In NY, there is a culture of “image selling”. They always try to negotiate something, for instance, I found an homeless guy who negotiated with me, the amount of money I should give to him, because he helped me with the ticket to the airport.

NY is the capitalism capitol. Every service is private, and the public ones are very expensive. I talked to a girl in Wall Street that payed 40 000 dollares for a college degree! So, who has the money, has the education. The city of NY is very multi-cultural. A sign of it, is that some of the publicity that is shown are in spanish, because of the increasing people coming from South America.

The majority of the people that I have met in NY, are not americans, but immigrants looking for a better life.

The trip showed me that Europe is the zone of the world where the level of education is higher, but from my point of view and seeing my country, Portugal, we are not very entrepreneurs to create our own company. In the USA we see a lot of people that doesn’t have access to a college education, but still create successful companies. There are some private Universities like Stanford and Berkeley that gives for free, online courses, for instance: http://www.venture-class.org.

The difference between the rich and the poor in NY is very high. I watched a lot of homeless people in subway stations asking for food. This is really disturbing because some of them, don’t ask for money, but for food. That happens in Europe too, but not in that much quantity.

Conclusion

NY city is one of the best places to launch a business. One of the reasons is that we can do everything. If you have an interest in something, you will certainly find the group of people in the city that does it. There is a show called How to make it in America that happens in NY and show how entrepreneurship and persistence are very important in today’s market.

We should learn more about the entrepreneurship model of the USA, where they instigate people from the faculties to launch a business. In Portugal, there are a lot of improvements in that area. We have a lot of entrepreneurship events like Startup Weekend, Startup Pirates, SwitchConf, etc.

If I will return to NY? Off course!

]]> http://hugomonteiro.net/2011/12/11/my-trip-to-ny/feed/ 0 http://hugomonteiro.net/2011/08/19/keeping-the-motivation-high/ http://hugomonteiro.net/2011/08/19/keeping-the-motivation-high/#comments Fri, 19 Aug 2011 14:25:09 +0000 Hugo Monteiro http://hugomonteiro.net/?p=392 Our life and work, specially the second, are very focused in goals and deadlines. Many of us had terrible experiences putting together these two words: goals and deadlines.
Many companies think that if you have goals and deadlines, and money at the end, without motivation effort inside work environment, you are going to achieve your goals pretty quickly. I don’t think like that. Working with a carrot in front of our noses is not the way to motivate people to work more. So, the question is, how can we motivate people to work more without worrying about the money?

There are some things that we can do, but they are not a recipe for everything. It depends mostly on the people you have working with you or for you. As Alexander Kjerulf says, “the only two things that motivates you at work are your relationships and your work progress”.
1. Relationships: You work more and you will be more motivated if you like your colleagues at work. How many times you asked for help? How many times you shared knowledge? How many times you told stuff that made someone laugh? To improve your relationships at work you can do simple things like:

• Give a good morning like you mean it!;
• Short breaks with your colleagues;
• Ask for help;
• Share something you know that will improve your work environment;
• Do events outside work. For instance invite your colleagues for parties, dinners, football games, etc.

2. Work progress: What is our motivation above all? Help the world and get recognized for it! It is exaggerated but it is true. You are here to leave your mark to the world above all. And if your company knows how to motivate you for this, you will love your job. See google for example, they work to improve our lives, with gmail, calendar, with android or more recently google+. What can we do to motivate people to work more and to achieve their goals quickly and sometimes to handle deadlines pressure? As I said previously this is not a recipe, but are simple things that we can do to improve our work:

• Apply KISS principle (Keep it Simple Stupid). Split your goal into smaller goals. If you have smaller goals and you surpass one by one, you get more motivated, because you notice that your cleaning your list. If you have a long list of goals, you get lost;
• Give your team more meetings to show them the progress they are doing. For instance, SCRUM is an Agile development method which has one meeting day to know the progress of the team;
• Let the experienced people of your team to do workshops on how to make your work more productive, sharing their knowledge on how to handle big sums of work;
• Have a constantly updated team wiki about the business/technology you are working on.

Conclusion

Nowadays, motivation is one the most important aspects that changes our work environments everyday. To have your team or your colleagues motivated with the job they are doing, you have to join the professional and your personal life. If you go to your work with “friends”, it is easier to handle pressure and deadlines, because you are not alone and you have people that will certainly help you.

Yes, a networking-based company. The well-known method to offer services using the knowledge of our friends. Seems strange, but we hear often that we don’t have the expertise to do something, or we don’t know how to make a pie. You don’t need to know any of that. You just need to know a good friend who knows how to make great pies.

We meet people everywhere, that’s why we call it networking. We create connections between people, and that’s why it makes it so powerful. We don’t need to know the knowledge of the universe, we just need to know the people that together have the knowledge of the universe. As an example, many of you, thought that couldn’t make a big project. Think again, how many “friends” or strategic connections have you? Do you know how to design something or do you know rails programming, or java? No? But you know the people that can have that expertise? Talk to them! The greatest experience in the world is not how to make great ideas came true but is how to join great people to do something even greater.

Sometimes, even if we have a lot of friends, they don’t have the expertise that we need. Don’t worry. That is something called conferences. A lot of my networking is built going to conferences, going to public events where we share our business cards and our knowledge! We need to take the first step and don’t expect that someone will talk to you.

This is networking. Talk to people. Know them, and maybe create a business or a service in your company that uses your networking knowledge. If we are good project managers, we know how to motivate people to work in a project. If we don’t know how to motivate, we need to learn, and that’s a really important subject! Happy at work is not something that we do in 2 hours. In May of 2011 I was in a conference in Oporto, Portugal, called “Happiness and creativity in your work life” where Alexander Kjerulf spoke about happiness at work. His book has little tips of what we can do at work to motivate our collaborators.

Conclusions:

Tips for creating a networking-based company:

• Have business cards (You can order it through moo.com – they have great designs for a variety of businesses)
• Talk to your friends, know them (What they like, personal projects, etc)
• Use your personal projects to sell yourself (If you don’t have a personal project, create one, in your area of expertise)
• Go to conferences now!
• Use outsourcing (Don’t spend hours to do something that costs so little, time is important! – I learned this with Tim Ferriss)
• We can do it! (Yes, it’s a tip!)

Great Lesson!

“The principle was suggested by management thinker Joseph M. Juran. It was named after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed that 80% of income in Italy was received by 20% of the Italian population. The assumption is that most of the results in any situation are determined by a small number of causes.”

This rule says that 80% of your outcomes come from 20% of your inputs. For instance, in your life, there are certain activities that you do (your 20%) that account for the majority (your 80%) of your happiness and outputs.

The 80/20 rule can be applied to your life and your business, where being happy and satisfied for what you do, is the most important thing. Off course that money is important, but it shouldn’t be so important compared to your happiness.

Live your life following the 80/20 rule. Follow your dream!

(more information about the 80/20 rule)