Number one way to celebrate Oscar Night is to Blog about it! Everyone has favourites. Will there be surprises this year? Will there be upsets? You never know!!
The best way to celebrate Oscar Night is to BLOG ABOUT IT!!!
Okinara Consulting Services is giving you a chance to blog about your favourite moments. They have a special on Oscar Themed blogs and just blogs in general.
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Have you ever tried Googling yourself? Were you surprised? Was it a good surprise? Was it the worst thing you did all day when you first googled yourself? Or are you one of those who google themself all the time? Or is your name not even on google?
For me, showing up on google is 80% of my marketing whether it is for business reasons or personal. Today when I googled myself, I found that there were other Kapil Busaras who were sharing the first page on Google. I am the face of my company. Most of the time my business depends on my name. My clients have found their way to me to GIVE me business from googling me.
Why have I put so much emphasis on my name up until now? Because the world we live in is very dynamic and is ever changing. I started off as a software developer, then as Performance Test Engineering, later I became a free lance web develper, and when that was going well, I founded Okinara Consulting Services. Although when the company was formed it's core business was focused on web development, the name that was chosen did not indicate that it was strictly a web development company. I knew I wanted to expand into other areas. Today Okinara does so much more than web development, we design Logos, flyers, brochures, create strategic solutions to social media marketing, and we will soon be launching a new product.
Tomorrow I may wish to start another business or get into a different industry. If it is a brand new company, people may not know about it, however people who know me as Kapil Bulsara, will know me even if it is a new company, and building on my previous successes I can relatively easily transition into a new field of work or business.
Some of you may not have the luxury of owning a domain name that is your personal name because it might already be taken, and even if you do have that domain name, you may be plagued by having to share the Google spotlight with other people who have the same name as you, which I am currently facing.
For that reason it is important to expose yourself more with the use of social media sites. Everyone has a Facebook account, and If you don't, stop everything at once, including reading this article and create an account NOW!. Once you have a Facebook account, what you should do is create a facebook username which gives you a public facebook page, but don't worry your personal stuff like your wall and photos because it will not be visible to the public, unless you chose to. For e.g. this is mine: http://www.facebook.com/kapil.bulsara. It is not very professional you might think. It does not have to be. Everyone knows you have a life outside of work.
Another think you need to do is get a linkedin account. If you don't already know, LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site. Here is my page http://ca.linkedin.com/pub/kapil-bulsara/31/4a8/821.
You also need to get a twitter account. Here is my twitter page http://twitter.com/kapilbulsara. The common thing I hear about twitter is that they don't like that it is all open to public. Well you don't need to post personal details on twitter. I use twitter to share some semi-personal stuff and also tweet about my business or just general information that will be useful for the average citizen of the Internet.
All this creates exposure and awareness of who you are. If you haven't noticed this is not new, this is the norm now. You absolutely MUST have an online presence. Traditional networking still exists and can't really be replaced, but you cannot neglect social networking. A lot of your success depends on who you know!
Has anyone ever a difficult time organizing their meetings, leads, prospect clients, current customer issues, projects and TODOs. I know I have. I am pretty organized, but still I want and need a centralized system from where I can track everything, something that quickly gives me an overall picture. Currently I use text documents, spread sheets, gmail, google calendar and my memory to accomplish this.
I have thought about getting a CRM system or a Project Management Software to help me with my getting more organized and efficient. Just yesterday I seriously started doing a lot of research and testing things out. I was looking for a LAMP based web application that handles project management and CRM (Customer Relationship Management). Although I’m a proud owner of by business, I’m still pretty much regarded as a freelancer as opposed to an entrepreneur. I need something simple that gets the work done.
I narrowed it down to these 3:
Now I’m really confused as to which one I should use.
These are some of the things that I need.
Any help in deciding what I should be using is very much welcomed. Please leave a comment or contact me from my contact page. Thanks
It has been quite some time since we’ve been living in the information age. We have already quite matured in the web 2.0 and online social network age. I’m sure you’ve heard so many times that we are just bombarded with information from everywhere. I call it the “excessive information age”. All of us are now more than ever so easily influenced by everything and everyone around us from all sorts of social media, and at the same time we are getting confused by all this noise.
