If someone pitches you on a “great” Web3 project, ask them if it requires buying or selling crypto to do what they say it does.

We’ve all received feedback during our performance reviews. Feedback not only engages the employee in the conversation it also spotlights vital issues.

Receiving feedback is an opportunity to grow. However, many people don’t look at feedback this way. People don’t want to be told what they need to improve, which makes giving feedback challenging. 

There are 4 main types of feedback. Learning about these will enable you to give effective feedback.

Depending on whom you’re sharing feedback with and the context, you can use one or more types of feedback.

• Directive feedback, as the name suggests, is direct and essentially tells someone what to do though that doesn’t mean it is not put “nicely.”
• Contingency feedback relies on making the person see the consequence. It talks about what can happen.
• Attribution feedback describes someone or their actions in terms of quality or label.

Impact feedback aims to educate the person about the effect of their actions on others.

Impact feedback is most useful in performance reviews. Typically, this feedback aims to understand the “why” for a particular action. And this is why impact feedback is most likely to be well-received.

Feedback will also be received well if the giver is not authoritative or commanding, and that’s what impact feedback is.Impact feedback is not authoritative and can be a great starting point if you need to get to the authoritative feedback stage.

Whichever type of feedback you choose, remember these 10 mistakes to avoid while sharing feedback.

Avoid:

• Judging individuals.
• Sharing vague feedback.
• Speaking for others in your feedback.
• Trying to soften negative comments by sandwiching them between positive messages.
• Exaggerating feedback with generalities.

Avoid:

• Psychoanalyzing the motives behind the behavior.
• Lengthy feedback.
• Sharing implied threats via feedback.
• Using inappropriate humor.
• Phrasing feedback as a question.

“We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.” – Bill Gates, Co-founder of Microsoft

While what Bill Gates says is accurate, as someone who shares feedback, you need to be watchful and customize your feedback to reduce resistance. 

Points to consider to reduce resistance to feedback

• Consider the specific situation of the receiver.
• Remember, everyone processes information differently.
• Factor in the receiver’s personal situations.
• Individualize your feedback by considering the receiver’s strengths and weaknesses.

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Given the fast-paced world we live in with numerous pulls and tugs on us, we all have experienced some degree of anxiety now and then. And to top it all, we were hit by a  pandemic, and our worries soared high.

“Anxiety’s like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you very far.” — Jodi Picoult, Author

It turns out if you pay attention and work with it; your anxiety can become a superpower. All you need is to look at it from a different perspective.

Like Maya Angelou put, “If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.”

So how can you embrace your anxiety and turn it around?

Many times anxiety manifests itself as a premonitory feeling.  You constantly feel like something bad is about to happen. 

For example, you may be dreading being late for crucial meetings. Channel this fear to prepare for situations. 

Once you’re prepared, you’ll note that you’ll be more organized and also punctual. 

And we all know that being organized and punctual are traits of great leaders!

Embrace your vulnerability. 

For best results, people you work with need to connect with you. Show yourself and be authentic. 

If you’re nervous about speaking to someone in a meeting, admit it; the openness and sincerity will get you further than what you think.

Be uninhibited about your anxiety. This will enable you to help others face their fears and anxieties. 

Studies have proven that being able to help others releases dopamine, the “feel-good” hormone.

Jason Saltzman used his anxiety and empathy to channelize his venture Relief App to help people tackle their debt.

“Nothing diminishes anxiety faster than action.”

—Walter Anderson, Political analyst

What you think is your “weakness” can be your superpower!

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• Meta will soon allow users to create and sell NFTs and display their NFTs on their social media profiles.
• Meta rival Twitter is testing NFT showcasing capabilities, while Reddit has launched its own collection of NFT avatars.
• The move comes after Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg last year said that NFTs could one day be wielded to support a market for digital goods in its planned metaverse, an avatar-filled world that the company is investing $10bn annually in building over the coming decade.

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 Do you ever get frustrated with being interrupted? Do you wish you had a place to retreat at work to do serious thinking? Do you believe the quality of your work would go up and your stress go down if you had more time and space to really concentrate? Well, you can. Welcome to the new world of Monk Mode mornings.

What exactly is monk mode?

Between when you wake up and noon: no meetings, no calls, no texts, no email, no Slack, no Internet. You instead work deeply on something (or somethings) that matters.

What makes this hack particularly effective is its simple regularity. If someone wants to schedule something with you, it becomes reflexive to respond “anytime afternoon.” 

There’s no guesswork or inconsistency: everyone’s on the same page, and you make 3 to 4 hours of deep progress on valuable goals, every day.

It means shutting out the world for a time. It is a relatively extreme approach to take, but we decided I would write from 5 AM to 1 PM every day. I did that five days a week for about 9 months. I worked from a small office — tiny really—but in it I found space. And in that space, I found creative freedom. – Greg McKeown [2X New York Times bestselling author]

 The work world is infected with the disease of busyness. People often experience motion sickness rather than momentum. They become tricked by the trivial. 

