What does it take to succeed? A positive attitude? Well, sure, but that’s hardly enough. The Law of Attraction? The Secret? These ideas might act as spurs to action, but without the action itself, they don’t do much.
Success, however it’s defined, takes action, and taking good and appropriate action takes skills. Some of these skills (not enough, though) are taught in school (not well enough, either), others are taught on the job, and still others we learn from general life experience.
Below is a list of general skills that will help anyone get ahead in practically any field, from running a company to running a gardening club. Of course, there are skills specific to each field as well – but my concern here is with the skills that translate across disciplines, the ones that can be learned by anyone in any position.
1. Public Speaking
The ability to speak clearly, persuasively, and forcefully in front of an audience – whether an audience of 1 or of thousands – is one of the most important skills anyone can develop. People who are effective speakers come across as more comfortable with themselves, more confident, and more attractive to be around. Being able to speak effectively means you can sell anything – products, of course, but also ideas, ideologies, worldviews. And yourself – which means more opportunities for career advancement, bigger clients, or business funding.
2. Writing
Writing well offers many of the same advantages that speaking well offers: good writers are better at selling products, ideas, and themselves than poor writers. Learning to write well involves not just mastery of grammar but the development of the ability to organize one’s thoughts into a coherent form and target it to an audience in the most effective way possible. Given the huge amount of text generated by almost every transaction – from court briefs and legislation running into the thousands of pages to those foot-long receipts you get when you buy gum these days – a person who is a master of the written word can expect doors to open in just about every field.
3. Self-Management
If success depends of effective action, effective action depends on the ability to focus your attention where it is needed most, when it is needed most. Strong organizational skills, effective productivity habits, and a strong sense of discipline are needed to keep yourself on track.
4. Networking
Networking is not only for finding jobs or clients. In an economy dominated by ideas and innovation, networking creates the channel through which ideas flow and in which new ideas are created. A large network, carefully cultivated, ties one into not just a body of people but a body of relationships, and those relationships are more than just the sum of their parts. The interactions those relationships make possible give rise to innovation and creativity – and provide the support to nurture new ideas until they can be realized.
5. Critical Thinking
We are exposed to hundreds, if not thousands, of times more information on a daily basis than our great-grandparents were. Being able to evaluate that information, sort the potentially valuable from the trivial, analyze its relevance and meaning, and relate it to other information is crucial – and woefully under-taught. Good critical thinking skills immediately distinguish you from the mass of people these days.
6. Decision-Making
The bridge that leads from analysis to action is effective decision-making – knowing what to do based on the information available. While not being critical can be dangerous, so too can over-analyzing, or waiting for more information before making a decision. Being able to take in the scene and respond quickly and effectively is what separates the doers from the wannabes.
7. Math
You don’t have to be able to integrate polynomials to be successful. However, the ability to quickly work with figures in your head, to make rough but fairly accurate estimates, and to understand things like compound interest and basic statistics gives you a big lead on most people. All of these skills will help you to analyze data more effectively – and more quickly – and to make better decisions based on it.
8. Research
Nobody can be expected to know everything, or even a tiny fraction of everything. Even within your field, chances are there’s far more that you don’t know than you do know. You don’t have to know everything – but you should be able to quickly and painlessly find out what you need to know. That means learning to use the Internet effectively, learning to use a library, learning to read productively, and learning how to leverage your network of contacts – and what kinds of research are going to work best in any given situation.
9. Relaxation
Stress will not only kill you, it leads to poor decision-making, poor thinking, and poor socialization. So be failing to relax, you knock out at least three of the skills in this list – and really more. Plus, working yourself to death in order to keep up, and not having any time to enjoy the fruits of your work, isn’t really “success”. It’s obsession. Being able to face even the most pressing crises with your wits about you and in the most productive way is possibly the most important thing on this list.
