I had the pleasure of judging the last Queen City Hack hosted by Gas Buddy. I was BLOWN AWAY! These teams created some amazing applications, working applications, applications designed beautifully, ALL IN 24 HOURS!!! I couldn’t believe what these teams created and was incredibly surprised! I left inspired, the future is looking very bright. Here are 5 reasons you should get involved with the next Hack-a-Thon:
We want to be one of the most caring, smartest, driven companies in the world. How can we do that? By working on the team!
Every Friday after lunch our team gets together and learns something about work at @StratLab. We invite clients to learn with us and so far it’s been awesome!
Week one was “All About Dat Measurement”
This coming week (January 27th) is “Learning About Your CreativEddy” -with your favourite @edwardoalvaro.
February 3rd – 5 Minutes Question Roundtable, no question is off limits.
February 10th – Eddy (Illustrator) Alvaro is leading down another creative rabbit hole.
February 17th – Creating your own business cards/team building
February 24th – Brooke on how to create a following on Instagram
March 3rd – Andy on how to make you a better videographer with 5 tips
March 10th – Conrad on how to be a better, faster, smarter writer
February 24th – Brandon on how he designs a website and where websites are going in 2019
“A Gold medal is a wonderful thing, but if you’re not enough without it, you’ll never be enough with it.” -Irv Blitzer to Derice Bannock after Derice asked why he had cheated in the Olympics.
At times it may seem like it is but coaches, captains, players, and parents all need to understand that winning isn’t the goal of team sports. Like Irv (John Candy) says, if you’re not good enough when you lose, you’ll never be good enough when you win. But we insist on focusing on the score or the team record, when’s the last time you heard someone worry about the team culture or player wellbeing? That’s because most of us don’t know how to run a team successfully.
At a given Volleyball tournament of 12 teams, the first three teams go home happy. One, Two or Three are a nice finish, but anything after that really sucks. So the average coach has a 25% chance of going home happy?!? That’s crazy! Now I’m obviously over exaggerating but your win loss record is only one of many things to focus on as a coach. The problem is that’s the easiest thing to single out as a parent, athlete, spectator, did you win? Why not?
It’s not just coaching, in life we often forget what the purpose is. Is the end goal really just to win the tournament? At what cost? What are you willing to sacrifice? When will one more win be enough? In life, how much do you make? How much did you clear last year? How Any time I hear conversations like that I feel a little worse for man kind.
The money doesn’t matter, just like the win doesn’t matter.
Your goal is to get your team to focus not on the win but the bigger issues at stake in sport.
These can be very hard to focus on when everyone around you wants a win.
It’s hard to focus on creating something amazing in life when everyone tells you to get a “real job”.
The 75% of the tournaments you leave without a medal makes the other 25% all that much sweeter. There’s a romantic side to sports that Billy Beane talked about in Moneyball and I see on coaches faces time and time again. It seems delusional how much these coaches and volunteers put in just to help the younger generation see a sport through their eyes. It’s really quite amazing to see.
Don’t give up.
I talk to amazing teachers, mentors, and coaches all the time. I feel everyone is on the brink of quitting and getting more “me” time. I crosses every volunteers mind I guarantee it. But the tittle of this post is “It Sucks Being a Coach….Sometimes” because there are these magic moments where you see kids come together, do things they never thought possible, and learn life skills in a completely different way.
This past weekend we has Nationals in Winnipeg. We didn’t do as good as I thought we should (in the tournament), but throughout the weekend I witnessed a bunch of thirteen and fourteen year olds become a team. As a team they cheered on our arch rival at Provincials, Meadow Lake in any game they watched them play in. It’s like they grew up. The crux of the boys coming together was after cheering on a girls team they all went on to the court, lined up to shake hands, and congratulated the girls team on a game well played.
I couldn’t have been more proud.
Life gets hard to teach us a lesson. As long as we don’t cave under the pressure, as long as we don’t throw in the towel, we’ll be okay. The harder the challenge the more important the lesson.
“I now appreciate public transit.” –Conrad Hewitt, 2016
Trying to see peoples’ points of view isn’t something that comes natural to humans. As we’ve evolved, the softer skills in life have become much more important to our survival than the hard skills (fight or flight) as of the last hundred years. In business it’s even more rare. Empathy is a word that is not often discussed in the board room. Love, Kindness, generosity, all words never uttered in the corporate world. Until now.
