Happy Labor Day! Thanks to all of the hard workers, especially…

Happy Labor Day! Thanks to all of the hard workers, especially our Interior employees, who make our country great. Enjoy a nap. We hope you sleep as well as this bear cub at Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee. Photo by Charlie Choc (http://ift.tt/18oFfjl).

Wonderful Penthouse in Chicago designed by Kara Mann

This wonderful penthouse not only has wonderful views of the city of Chicago that we can enjoy from each of its rooms, but it also has a wonderful interior characterized by a modern and luxurious style. It is home décor clearly created with care and a great dose of good taste. It was designed by the incredibly talented Kara Mann and is located in the fabulous city of Chicago, Illinois,..

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How to Study Better – Tips and Tricks from Famous People

Most young people dream of professional success and glorious careers. What they often neglect in that regard is the importance of good studying and self-development.

Some of the biggest authorities in all fields of work emphasize that consistency in learning is what made them so productive and outstanding.

One of the best football players in history, Brazil-born Pele, cleverly noted: “Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do.”

A vast majority of famous people are well aware of this fact and they nurture all sorts of daily habits to help them achieve their objectives.

A long time ago, Nelson Mandela stated: “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”

So, in this article, we will show you the best study tips of famous people you can use for your own success:

Daily routines which increase odds of success

What keeps you going and gives you the motive to study depends on your personality. However, the general goal is to secure a fruitful future through learning, making knowledge your personal capital for the future.

According to John F. Kennedy, the goal of education is the advancement of knowledge and the dissemination of truth. But, how do you improve knowledge and the results of your studying?

Some daily routines are common to many famous persons and we decided to present you our top 5 picks. Let’s take a closer look here.

Get up early

People often say that the early bird catches the worm.

If you get up early, you have more than enough time to plan the day, determine your short-term goals and schedule your activities. Doing so, you will enhance the quality of studying because the brain is always fresh after sleep.

It is not a surprise to discover that many famous persons get up very early. The list includes Apple CEO Tim Cook, the founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg and Xerox CEO Ursula Burns.

All of these people know that they have to seize the day and use it only to complete important duties. Just like Tim Cook once said: “You can only do so many things great and you should cast aside everything else.”

Read a lot

reading habit

Reading is the essence of the learning process and some extremely successful individuals claim that it sets the cornerstone of their career achievements. Billionaire Warren Buffett, TV host Oprah Winfrey and extravagant scientist-businessman Elon Musk are some of those who strongly believe in the power of written works.

Allegedly, Buffett used to read as much as 600 pages each day in the early stages of his career while Musk claims that he literally learned how to build rockets from the books. Needless to say, this is an essential suggestion for all students, teachers and young business people.

See Also: 7 Reasons To Start Reading Books? Here’s why!

Work overtime

It’s a widely known fact that Mark Cuban, the owner of Dallas Mavericks, didn’t go on a vacation during the first 7 years of his private business. At the same time, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer used to triple her weekly working hours while she was a member of Google’s team. These people know that they cannot replace hard work with intelligence, talent or intuition.

Sometimes you just need to unplug and do what you have to do. Michael Jordan, the best basketball player of all time, knew this very well as he used to take thousands of jump-shots each week even in-between seasons.

His famous quote precisely describes the principle of hard work: “Obstacles don’t have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don’t turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it or work around it.”

Exercise regularly

exercise regularly

One of the most popular Latin phrases claims that a healthy mind is in a healthy body. This couldn’t be more accurate because training gives people physical and mental strengths to deal with the most difficult challenges. Young people should know this just like Hillary Clinton, Haruki Murakami and Richard Branson know it.

These and many other famous persons conduct regular daily exercises and never skip training sessions. They do all sorts of exercises to remain healthy and in a good shape. They do yoga, swimming, jogging, cardio training or weight lifting.

Body fitness is simply a prerequisite for professional success and that is why you should follow these examples and exercise regularly.

See Also: 19 Ways to Get Motivated to Exercise

Work gradually but steadily

Some people don’t want to nurture the “all or nothing” approach in their lives. Instead, they prefer incremental work processes in a long period of time. This is especially characteristic for famous writers like Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway or Stephen King. They all had a writing routine that kept them fruitful and productive.

For instance, Hemingway used to write for a few hours in the morning and then he would stop just to let the ideas flourish inside his head until the following day. On the other side, Twain and King used to set the minimum number of pages they ought to write each day and they would do it without exemptions.

The most important thing in this model is to force yourself to start again on a daily basis. Just like Twain used to say: “The secret of getting ahead is getting started.”

Conclusion

Success doesn’t come easy. It’s the product of dedication, talent, hard work and a lot of learning. Some of the most famous people in the world often emphasize how passion towards studying enabled them to become successful.

Through learning, you gain valuable knowledge and also create the habit to work consistently. These are the basic preconditions of success, so do your best to follow these 5 study tips and find out which one suits your character the most.