10. Basic Accounting
It is a simple fact in our society that money is necessary. Even the simple pleasures in life, like hugging your child, ultimately need money – or you’re not going to survive to hug for very long. Knowing how to track and record your expenses and income is important just to survive, let alone to thrive. But more than that, the principles of accounting apply more widely to things like tracking the time you spend on a project or determining whether the value of an action outweighs the costs in money, time, and effort. It’s a shame that basic accounting isn’t a required part of the core K-12 curriculum.
What Else?
Surely there are more important skills I’m not thinking of (which is probably why I’m not telling Bill Gates what to do!) – what are they? What have I missed? What lessons have you learned that were key to your successes – and what have you ignored to your peril?
“[The Internet] is not a truck. It’s a series of tubes.” – U.S. Senator Ted Stevens
Ah, the Internet: you use it every day for school, work or fun. In such a short period of time, the Net has grown into an essential every day thing that it’s hard to imagine life without it.
But how much do you know about the Internet? Did you know that you have the Soviets to thank for this wonderful invention? Or that despite the flack that he got for inventing the Internet, Al Gore actually did play a major role in the creation of the Net?
Here are the 10 Things You Should Know About the Internet:
1. Sputnik: Kick in the Pants that Launched the Net
In 1957, the Soviet launched Sputnik (Russian for “traveling companion” or “satellite”), the first man-made object to orbit the Earth. It was a big surprise to the United States, who feared that it was falling behind technologically against its Cold War enemy.
In direct response to Sputnik, President Dwight D. Eisenhower directed the Department of Defense to create the Advanced Research Projects Agency or ARPA in 1958. One of its research programs was headed by Dr. J.C. R. Licklider (or simply “Lick”), who convinced the U.S. Government to create a computer network, which would later evolve into the Internet.
So, who says war isn’t good for anything? The Internet is arguably one of the most important technologies that came out of the Cold War.
2. Before The Internet, There Was ARPANET
The logical map of the first 4 nodes of the ARPANET in December 1969, as sketched by Larry Roberts. (Image: The Computer History Museum)
In 1969, after Licklider left ARPA, his successors Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor, Larry Roberts and colleagues created the network that would later become the Internet. The initial ARPANET consisted of four nodes (or computers called Interface Message Processors, which would later evolve into routers) located in UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UC Santa Barbara, and University of Utah:
First ARPANET IMP Log – CSK refers to Charles S. Kline, the very first person ever to login to a remote host via the ARPANET (Image: The Computer History Museum)
The programmers in Westwood (UCLA – Ed.) were to type “log” into their computer, with the SRI computer in Palo Alto filling out the rest of the command, adding “in.”
“We set up a telephone connection between us and the guys at SRI,” Kleinrock recalled. “We typed the L, and we asked on the phone, ‘Do you see the L?’ ‘Yes, we see the L,’ came the response. We typed the O, and we asked, ‘Do you see the O?’ ‘Yes, we see the O.’ Then we typed the G, and the system crashed!” They immediately rebooted and this time, ARPANET sprung to life. (Source)
It would take a couple more years until ARPANET became popular. Indeed, in 1973, Bob Bell of Digital Equipment Corporation noted that the NET was a really busy place on Friday nights (well, geeks will be geeks!):
I remember hearing that there was an ARPANET “conference” on the Star Trek game every Friday night. Star Trek was a text based game where you used photon torpedos and phasers to blast Klingons. (Source)
3. Packet Switching: The Way the Internet Works
We won’t get too technical here, but the way information travels through the Internet is pretty neat. Take for instance, how data gets from point A to point B (say, the text and images from this webpage from the Neatorama servers to your browser). One way to do it is to open a channel from point A to B: data is transmitted in a dedicated circuit until all the data is transfered along the same path. It’s a pretty fast way to send information, but it comes at a high cost: a dedicated circuit has to remain open until the last bit of data is sent. This method is called circuit switching and it’s the system used by telephone companies.
In the early 1960s, Paul Baran, Donald Davies and Leonard Kleinrock, working independently, came up with a different way to send data. First, large chunks of data are divided into several small packets that are sent through the network. Each packet may take a different route to reach its destination. Once every packet has arrived, then they are re-assembled into the original data.
