Learn 10-30 words/phrases in every Major Language

When I was in my mid 20s, I had a friend named Vince or Vin or Vinny or Vincenzo, depending who he was talking to at the moment. At that point I had never been to Europe and the only place I had visited with a foreign language other than Spanish had been Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

I was out with Vin one day and he ran into a friend. Vin spoke English, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. But with this particular friend he started talking another language I didn’t recognize. Turns out his friend was Moroccan and Vincenzo pulled out some Arabic. I was amazed envious all at once.

Shortly after, I read an interview with Quincy Jones in a magazine. One piece of advice he had struck me and had stayed with me ever since. Before any trip he would take to a foreign country, he would learn thirty words or phrases to be able communicate with the people of that country. He understood that it was important to be able to connect with people and language, even just a few words, could facilitate that connection.

That’s sage advice. Short of everyone in the world becoming fluent in Esperanto, we could all use a reserve of words, sentences or phrases in other languages for when we travel or when we meet people from other countries here on our shores. It leads to smiles, new connections, fosters friendships and could breed goodwill amongst all. Being able to say a few words to each other in someone else’s native tongue helps us show humanity and humility to our fellow women and men.

Now, years since that day with Vinny, I’m not only fluent in Spanish and English but also picked up Japanese and can defend myself in Italian, Portuguese and some French to boot. A Chinese phrase here, a Tagalog (the language of the Philippines) word there and I have broken down many a wall in both domestic and foreign soils and gotten into some amazing adventures because of it. Next up, I want to pick up some German, Polish and Russian.

If you have been itching to learn a new language, are traveling for business or pleasure to a foreign country and are dreading trying to speak to anyone who doesn’t speak English, take that amazingly powerful tool in your hand and get yourself an app like Duolingo, Babbel or Rosetta Stone and learn a few key phrases. You never know, you may end up like “The Machine”.

The Planning for a Business Plan Plan

“Do I need a business plan?”

Yes and no.

There was a time where you would go to a bank to ask for a loan for your business. They in turn would ask you for several things, including a detailed business plan. Depending on who and what kind of business you were trying to start, a business plan would go up to ten, twenty, thirty, sometimes fifty pages. Your eyes would glaze over, your hands would turn into claws as you hovered over your Oliver or Smith-Corona typewriter. PowerPoint was a T-Square, a protractor, some colors pencils and a compass that could kill a moose. You also had to find a commercial real estate broker for a space, buy office furniture, have a rotary phone installed and try not shatter the giant glass water cooler bottle while changing it, forget about trying not to spill all the water on the floor.

Today, you go sign a piece of paper at WeWork, move into a fully furnished office and they even supply the fruit infused water with no potential for glass breaking or getting your shoes wet. Same goes for a business plan. It has become a bit simpler, but you still need one.

Unless you’re planning to get a loan from a bank or any other type of financial institution, chances are that they will expect a detailed business plan. This will be how they will understand your plans to profit and subsequently pay off your loan. But if you’re planning to start your business with your own capital or through others means with less red tape, an overly detailed business plan is not necessary.

When clients come to me with an idea or even product, I ask them what’s their plan moving forward. Their usual response is, “do I need a business plan?”

I smile and give them a one page business plan template that has twelve boxes:

1. Company Identity

2. Problem

3. Your Solution

4. Target Market

5. The Competition

6. Revenue Streams

7. Initial Marketing Plan

8. Expenses

9. Team & Key Roles

10. Timeline

11. Future

12. Exit Plan

Some will need more space than others for the information, depending on the business, service or product. These basic categories will help you further understand what you are creating, its structure and its future.

With these basic blocks, you can start putting together your business model canvas and your visual presentation deck, two things that you definitely need at the outset. I will explain these in further detail in future posts.

So, no, you don’t need three reams of paper’s worth of a business plan but you do need a plan. Something clear and concise that will serve as a guide for you and your team.

Sleep Hacking & Productive Brain Hours

In one of the chapters of my life, I was a bartender. I worked late hours and slept in a lot. 

In another chapter, I was a school teacher who needed to wake up at 5am to drive an hour to school. Falling asleep at night was an anxiety riddled hassle fest. 

I have always instinctively felt like a night owl and thought I would never be able to go to bed early or wake up early. This caused me years of insomnia, grogginess, anxiety from having to force my self to go to sleep. 

In 2013, I started hacking my sleep. Calcium/Magnesium supplements, cherry juice, melatonin, and a glass of red wine I would ingest. Long ice baths, limiting TV time to 30-60min and keeping the lighting in my place to a minimum after 9pm.