 

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Armani Hotel in Milan, Italy near the Piazza del Duomo

This luxurious hotel has been decorated in a classic and contemporary style. The hotel is populated by large spaces in which every detail has been carefully thought out, always bearing in mind a desire to offer guests a place full of elegance, decorated with style and with a touch of delicacy. It is located in the prestigious Manzoni 31 building in Milan, anchoring the world-famous fashion district known as the..

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How to Start a Business on A Budget

The cost of starting a business has never been lower, thanks to the internet. And with most startups not having enough budget, making it big in the industry can take a lot of work.

Here’s our guide on how to start your business on a budget.

Sell your skills

Set your business up around your own skill set. If you’ve worked for 20 years in a particular industry, utilize all that valuable knowledge and experience to establish your own business.

If you’re in the service sector and can sell your skills (e.g. accountancy, marketing), rather than having to invest in stock, premises and equipment to run your business, you’ll be off to a flying start on your own. You could start making a profit in your first month of trading.

Ask for help

business help

If you have friends and family with skills that could benefit your business, ask them for help and advice. If they won’t do it for free, the least they could do is supply it at mate’s rates. As the saying goes, if you don’t ask, you don’t get.

Outsource sensibly

As a new business on a tight budget, it seems unlikely you’ll be able to hire a team of staff to help straight away. You’ll have to be prepared to roll your sleeves up and be everything to your business- from being the CEO to the accountant to the cleaner.

That’s all you.

When you reach the stage where it makes sense for you to start outsourcing, you’ll know. If demand for your time becomes unmanageable or time spent performing non-profit making activity is negatively impacting your productivity, it’s time to outsource.

And you can outsource everything these days. Popular freelancer sites like People Per Hour, TopTal, or Upwork let you search for a freelancer to complete almost any business task virtually. You can outsource your bookkeeping for £15/hour or hire someone to run all your social media accounts for five days for £10.

Outsourcing in this way makes sense for new businesses as there is no long-term commitment compared with hiring full-time staff.

See Also: A Practical Guide to Hiring and Managing Freelancers

Embrace the home office

home office

It might not be the slick city center office you had dreamed about, but it’s free. You could look at coworking spaces or cheap shared office space, but that will add dents to your budget as well as time.

See Also: 8 Ways To Set Up An Awesome Home Office

Invest where it counts

You don’t get a second chance at a first impression, so make it count. You can register a professional domain name which will serve as your web address and email address. With a .uk for just £4.49/year, you’ll be able to get a good investment you can use in building your brand and reputation.

Get a free website

Websites don’t have to be expensive and free websites don’t have to contain lots of annoying adverts. You can, for example, get your website hosting from a company like Certa Hosting for £3.99/month and you’ll get a website builder free of charge.

If you worry about managing your site, you can create and maintain a professional-looking website using simple drag and drop technology. Most hosting companies offer scalable resources, too. This way, as your business grows, your website can grow with you.

Smart marketing

Unfortunately, it’s not usually the case of ‘build it and they will come’ when opening a new business. You need to tell people you exist, tell them what you do and remind them regularly. Luckily, there are lots of ways to do this for free:

Social media – Leverage the power of social media to launch your business and collect followers.
PR – Get the local media on board. Write a press release announcing your launch and send it to the editors of relevant newspapers, magazines and websites. Make good contacts there and let them know every time you have news to share.
Collect data – Build a database, but be aware of data protection laws.
E-mail marketing – A professional email marketing campaign is a click away at companies like MailChimp where you can have up to 2,000 subscribers and send 12,000 emails per month.
Design posters, flyers and social media posts like a pro and for free with a tool like Canva.

Conclusion

Savvy shopping, lean operating and concentrating on what you’re good at is the recipe for success, particularly for businesses starting on a budget. If you’re just starting out, keep one eye on your bottom line and the other on expanding your business. It’s the best way to ensure that your business stays successful, sustainable and profitable.

 

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Modern and Cozy Loft designed by Marmol Radziner in Los Angeles, California, United States

Personally, I love lofts, and this one is full of those special details that make us fall in love with an interior. Located in the wonderful city of Los Angeles, California, United States, this loft covers an area of 2,000 square feet, and was designed by the architectural firm Marmol Radziner in the year 2016. During its remodeling, the existing walls for two small bedrooms were torn down in order..

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Leaving Walden

After two years, two months, and two days, Henry David Thoreau left his cabin in the Concord woods on September 6, 1847. As explained in the concluding chapter of Walden, Thoreau made his decision to move out in the same spirit of adventure as his decision to move in:

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves . . . The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.

Recent books, many of them published in honor of this year’s bicentennial festivities — Thoreau was born on July 12, 1817 — certainly reflect his “more lives to live” determination, as well as the diversity and intensity of his interests. In his award-winning Thoreau the Land Surveyor, Patrick Chura shows how the profession Thoreau took up after Walden so deeply influenced his environmentalism and his writing. In The Boatman, Robert M. Thorson describes a man as happy on New England’s rivers and streams as he is tramping her woods. Geoff Wisner’s Thoreau’s Animals, like his earlier Thoreau’s Wildflowers, is arranged to reflect the seasons and Thoreau’s wonder about them in his journals, as in this May 27, 1841 entry:

I sit in my boat on Walden, playing the flute this evening, and see the perch, which I seem to have charmed, hovering around me, and the moon travelling over the bottom, which is strewn with the wrecks of the forest, and feel that nothing but the wildest imagination can conceive of the manner of life we are living. Nature is a wizard.