Packet switching may sound counterintuitive (it is slower than circuit switching and packets may get lost, thus requiring a re-send), but it has its advantages. For one, because there is no single path of communication, the packets can route themselves to avoid damaged or congested networks.
At the time, U.S. authorities were worried how a computer network would survive a nuclear attack, so when Baran proposed the packet switching method (he called it the “hot-potato routing” or “distributed communications” – it was Davies that named it “packet switching”), the military threw its support for the method.
4. TCP/IP: The Language of the Internet
In 1973, Vint Cerf (who is often called the “father of the Internet”) and Bob Kahn created the TCP/IP suite of communication protocols – basically a language used by computers to talk to each other in a network.
The TCP/IP protocol is so simple that, as an 1990 April Fool’s joke, D. Waitzman of the Internet Engineering Task Force proposed that pigeons be used to carry IP traffic!
A decade later, IP over Avian Carriers was actually implemented by the Bergen Linux user group. They released 9 packets over a distance of 3 miles and actually got 4 responses (that’s a packet loss ratio of 55% and a response time between 3,000 to 6,000 seconds).
5. Al Gore Actually Did Create the Internet. Sort Of.
“Remember America, I gave you the Internet and I can take it away,” joked Al Gore on the Late Show with David Letterman.
Okay, I was being cheeky with that heading. But here’s the story: During the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election, Al Gore took quite a drubbing for the claim that he “invented” the Internet. Problem was, Gore made no such claim. During an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN, Gore was asked how he would distinguish himself from others, and he replied:
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system. …
Though the term “initiative in creating the Internet” is vague, Gore did quite a bit of legislative work in creating a high-capacity national data network that is a significant part of the Internet. And don’t forget: though Gore didn’t coin it, he did popularize the term “information superhighway.”
6. Father of Spam: Gary Thuerk Sent the First Email Spam
Spamming is an old marketing technique – the very first spam was a dentist advertising his services via telegram in 1864. Then, as in now, people who got the unsolicited telegrams got really mad – some even wrote the local newspaper complaining of the advertising tactic. But when the paper reprinted the telegram, the dentist just got free publicity!
The first email spam was sent by Digital Equipment Corporation’s marketing manager Gary Thuerk in 1978 to 393 recipients on ARPANET. He was advertising the availability of a new model of DEC computers. The Wall Street Journal has an interview with Thuerk (along with a reprint of the original email):
From a marketing standpoint, the email was a success: About 20 people came to each of Thuerk’s open houses, and he estimates it led to more than $12 million in sales. But the email also earned Thuerk instant notoriety. “People started complaining immediately,” he tells the Business Technology Blog. Someone from the Rand Corporation sent him a letter telling him he broke the rules of the ARPANET, the Internet’s predecessor. (There was an unwritten rule that people wouldn’t use the ARPANET to sell things; Thuerk tells us he only promoted a product.) A major from the defense communications agency called Thuerk’s boss and made him promise that Thuerk would never send an email like that again.
Thuerk has embraced his place in history as the father of spam. It’s landed him in the Guinness Book of World Records, and he does promotional work for anti-spam companies from time to time. He says people have one of three reactions when they meet him: Some are excited to meet someone with an unusual claim to fame; some want to beat him up on the spot; and others just avoid him like the plague. (Source)