It is almost inevitable that we will have to evolve. We are pushing limits of our social and logical cognition. If you really think about it, the situation almost requires quick judgement and adaptation. Stability almost seems nowhere to be seen, and for thousands of years in our evolution, stability is the one thing that we have experienced and adapted to. Our environment(by this I mean our day-to-day activities, by which I mean interaction online and interaction with computers in general) is changing at such a rapid pace that our minds are getting pushed to this quick form of adaptation. Cultures all around the world seem to be blending too. So what we learned while growing up might not necessarily be very useful when interacting when we start encountering people from different races and cultures around the globe. But we are learning and evolving now more or less a single unit.
What does all this mean. Well if you go to the theory of evolution and natural selection, this is what I think is bound to happen. Success in this time and age depends on quick, rapid yet correct action. You can either make it or break it in a few actions, sometimes in a matter of weeks, and crazily sometimes even in a matter of days.
What is needed in this age is not a 1000 hours of research to make a decision, as some people do when chosing a product, a service, a house, or a job. What is required in this age of excessive information is intuition and instinct to make a correct judgement and to be able to do it quick AND TAKE ACTION, at the same time being aware of the risk of burning out too quickly. We are seeing instant successes – it no longer takes decades to reach a level that most people dream about, it takes a few years and sometimes just a few months, or in some extreme cases just a day, or well… just a single video of less than 5 minutes on this thing called ‘YouTube'(I’m sure you’ve heard of it)
I don’t see all of this as luck. I see all of this as evolution. People who might seem like they don’t have the slightest clue about what they are doing are becoming instant success. It is my belief (and please don’t sue me for this) that these people are instinctively driven to behave in a certain way, or to act a certain way.These individuals who posses this instincts to act in a quick and correct way will become successful, and to some ‘intelligent’ hard working people this may seem very scarey, because you no longer need to get a degree, or a Phd to get ahead in life(actually who am I kidding, that never was the case anyway).
What am I saying here? I’m saying, natural selection will take place because conditions have changed and the rules that applied in the past for success (and ultimately survival) don’t apply now. With these changes in the conditions in our ‘environment’ natural selection will pick out the new winners, who are instinctively driven by and towards quick correct actions.
What is that one thing that will have the largest impact in your business. That one thing that will have the largest impact on your profit and that one thing that will get you out of a financial crisis?
Why am I so concerned about profits and money making. Well that is THE reason why businesses exists – to make profit. Sure, ideologically businesses are there to provide services, products and serve its customers. But how many businesses do you see in existence that provide all kinds of great products and service and make their customers happy and do not make any profit? The real answer is NONE!
If you are thinking that there some companies who provide great products and services but aren’t making profits, then its either a temporary situation that the business is in, or if they maintain this trend, they will soon go out of business. If however, it is neither of the cases then that business is,..well…out of business already.
Profit is the juice, the fuel, the gas, the food, the energy, the chi, the life force that keeps businesses operating. The book definition of profit is Income minus expenses, and to maintain a positive profit(i.e. NOT loss), which is also something that we are actually interested in, you need to have income more than expenses.
So what is that one thing that has the largest impact on profits? The answer is SALES, SALES, SALES and more SALES.
Let’s face it, you can reduce your expenses as much as possible, streamline the crap out of your business, but if you are falling short on SELLING, then you are in trouble. The only way to get your business out of a financial crisis, is to sell yourself out of one – and that is the bottom line!
I haven’t really found it a very useful strategy to learn from your failures. Every time I realize that I have made a mistake or that I have really failed at something and decide that this is the particular lesson I have learned from it, I really don’t really seem to learn a lot or that it really doesn’t help me a lot. I have only learned how not to fail again, but haven’t really learned how to succeed in that particular situation. I mean, really think about it. Do you really want to know all the ways of how not to fail, or would you rather learn a few techniques that help you succeed and master it?
For the past one year I have been reading, listening and watching a lot of self help, or self development material. My understanding of peak performance, about different tools and strategies to achieve your goals, how to set your goals and how to determine what I really want in life has expanded to an extent to which I can safely say I can write a book now from what I have learned and from my own way of thinking. And for some reason there always seems to be something lacking. It helps me a little, but then sometimes(not always) I fall in to the same rut; into the same old habits.