I’ve been using this evening routine for the better part of the last six years. Not only have my sleep habits gradually improved, I now appreciate and embrace sleep.

Yet, the main outcome has been the discovery of my productive hours. For the past eight months my body has been waking me up between 5am - 6am. Sometimes I ignore my body and continue to sleep, restarting my sleep inertia cycle, and that leads to grogginess, a topic for another post. But I when do get up, I have my most productive days. 

I get up, stretch a bit then I sit down and meditate. For the most part I use guided meditations, tracks with solfeggio tones or music for me to get into a flow and recently a handful of guided meditations to align myself to a specific purpose. I do snooze a bit sometimes but I set alarms as fail safes. 

After 20min of meditation, I get up and make coffee. I pour myself a cup and start writing in my journal. Sometimes it’s just one line, other times three or four pages. Thoughts, ideas, goals, motivation, dreams from the night before and anything that passes through my mind, I jot down. Then, I read for 30-60min. I get up, look at my white board and break down my day. Not everyday is perfect, but I carry out this routine for the most part 4-5 days a week. My sleeping patterns have vastly improved, but it has taken a lot of conscious effort.  

How are you sleeping? How are you priming yourself for sleep?

What are your productive hours? Are you resting enough? Are you taking care of yourself? 

Comment or ask me anything about sleep and productive hours below. 

Building Brand Integrity

You open up your smartphone and immediately one of your apps starts updating. A while later your looking for the app, you swear it was in this folder but you don’t see it. Then you realize that the app updated and the company has rebranded with a new look, logo or color scheme.

Every 2–3 years, companies rebrand for several reasons. They modernize their look, expand their services or product line, attempt to change public perception after some negative publicity or just because they have profited and can afford to do so.

What doesn’t change, what shouldn’t change is the brand’s integrity. As a startup, a new company a large part of your mission is what your company stands for, what overarching idea it encompasses as a product or service without compromise. As companies grow their brand mission can expand as well, but the integrity that was the original foundation stays the same. If it doesn’t, you risk alienating your early adopters and possibly confusing or creating doubt with potential new markets.

Let’s define brand integrity. Simply put it’s what your company stands for and how they make their products or provide their services and how this reflects on the company from the consumers point of view. Adding to that and just as important is your work practices and the environment for your company’s workforce. This should be laid out clearly in your company’s mission statement, as the inspiration to your business plan with clear and precise core values.

On the product side, say if you’re a food product, are you non-GMO? Organic? How are you sourcing your ingredients? Fair Trade? If you’re a clothing company, we can apply similar attributes. Fair Trade sourcing? Where is the product made? What kind of labor practices are conducted at the manufacturing point? Are you going with Made in the USA? Are you Assembled in the USA? Just to name a few.

Brand integrity also includes the post-buying experience. How’s your customer service? Your warranty? Product repair and/or replacement? Ever hear someone say, “I love this product but when I had a problem, the customer service sucked!”

This can be a death knell for a company that’s barely off the ground.

It’s all about keeping your promise of how you are making your product and following through on this even after it has been sold.

Take a look at Patagonia. They’re universally known and respected brand is based on a strong commitment to their core values:

Quality — the pursuit of ever greater quality in everything we do.

Integrity — relationships built on integrity and respect.

Environmentalism — serve as a catalyst for personal and corporate action.

Not Bound by Convention — our success — and much of the fun — lies in developing innovative ways of doing things.

This has been the company’s brand since Yvon Chouinard founded the company in 1973. Patagonia has been known to provide customer service and repair clothing that was purchased over 20 years ago! Checkout this great episode of NPR’s How I Built This where they talk to Yvon and the growth of his company.

On the company’s staff side, what kind of working culture are you trying to create? Will it be a stiff hierarchy where the executive suite is separated from the non-executives even when the company has ten or less employees? Will you offer equity to early employees and make them feel part of something bigger? Does everyone have a chance to contribute ideas and opinions? Look at Pixar’s Room of Candor for reference. This is another area where Patagonia is recognized is at the forefront of company culture. It’s more than just ping pong tables and free beer at a co-working space.

Some of these will be budget related and difficult for startups and small companies to get it right off the get go, but not impossible. As long as you set strong core values, a clear mission statement supported by a clear business plan, you can define your brand integrity and see it through as you launch your product and services and continue to be true to it as your company succeeds and grows. Budget related or not, don’t compromise.

Feel free to share your thoughts or add to the discussion on brand integrity in the comments section.

Thanks to Wiley, Patagonia.com, White River Design and Smart Brief for info and reference points.