7. The Sexy Web: 12% of Websites = Porn!
Grandma’s reaction to 2 girls 1 cup. If you don’t know what this is all about, consider yourself lucky. Very lucky. [YouTube Link]
We can’t talk about the web without talking about porn. The amount of smut available on the Net and our appetite for it are astonishing. Here are some statistics on porn from Jerry Ropelato of Top Ten Reviews (who claimed that all of them come from reputable sources)
Pornographic websites: 4.2 million (12% of total websites) Pornographic pages: 420 million Daily pornographic search engine requests: 68 million (25% of total search engine requests) Daily pornographic emails: 2.5 billion (8% of total emails) Internet users who view porn: 42.7% Worldwide visitors to pornographic web sites: 72 million visitors (monthly) Internet pornography sales: $4.9 billion
Every second, 28,258 Internet users are viewing pornography Every second, 372 Internet users are typing adult search terms into search engines
Statistics from GOOD Magazine:
35% of all Internet downloads are pornographic in nature Every day 266 new porn sites appear on the Internet “Sex” is the most searched word on the Internet 70% of Internet porn traffic occurs during the 9-5 workday US produced 89% of all online porn
Blogs (short for web logs) are regularly updated journal published on the Web. According to Technorati, there are about 112.8 million blogs on the Web right now, with 175,000 new blogs added every day. That’s about 122 new blogs a minute or 2 blogs a second!
The term “weblog” was coined by John Barger on December 17, 1997 to describe his website Robot Wisdom that “logged” the links he collected while surfing the Net – as such, his website got the distinction of being the world’s first blog*. (The contraction “blog,” which arguably became a more popular word, was coined in 1999 by Peter Merholz of Peterme.com who playfully broke up the word into we blog).
[*Note: yes, technically there are blogs that preceded Robot Wisdom, though they were never called "blogs." For example, Justin Hall of Justin's Links from the Underground (now defunct) started his website in 1994.]
Blogging became more popular in 1999, with the creation of hosted blog tools that made writing for and managing a blog easier (like Pitas.com, LiveJournal, and Blogger.com) Today, blogs have become mainstream – newspapers have ‘em, corporations have ‘em – and heck, even politicians have ‘em.
So whatever happened to Jorn Barger, the world’s first blogger? Paul Boutin of Wired Magazine wrote about his encounter with Jorn, homeless and broke, on the streets of San Francisco:
Homeless and broke at age 53, [Barger] allowed the domain registration for robotwisdom.com to lapse and can’t afford to re-up it. He has abandoned his Chicago apartment and is staying on Andrew’s floor while he tries to get back on his feet. He’s looking for work – sort of. After a few hands-in-pockets attempts at small talk, we give up. I continue up the hill.
A few weeks later, I find out that Barger has recovered his domain – and Robot Wisdom pops back up online. I hunt him down for a pint at a local pub and he tells me he’s moving on, this time to Memphis. He says he avoids the need for a job by living on less than a dollar a day. “I was carrying a cardboard sign when we met that day,” he tells me. “I wasn’t sure if I should show it to you. I figured if things didn’t work out with Andrew I could pick up some change.” On his panhandler sign, Barger had written:
Coined the term ‘weblog,’ never made a dime. (Source)
9. Surprise! There’s a Third YouTube Co-Founder
Before there was YouTube, there was … a dating site called Tune In Hook Up?! Yes, that was the first version of YouTube that completely failed (Source: article by Jim Hopkins at USA Today, from where I shamelessly, um, co-opted the heading).
The YouTube we all know and love got started when former Paypal employees Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim wanted to share some videos from a dinner party only to realize that the video clip was too huge for email. Posting the video online wasn’t easy either – since video websites back then accept some but not all video clip formats.
So the trio went to create YouTube in 2005 – and a little over a year later, the website streamed 100 million videos per day and got 70,000 videos uploaded per day (roughly 1 per second). It was the fastest growing website in the history of the Internet. It was estimated that in 2007, YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000!
Hurley and Chen sold the company to Google for a cool $1.65 billion … so what happened to Jawed? He left active role at the company to be a graduate student in computer science before it was sold (but he didn’t leave empty handed – Jawed got about $64 million in stocks when YouTube was acquired by Google).
Oh, and of course: the first video clip on YouTube was uploaded at 8:27 pm on Saturday April 23rd, 2005. It was of Jawed himself (shot by Yakov Lapitsky) at the San Diego Zoo:
10. The Rise of Social Networking and Social Media
In a way, the Web is a big social network. Even before there was the Web, BBSes served as online communities where people chatted and collaborated. But the term “social networking” became a buzzword when it was reported in 2005 that MySpace had more pageviews than Google (Source).