Just two days ago I was thinking about all my successes in the past. Actually I have done that a lot of the times in the past. I think about all my successful moments in life and keep wandering, what was it really that made the difference. It has been many months, and for some situations I can even say it has been years since I started inquiring about what it really was that made the difference. There have been times when success seemed so easy to attain. Two days ago I made some very key distinctions that resulted in my quick and easy success.
According to me, these are my key 6 steps that I have used unconsciously to succeed. What is or was your success strategy? I’m sure everyone has their own strategy; their own algorithm of success. Scrap out the old belief that you have to fail many times to succeed. Before I knew this idiotic concept of learning by failure, I was actually successful in a lot of things that I did. When I started learning from failure, I was actually failing more and succeeding less. You know what they say, “I was born smart, education made me stupid”.
Everyone everywhere is getting mobile – actually this statement is so 2000. What I should be saying is everyone is mobile and everyone is connected everywhere every time, and the fact is even that this is so 2006.
The question that I am trying to answer is – should we be throwing away our desktops and laptops and go completely mobile with cell phones and tablets like the iPad?
Definitely throw away your desktop. If you just bought one, then keep it to store your media and then when it’s time to throw it away, throw it away.
Laptops – keep those because they won’t be going away anytime soon. The iPad isn’t really a netbook killer yet and netbooks simply put are not notebooks. There are a lot of things that the iPad doesn’t have. Like a web cam, less computing power and etc etc. We’ve heard all about the iPad haven’t we?
Even this blog was posted from my phone, and I am not talking about using a web browser on my phone. I’m actually using a wordpress app on my iPhone to draft and post. I can approve, disapprove and delete comments directly from this app.
When I need to go somewhere and I don’t know where it is, I don’t even bother checking. I get in my car, look it up the gps on my IPhone and I’m off.
I don’t carry a watch on me, I use my phone(likes millions do these days), I don’t keep alarm clock – got a phone. And remember those daily planners, those little books they used to carry back in the days – ya you don’t even need that anymore, and if you are still carrying those – shame on you!
Get a smart phone!!
Even shopping had been made easy. Some of the major stores have their own apps for phone like the iphone and you can browse their entire catalog.
Just about to head into a meeting, so I’ll just wrap it up here, but stay stunned!
This to me is probably one of the most accurate definition of success. In 1904, Bessie Anderson Stanley wrote the following definition of success in Brown Book magazine:
He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much; who has enjoyed the trust of pure women, the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children, who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who has left the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who has never lacked appreciation of earth’s beauty or failed to express it, who has always looked for the best in others and given them the best he had, whose life was an inspiration, whose memory a benediction.
I joined Toastmasters a little over a month ago and yesterday I gave my first speech; the so called ‘ice-breaker speech’. I think I did well. For anyone who does not know what Toastmaster is, it is basically a public speaking club. I am a member of the North York Toastmaster’s club in Toronto. It’s a very diverse group since there are first timers to very experienced public speakers. Everyone’s very friendly and very encouraging. There are a lot of talented speakers there too, which is amazing because it will give me the added motivation to keep improving myself. I absolutely get totally engrossed in listening to some of the speeches.
I went full out and gave it all that I had in my own first speech. I actually went way over the time limit,…hehe, but yes since it was my first speech it was quite flexible. I will have to work on that in my following speeches.
Overall it was an amazing experience. Can’t wait for my next speech. 🙂
Spring is here and this season brings new hopes, new opportunities and hopefully brighter results. I am keeping myself busy with projects. Keep those ideas pouring in and hopefully we can collaborate and build something exciting.
Many requests for blog sites and shopping carts have come to me and as always I’m happy to be of service. For those who do not know yet, I am also providing strategic couching in areas of social media marketing, online business strategy, career planning, kick-ass study plans for college and high school kids and help for folks to get out of the analysis paralysis and into putting passion into action.
Just recently I had a client hand me a $100 cheque for my advice which hardly took 20 minutes.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. If there is a solution out there then I can do it, if there is no solution out there yet, let’s go get down to it and make one. I don’t believe any business that I do can be done alone. Like I said in my previous articles customers are collaborates of success, so every success solution comes with your efforts and mine.
So why pay me to do anything? Well, when everyone does, I watch, and when everyone stops I do! I love uncommon sense and I love the challenge! 🙂
So contact me and lets get down to business!