There were lots of great blog posts this week from Portfolio authors, here are a few to check out…
Pam Slim on taking massive action
John Warrillow on taking a mulligan in business
Amber Mac shares 5 tips for using LinkedIn
Laura Vanderkam on what it means to be frugal
Jonathan Fields talks about entrepreneurship for kids
Jack Covert selects CAR GUYS VS. BEAN COUNTERS
There were lots of great blog posts this week from Portfolio authors, here are a few to check out…
Pam Slim on when to stand your ground
John Warrillow on determining the value of your business
Jonathan Fields discusses good pain, bad pain, and how to tell the difference
Amber Mac shares 5 inspiring steps to innovation
Jeff Bussgang shares 5 lessons entrepreneurs can learn from Navy Seals
One of my favorite interviews to come out of the IDEA MAN book tour is this one from Boing Boing. Rob Beschizza spoke with Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen about several fascinating topics, including private space travel and his ongoing work with the Allen Brain Atlas. Here’s a brief excerpt, and I encourage you to check out the whole thing.
Rob: Is there any advice you could give to people who want to take the same path? How do you focus on new ideas without losing sight of execution?
Paul: To come up with ideas, you have to prepare. You get there by following tech news, a lot of websites, blogs such as BB, and many other things. Stuffing your brain with information. Hopefully, you get an idea for something after you’ve done that for a while: that’s what happened to me. Then you have to put together a team of people, and I was lucky to have Bill Gates, and other people, as my partners through the years to execute those ideas. And you’ve got to test your idea against what’s already out there, to make sure it’s not duplicative, that it really is a green-field idea. All those factors have to work together. And if you’re lucky you come up with something that has the potential to change the world. And that’s incredibly rewarding. But it’s not just the idea. It’s all the effort and the work that come after you have the idea.
IDEA MAN is the highly anticipated memoir from Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft (to be published on April 19). The book is excerpted in the May issue of Vanity Fair, which just hit newsstands.
Here’s where you can read the full excerpt
Per usual, there were some great blog posts this week from our Portfolio authors. Here are a few to check out…
Pam Slim on achieving the impossible
Erik Calonius on the Eureka Moment in visionary thinking
Laura Vanderkam on the value of idea files
Jonathan Fields asks “who is a creative?”
John Jantsch on how to turn your Facebook profile into a fan page
Amber Mac on the popularity of Tumblr
Score! Recently, Entertainment Weekly featured Malled by Caitlin Kelly in The Bullseye, a section that ranks the hits and misses of the week’s pop culture events.
EW raves about the forthcoming Portfolio title: “This excellent memoir is about a journalist who loses their job and has to go into retail. Or in other words, the year 2008.”
In Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail, Kelly uses her position behind the cash register to challenge our assumptions about retail work and interviews industry insiders to reveal the complexities of this business. In terms of pop culture sizzle, Malled placed only slightly below Zach Galifianakis gently squeezed into an Orphan Annie dress — and I mean, come on, even we kind of have to concede the win.
For more information or a review copy of Malled, please email tiffany.liao@us.penguingroup.com