But before MySpace, there was Classmates.com (launched in 1995) and SixDegrees.com (launched in 1997, dead by 2001). Afterwards, more successful websites followed: Friendster, MySpace, Orkut, LinkedIn and Facebook. And how successful were they? MySpace was sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. for $580 million and Facebook is now valued in the billions of dollars).
There’s a social networking website for everybody under the sun: Like movies? There’s Flixster. Online games? Avatars United. Anime? Gaia Online. Books? LibraryThing and so on. (Wikipedia has a huge list of social networking sites here)
On the other side of the new Internet are social media websites. The term “social media” is kind of a hodgepodge (Wikipedia, blogs like Neatorama, and videosharing websites like YouTube can all be classified as social media). But all of them have one thing in common: they encourage active interaction and participation of their users.
An interesting subset of the social media websites are social news sites like Digg, reddit and Mixx. These user-driven websites let people discover and share content on the Internet in a social way: users submit and vote on others’ submissions to determine which links get featured prominently on the websites’ front pages.
But there is a darker-side to social media website. The “Digg Revolt” on May 1, 2007 (remember that?), over the AACS encryption key controversy illustrates how the “social” in social media can be a double-edged sword:
Digg.com has become one of the Web’s top news portals by putting the power to choose the news in the hands of its users. Just how much power they wield, however, only became clear Tuesday night, when Digg turned into what one user called a “digital Boston Tea Party.”
When the site’s administrators attempted to prevent users from posting links to pages revealing the copyright encryption key for HD-DVD discs, Digg’s users rebelled. Hundreds of references to the code flooded the site’s submissions, filling its main pages and overwhelming the administrators’ attempts to control the site’s content. (Source)
Ultimately, Digg admins capitulated to its users’ demands and stopped deleting stories with the forbidden codes.
Bonus: Internet ? World Wide Web
Most people use Internet (or Net) and World Wide Web (or Web) interchangeably – but in reality, they’re quite different:
• The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks – these computers exchange data (hypertext documents like the one you’re reading now, emails, file transfers, and so on).
• The Web is a system of documents linked via hypertext that is accessed via the Internet – so the Web is just a part of the Internet.
The Web was created in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee (now Sir Tim Berners-Lee, as he was knighted in 2004 for his contributions to the Web) while he was working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. Sir Berners-Lee was just 34 years old at the time. (Photo credit: captsolo [Flickr])
Berners-Lee’s very first Web was a project called ENQUIRE (named after his favorite book: Enquire Within Upon Everything, a 1856 how-to book for domestic life). In 1989, Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau wrote a proposal to CERN management about a global information management system to keep track of accelerators and equipments and for scientists to share data. Berners-Lee originally considered calling it “Information Mesh,” “The Information Mine” (which was turned down because the acronym TIM is his first name), and “Mine of Information.” He later chose “World Wide Web” when he was writing the code in 1990.
A client/server model for a distributed hypertext system, as proposed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee
By Christmas of 1990, Berners-Lee had put together the world’s first Web: a web browser (written in Objective-C, by the way), a web server (his NeXT cube computer) and a web page (yes, that would make it the world’s first web page – archived here on w3: Link). The first practical use of the Web was a CERN telephone directory, to encourage its employees to it!
World’s first web server: Tim Berners-Lee’s NeXT cube, on which he scribbled: This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!
The Web is now huge: according DomainTools, there are currently over 103.6 million active domains (and over 348 million dead ones) on the World Wide Web. Last week, Google announced that it has indexed 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) web pages (about 903,000 of which mentioned Neatorama :) ):
We’ve known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we’ve seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days — when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!
All right, we get it… Gas prices are high; the real estate market isn’t good, stocks are down, and many banks are in a mess. The media keeps drilling it into our heads like we had no idea.
Despite their negativity this may actually be an excellent time to better your life and the lives of those around you. Tough times are some of the best times for people to become resourceful, innovative, and make positive changes.
Here are 9 ways you can take advantage of this “terrible” economy.
