One of the most powerful tips for self-improvement is also one of the simplest. Be positive. Learn to relate to the world in a positive light. “This heatwave is great! It’s given me a whole new appreciation for ice cream!”
It’s so easy to fall back on negativity to drive a conversation. Everyone can relate to being frustrated, or sleep-deprived, or depressed. But these topics are a conversational crutch.
Stay positive. Be the optimist who pulls any group up and people will fight for your company.
Want to start a business but can’t come up with an idea? A friend just pointed me to Springwise, which updates daily with new entrepreneurial ideas. I’m particularly enjoying the marketing and advertising section. From advertising in bar handstamps to runners’ pace tattoos, there are some really clever ideas.
So many people take a look at an idea and think, “That’s amazing! But I could never do it.” You can. For example, Craig came up with the idea for a website full of entrepreneurial ideas years ago…
Waiting in a huge crowd tonight to get out of a concert, Alexandra and I heard a guy behind us yelling “OH MY GOD, OH MY GOD!” as he weaved his way through the crowd. As he passed us he stopped, grinned, and whispered, “you get out faster if you yell ‘oh my god’.” And with that, he was off again. “OH MY GOD, OH MY GOD!”
Tanja Diamond bills herself as “the world’s only sexual transformation expert”. (I’m not sure why, because each time she introduced herself she would have to follow it up by explaining that she didn’t transform men into women, she transforms their sexual abilities. Just so we’re clear.) She was one of a panel of five speakers, including myself, who spoke at an event on Sunday, and she brought up some troubling recent research.
I was already familiar with the first study. Women were given T-shirts from a number of different men and instructed to smell the shirts and rate which they thought smelled the best. It turned out that universally, women preferred the odors of men whose immune systems most differed from their own.
It was found, by Wedekind and his team, that how women rate a man’s body odor pleasantness and sexiness depends upon how much of their MHC profile is shared. Overall, women prefer those scents exuded by men whose MHC profiles varied the most from their own. Hence, any given man’s odor could be pleasingly alluring to one woman, yet an offensive turnoff to another.
-Psychology Today
It makes sense that nature would engineer us to be attracted to people with a different genetic profile. Encouraging cross-breeding leads to healthier offspring. The catch is that once a woman gets pregnant, her preferences change and she is more attracted to her own tribe. And birth control pills work by manipulating hormone levels to simulate pregnancy. So the men a woman is naturally attracted to change when she goes on the pill.
The Swiss researchers found that women taking oral contraceptives (which block conception by tricking the body into thinking it’s pregnant) reported reversed preferences, liking more the smells that reminded them of home and kin. Since the Pill reverses natural preferences, a woman may feel attracted to men she wouldn’t normally notice if she were not on birth control – men who have similar MHC profiles.
-Psychology Today
The obvious question: well, what happens if my wife and I fell in love while she’s on the pill and wired to be attracted to her own family? Scientists have something to say about that, too. Back to Psychology Today:
The effects of such evolutionary novel mate choices can go well beyond the bewilderment of a wife who stops taking her contraceptive pills and notices her husband’s “newly” foul body odor. Couples experiencing difficulty conceiving a child – even after several attempts at tubal embryo transfer – share significantly more of their MHC than do couples who conceive more easily. These couples’ grief is not caused by either partner’s infertility, but to an unfortunate combination of otherwise viable genes.
Conclusion? Before you enter into any serious long-term commitments, have your partner go off the pill for a while. If the chemistry evaporates with the hormones, better to find out sooner rather than later.
The thirty day challenge isn’t about sales. Ideally you’ll make a few dollars, but it’s really a full month of market research. Find a niche, find traffic in that niche, see if that traffic consists of buyers. My old niche didn’t have enough buyers.
In that light, the market research was actually quite successful. Craig and I learned within a month that our niche wasn’t worth pursuing, before we invested a single dollar and before we invested large amounts of time. Ed Dale says that every internet business he starts begins through this process.
So, we don’t really have a choice. Thirty Day Challenge, round 2, here I come! Craig and I did some preliminary niche research yesterday and I found a few ideas I liked. One of them actually had a huge payout and terrible looking AdWords competition, so I threw up a few Google ads while I was at it and hopefully will even make a few bucks on the side off of that.