As knowledge workers, we need to advocate for space so we can find the signal in the sound. As managers, we need to protect our people’s space to think, concentrate and get things done. There is a time to collaborate together; there is a time to be in monk mode. As Pablo Picasso is credited with saying, “Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.”

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When Covid-19 hit the world, how we look at the world changed, and so did our working styles. 

Overnight meeting attendees switched from rushing between conference rooms to rushing to find the right Zoom link. 

As a result, the medium changed, but the need to work together, discuss project progress and tackle challenges did not.

The virtual context adds layers of complexity for both meeting leaders and attendees. 

A vast majority of surveyed people reported feeling fatigued and drained during and after their virtual meetings — more so than with in-person meetings. 

Virtual meetings can be exhausting.

To make the virtual meetings effective, leaders need to tailor their responses as per the audience.  

Solicit feedback from the attendees. Not only will it help you communicate better, but will also help you plan and lead future meetings.

To help guide this meeting feedback solicitation process, consider these potential questions:

• How helpful are our team meetings?
• What is working well and not so well? What should we do differently?
• To optimize your workflow, should our meetings be scheduled in the morning, midday, or afternoon?
• How long should our meetings be?
• How often should we meet?
• Would you benefit from days or time blocks with no meetings?
• If you were to lead the meeting, what would you do differently?

Absorb and reflect on the feedback. 

It is essential after gathering feedback to let it sink in. 

Experiment and change things up.

Make some changes based on the feedback. This will let your team know that you’re listening and taking action.

Best practices for making virtual meetings more effective

• Cancel unnecessary meetings.
• Make necessary meetings shorter.
• Assign different roles to attendees.
• Use breakout rooms.
• Hold asynchronous meetings.
• Build-in breaks during long meetings.
• Moderate and facilitate virtual meetings more actively.
• Turn off “self-view,” and make camera use optional for some meetings.

To ensure productive virtual meetings, be willing to adapt and grow. 

Experiment with different meeting strategies or platforms. Adjust as needs change or evolve. 

Rely on meeting best practices and develop a tailored response.

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• Cracking down on educational institutes that join hands with edtech companies to offer online or conventional programmes, the University Grants Commission and the All India Council for Technical Education have warned them of derecognition.
• In a red-letter notice issued on Sunday, both the bodies asked higher education institutes to annul agreements with edtech companies.
• A senior official explained that universities were outsourcing content creation to edtech players, some were asking faculty from such companies to teach and certain edtech companies are also awarding degrees.

• The new guidelines issued by the Centre for electric vehicles charging infrastructure now allow owners to charge their vehicles at their residences or offices using existing electricity connections.
• The new revised consolidated guidelines and standards for electric vehicle charging infrastructure were announced by the Centre on January 14.
• Further, the guidelines have been made technology-agnostic by providing for not only the prevailing international charging standards available in the market but also the new Indian charging standards.

We think we’re being smart by taking shortcuts in life. While that’s great if you’re driving your car from point A to point B, everyone knows that there are no shortcuts in life. To build a strong body, you need to work out and eat healthy food every day.

How to stay focused on the long game?

To play the long game, you don’t need to be overly focused on the future and give up your life in the present. 

1. The only thing you need is to adjust your expectations. That will not only help you to appreciate the present more, it will also make you more patient.
2. You want to patiently work towards your goals and at the same time enjoy the process.

Don’t chase short-term goals 

You’re better off improving your skills, building better products, and working on things that you can influence. When you chase short-term goals, you’re often going after things that are out of your control like money, status, and approval of others. 

So instead of chasing those types of things, work on what’s within your control. Eventually, others will come to you. This works on a small and big scale.

Why hasn’t new technology made us more productive than it has?

Balaji Srinivasan asks in a Twitter thread why we’re not far more productive given the technology available. Here I collect the five possible explanations he mentions.

• The Great Distraction.
  All the productivity we gained has been frittered away on equal-and-opposite distractions like social media, games, etc.
  
• The Great Dissipation.
  The productivity has been dissipated on things like forms, compliance, process, etc.
  
• The Great Divergence.
  The productivity is here, it’s just only harnessed by the indistractable few.
  
• The Great Dilemma.
  Productivity has been burned in bizarre ways that require line-by-line “profiling” of everything.
  
• The Great Dumbness.
  The productivity is here, we’ve just made dumb decisions in the West while others have harnessed it.

Three-Act Structure

One of the oldest and most straightforward storytelling formulas

• Setup — Set the scene and introduce the character(s)
• Confrontation or “Rising action” — Present a problem and build up the tension
• Resolution — Resolve the problem

In the first act, set the stage and introduce the character(s) of the story. In the second act, present a problem faced by the character(s) and build up the tension. In the third act, deliver the climax of the story by resolving the problem (with your product or service).

Freytag’s Pyramid: Five-Act Structure

• Exposition — Introduce important background information
• Rising action — Tell a series of events to build up to the climax
• Climax — Turn the story around (usually the most exciting part of the story)
• Falling action — Continue the action from the climax
• Dénouement/Catastrophe — Ending the story with a resolution

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Web 3.0 will reshape the Internet and blockchain forms the foundation of all this disruption.