There are many unforeseen benefits of seeing the world through another persons eyes here are three.
How many small startups have a marketing strategy? I’d venture a guess as very few. No I don’t mean a “marketing plan” I mean an actual strategy with tactics, objectives, and intended outcomes. Rarely do startups care about marketing because if you have to rely on marketing to make your product or service successful you’re not going to be.
How many recent extremely successful products or services have grown exponentially because of a marketing strategy? I’d guess very few. The reason something catches fire is one part luck and one-part remarkability.
Remarkability: The odds that someone will talk about your company, product, service or organization.
Most business owners think of marketing as logos and commercials when really it about getting people to spread your story. There’s nothing traditional about marketing in 2016.
You don’t need a marketing strategy. A lot of people will tell you you do. Professors of marketing, those who’ve never practiced their theories just taught them in the classroom are the worst at spreading the lies about why you need a marketing strategy.
They’ll say you can’t be “off brand” and that every communication you make needs to be consistent.
“Mind your four p’s!” they’ll tell you, even though three out of the four are almost obsolete or useless for your company. Price, Place, Product, Promotion.
Marketing needs to start at the beginning of the planning process of your product or service.
I love the Seth Godin quote “Advertising is the tax for the unremarkable.”
Freaker Kickstarter from freakerusa on Vimeo.
Next to put into perspective what goes on in a given year of search on Google.
Finally when you get depressed about when someone says something bad to you online watch this:
Country Music artists read out angry tweets written about them.
I don’t think you can find a better song about the new online world. And Alanis Morissette just had a way speaking to my soul. Hope you enjoy!
Want to see a brand new website the @Stratlab team just launched? Welcome to Normanview Dental.
If you don’t think so you’ve already given up. Read more
Think about it. People (it’s not just kids for your big fat information) who have a lot going on in their heads have a hard time paying attention to things that don’t interest them. There is far too many things to think about and do than to be wasting time on boring things.
I don’t like when I hear a parent say, my son or daughter has ADHD and it’s affected them in school. I’m pretty sure in highschool I could never sit still, I talked way too much and occasionally was sent to other classrooms to fetch the “long stand”. My grades were always OK, just above average so there was never a need to go get “tested”.
As I progressed in my schooling my grades declined. University is a lot more strict on classes and you couldn’t just “get by”, well I guess you could, I mean, I did but you’ll end up on academic probation.
What kids with ADHD don’t understand (and few people admit it) is that really ADHD is a Superpower. You can think incredibly fast, creative games are easy, coming up with new ideas is what you do. Well, I should say, what some do, others I’m sure are different. Our brain is working overtime, well not to a brain with ADHD, thinking overtime is what it does. And the best part? Once you find something you like and you’ll be glued to it for hours.
It’s this extreme focus that gives someone with ADHD a Superpower. They can concentrate longer, think longer and work long at the task they set out to do. But you have to give us a choice, no one likes doing what they’re told all the time, myself included. In a classroom, at work, in the gym, remember you don’t have all the best ideas, let the other person (or people) come up with the next task, job, or drill. You’ll be surprised how people react when you trust them to
From Richard Branson’s The Virgin Way he talks about the 7 most important words for leaders to use. “I’m not sure, what do you think?” puts your staff at ease, makes everyone around you feel like you aren’t a know-it-all and willing to implement other people’s ideas.
When you ask others for their ideas you get more options to choose from. You incentivize people coming to you with innovative solutions to organizational problems. Today’s best businesses empower their people to share ideas up the chain of command. As a leader, the less ideas you come up with to implement, the more champions you’re building up around you. Also, when you adopt your staffs’ ideas, you’re creating a very important incentive for your people to want to offer their ideas (very few organizations actually care about what their frontline employees think, let alone ideas they have).
When you ask others what they think, what you’re really saying is “I actually care about you and what you think of this organization”. As funny as that sounds, unfortunately most organization leaders don’t think their people are that smart, they’ve built up a facade that business is run by executives and the people who where suits to work everyday. When it really comes down to it, the best organizations have the best people on the front lines, and no, for the most part they don’t where suits.
I think we all can learn a lot from what Mr. Branson has taught us about business. Below are a few of my favourite quotes. Read more
