WITS Zen News for the week :
- Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
- The Inspiration Paradox
- Know the Basics of Putting Your Professional Self Online
- 8 Essential Principles of Effective Leadership
- Website Gives Students College-Completion Rate Comparisons
If you want more useful links than what we highlight here , follow @witszen on Twitter.
Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
The biggest startup ideas are terrifying. And not just because they’d be a lot of work. The biggest ideas seem to threaten your identity: you wonder if you’d have enough ambition to carry them through.
A recent study suggests that innovation and creativity are greatest when we are not at our best, at least with respect to our circadian rhythms. Circadian rhythms determine whether you are a “morning-type” person or an “evening-type” person, and are often measured with a short paper-and-pencil test called the Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire. Circadian rhythms drive daily fluctuations in many physiological processes like alertness, heart rate and body temperature. Recent research indicates that these rhythms affect our intellectual functioning too.
Know the Basics of Putting Your Professional Self Online
When handled correctly, you can use social media to enhance your personal brand, establish your expertise, or demonstrate your digital fluency. Commit to using social media for professional reasons and be proactive about managing your activity and image. Consider what potential employers or colleagues will see — you don’t want them to discover only pictures of you and your dog, or worse. Make sure at a minimum you have a LinkedIn account with a completed profile. Try tweeting or blogging about your area of expertise, thereby creating content that others can forward, retweet, or repost. This can help you establish yourself as an expert in your field.
8 Essential Principles of Effective Leadership
Leadership development is a process. Seeking instant results and ladder-climbing can leave us little to show for our efforts. Some leaders “penchant for moving on has allowed them to avoid facing the consequences of their decisions” thereby restricting their development. “They have changed responsibility so often that they have failed to undergo the development that comes from facing mistakes.” Then too, some leaders are so busy “fixing problems” with personnel changes that they never really face the core issue—themselves.
Website Gives Students College-Completion Rate Comparisons
The website is produced by The Chronicle of Higher Education with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It tells consumers which schools are doing the best job of graduating their students. Readers get information about a specific school’s track record for completion, along with comparisons of comparable institutions. It also lists student aid per recipient, median SAT scores, portion of the faculty who are full time, and freshman retention rates.