1. Buy foreclosures and invest in real estate
It’s a buyer’s market for sure. You don’t want to look back in ten years from now and have a “shoulda, coulda, woulda” moment. Even if prices aren’t low in your area, explore different towns and states for commercial locations and empty lots. Even if you don’t have the resources and funds to develop right now, stake your claim while you can.
2. Invest in green technology
High oil prices are igniting interest in alternative fuels and green technology. If you’re active in the stock markets, perhaps you should consider doing some research on emerging green companies. If you’re not an active trader, another way to invest is to explore purchasing a hybrid or electric car. It might be costly now, but in a few years you’ll be happy.
3. Start a company
Sure, there are a lot of companies shutting down but this maybe the right time to start a company up. Here are some tips to think about if you want to launch a start up:
- Look for an industry or market with a large number of businesses closing. Are the big competitors shutting down? If so, you’ll have less competition.
- Research the reason why they closed.
- Find a solution and an opportunity in what they did wrong.
- Many of the companies shutting down are large corporations. So one of the best things going for you is being small but thinking big.
4. Switch careers
I know exactly what you’re thinking or even saying right now, “well there are no jobs, and my job’s safe.” Is it really though? Do you like what you do? Is there a long commute? And many expenses? You must ask yourself questions like these. Wouldn’t you rather be your own boss? Or have a job that you enjoy so much you don’t care what you get paid or what it costs you to get there?
5. Move somewhere you’ve always wanted to
A location or town you’ve dreamed about living in might be at its most affordable right now. Seize this window of opportunity to make a big change.
6. Learn
During times like these there is plenty that you can learn. Such facts as:
- How big of a role the media plays in driving up fuel prices and striking fear in the public about their finances.
Become aware and educate yourself. You can prevent yourself from letting any future economic troubles giving you trouble.
7. Go on vacation!
Many people are skipping vacations because prices aren’t affordable for them. But you shouldn’t let that hold you back. While everyone else is staying home you can live it up and enjoy yourself with smaller crowds.
8. Get your voice out there
If increasing prices, the bad economy, and politicians are making you frustrated, then take action. Harness the power of new and old media to voice your opinions. Offer new ideas and solutions, be controversial, and be a leader.
9. Break bad habits & modify your lifestyle
Old habits die hard, but they might die quickly in a tough economy. Think about walking or riding a bike instead of driving everywhere. You’ll stay fit, save cash, and help out the environment. It’s a win-win-win situation.
*Note: These are views and opinions expressed in this post. Not concrete financial advice guaranteeing success. Bspcn is not responsible for your actions.
In 1957, the Soviet launched Sputnik (Russian for “traveling companion” or “satellite”), the first man-made object to orbit the Earth. It was a big surprise to the United States, who feared that it was falling behind technologically against its Cold War enemy.
The TCP/IP protocol is so simple that, as an 1990 April Fool’s joke, D. Waitzman of the Internet Engineering Task Force proposed that 
The first email spam was sent by Digital Equipment Corporation’s marketing manager Gary Thuerk in 1978 to 393 recipients on ARPANET. He was advertising the availability of a new model of DEC computers. The Wall Street Journal has an interview with Thuerk (along with a reprint of the original email):
The term “weblog” was coined by John Barger on December 17, 1997 to describe his website 
The YouTube we all know and love got started when former Paypal employees Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim wanted to share some videos from a dinner party only to realize that the video clip was too huge for email. Posting the video online wasn’t easy either – since video websites back then accept some but not all video clip formats.
In a way, the Web is a big social network. Even before there was the Web, BBSes served as online communities where people chatted and collaborated. But the term “social networking” became a buzzword when it was reported in 2005 that MySpace had more pageviews than Google (
The Web was created in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee (now Sir Tim Berners-Lee, as he was knighted in 2004 for his contributions to the Web) while he was working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. Sir Berners-Lee was just 34 years old at the time. (Photo credit: 
All right, we get it… Gas prices are high; the real estate market isn’t good, stocks are down, and many banks are in a mess. The media keeps drilling it into our heads like we had no idea.