It’s time to not just understand, but also learn the different use-cases of Blockchain and how it can be implemented in your industry.

Introducing: Blockchain Course for Managers and the rest of us

Of course, there are many blockchain course for developers, but nothing of significance for the non-engineering folks, i.e .managers, marketers, leaders, and a general enthusiast too.

It’s time to bring not just a very comprehensive course to you, but also the one that fits in your schedule and importantly, provides maximum learning retention.

Done in partnership with award-winning FWD app, the course goes live on Jan 22nd and is now available for pre-launch offer, i.e. straight 75% discount !

Get the pre-launch offer

The course has 8 modules, 27 sub-modules and has approximate duration of 225 minutes. Normally priced at Rs. 2999, the blockchain course for managers and business leaders is now available only for Rs. 449 (as a pre-launch offer)

Note that the 75% discount, i.e. prelaunch offer is only valid till Jan 22nd. Once the course goes live, this offer won’t be active.

Once you have made the purchase, we will send you a registration code which you can use to redeem the course in the FWD app (on Jan 22nd).

More details in this page.

A healthy brain is a prerequisite for becoming a successful leader. Interest in applying neuroscience to business has been mounting up for decades. Mental resilience is the key factor that differentiates you from the crowd.

To become a successful leader with acceptable mental flexibility, it is vital to develop these four superpowers of your brain:

• Neuroplasticity
• Brain Agility
• Mindset Matters
• Simplicity

1. Neuroplasticity

“Everything you have experienced in your life has moulded and shaped your brain to favour certain behaviours and habits,” says Tara Swart. But, it is futile to expect that those behaviours and habits would be the most ideal ones. By practising new habits, behaviours and learning new things, leaders can create new pathways, and their minds become flexible.

2. Brain agility

To become a leader, your brain must be agile. It must possess the capability to switch effortlessly amongst different types of thinking-from logical to intuitive to creative. When you think nimbly, your brain can analyse a problem from different angles and chase down a solution for it.

3. Mindset mastery

A leader needs to possess a “growth mindset”, which symbolises innovation and progress. “Fixed mindset” leads to stagnation and loss of self-confidence. Neuroplasticity is a great way to become inclined towards a “growth mindset” from a “fixed mindset”.

4. Simplicity

A hyperactive world places impossible demands on limited brains. Inability to perform causes stress. Mindfulness is the only way to save yourself from unnecessary stress. Connect with your body, focus on your thoughts and breathing. Make efforts to simplify your life, and this will reduce your stress.

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• Our efforts to date are merely a prologue to a time when we’ll be able to connect the physical and digital worlds even more closely, allowing for storytelling without boundaries in our own Disney metaverse, and we look forward to creating unparalleled opportunities for consumers to experience everything Disney has to offer across our products and platforms, wherever the consumer may be.
• The United States Patent #11,210,843 filed by Disney explains that the virtual-world simulator features a computing protocol that includes a hardware processor and memory storing the software code.
• Essentially, the technology is a clone of one of Disney’s 12 theme parks located all around the world.

Storytelling has always been a part of the business world. Its roots are deeply embedded in the corporate world. Storytelling is that stone that laid the foundation of how companies communicate. However, with time there has been a resurgence of storytelling.

Follow these seven ways to ace up your business storytelling game.

1. Dig Deeper: Vulnerable and realistic stories tend to create a good impression on your customer’s mind. Of course, your story may not have a perfect ending, and that’s acceptable, as imperfect stories resonate with the not-so-perfect lives of the customers and touch their emotional cord.

2. Sensitive to social issues: These days, the public is not just educated but also concerned about social issues. The story of your company should elaborately portray your missions and the impact they will have on society.

3. Personal touch is essential: To establish an everlasting bond with your people, your company needs to kneel down on personal levels. People don’t connect unless they relate, and relating to a character made of bricks and cement can be difficult.

4. Keep your best-storytellers close: Not all creativity blooms in the office of your executives. The best storytellers are closest to the front lines, whether in service, product, or sales.

5. Team-up with customers: Co-creating is a great way to boost your business. With increased customer involvement, your storytelling improves too. Try to tell a story from the lens of the customers and experience huge sales.

6. Answer customers’ needs: People have problems, and in the quest to find its solution, they reach out to your company. Your storytelling must emphasize how your company can solve their needs. The foundation of this emotional bond can continue for decades.

7. Modernize your endings: People no longer search for rational and economic benefits. Concluding your story with the economic benefits that your company could possibly bring to the customers is a Stone Age technique.

People are more inclined towards the changes and transformations that will come in their personal lives.

Today’s customers have certain needs, and they are well aware of them. Reconditioning will help your company to boost sales.

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The Fed had been adding $120 billion a month via QE since the coronacrash. Accelerated QT would mean doing the opposite at more than $50 billion a month ($50 was the size of QT in 2018). Say – $80 billion.