It may surprise some that Thoreau liked to play his flute for his friends, human and otherwise, and even liked a good sing-along. Scholar Laura Dassow Walls, author of the new biography Henry David Thoreau, cautions against trying to compartmentalize the man or failing to see the continuity in his worldview. In contrast to the more polarized approaches to Thoreau, Walls finds that his nature and political writing are connected by a common vision, and that the hermit-nag aspect of his personality is balanced by his “lively and charismatic” attributes. Walls also emphasizes the fundamental optimism that she finds in Thoreau — even given that the data-rich records he kept “help us measure the arrival of the Anthropocene epoch that threatens to overthrow everything he believed”:

Thoreau could look to “Nature” as an eternal fountain of renewal and regeneration, a sacred force capable of healing even the deepest acts of human destruction, including slavery, war, and environmental devastation . . . That the actions of human beings and the ancient fossil fuels they dug out of the ground to feed the engines of industry could fundamentally alter those natural processes — changing the chemistry of the atmosphere and of the encircling oceans, melting the poles, killing winter, killing life itself — was beyond Thoreau’s reckoning. Can his faith live on after nature, at least nature as he knew it has ended?

I think it can and will.

Walls notes that Walden ends with “an ecstatic vision into the regenerative forces of the Cosmos,” excerpted below. The new video game Walden is scheduled for commercial release this year; offering players “a kind of stillness at its core,” perhaps the game may guide a new generation to Thoreau and hasten the work of his wood bug:

Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer’s kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts — from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb — heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board — may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society’s most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!

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Discover a colorful wilderness at Petrified Forest National…

Discover a colorful wilderness at Petrified Forest National Park. Located near the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau in Arizona’s Painted Desert, this awe-inspiring park was one of the first sites in the national park system to be designated a wilderness area for its untamed, natural beauty. Pictured here, Petrified Forest National Wilderness Area’s north unit allows hikers to roam the red and orange part of the Painted Desert. Photo by National Park Service.

4 Ways To Trick Others Into Thinking That You’re An Extrovert

You’re reading 4 Ways To Trick Others Into Thinking That You’re An Extrovert, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

Is it just me or does it seem like this world was imagined, custom built and modified for extroverts?

Technology can only got so far in minimizing human interaction to the deliveryman, the person at the final window in the drive-thru and a magical thing called, “The Internet”.

For the rest of the time, you will have to deal with people… If you’re a budding entrepreneur or someone who wants to move ahead in life, you have to network!

So what can an introvert do in a networking setting to minimize discomfort?

  1. Have a game-plan

You don’t have to automatically get in the middle of the room, pick a crowd and start hobnobbing. You could, if you wanted to, but you should ease your way into the room and scope the place out.

If there’s an open bar, maybe head there first, and who knows, you might start conversing with someone while you’re there.

Pretend that you’re a lion trying to make a kill and you’re looking for the right antelope — the lion rarely picks the slowest antelope, but moreso the easiest to tire out. Don’t get overwhelmed, scope the room out.

Pro tip: Look for someone who is also alone. Getting in with a group that’s already mid-conversation is best reserved for confident networkers. Since we’re doing this to succeed, stick to one person and avoid two people, because they might be having a private conversation.

Once you’ve narrowed in a good target…

  1. Bring them to you

Give this person a gentle smile and lift your eyebrows while nodding. These two actions, nodding and lifting eyebrows, give the other person an impression that you two may have met before.

“Perhaps they don’t remember you, but thank goodness you’re there, because now there’s one more person that they know!”

Hold your eye contact and smile. Resist the urge to look away — this urge is your subconscious mind screaming, “What are you doing? We have to get outta here!” Ignore that and keep holding your gaze and smile.

This perfect stranger will now approach you out of curiosity.

Pro tip: Try to do this to someone who looks different than you. If you’re female, use this technique on a male and if you’re male and in a multicultural setting, do this to someone of a different race.


Why? This will prevent people from assuming that you’re having a private conversation, and you’ll attract a large group to your conversation.

3. Let them do the talking

Now that someone has approached you, their first question is probably going to be, “Have we met?” Answer honestly and let them speak if they have something to say. Hand them your business card.

If, based on their business cards, they seem interesting to you, ask them questions based on your natural curiosity, and reciprocate when they ask you something.

If you notice that the conversation is dulling out and you don’t want them to walk on to the next person that they might deem interesting, allow them to do most of the talking. Ask them a question and if they partially answer it, just remain silent and maintain your eye contact. They will continue answering…

This technique will make them think that you’re a really good listener and are genuinely interested in their industry, niche or position.

Seeing two very different people engaged in conversation will pique the interest of someone else, perhaps an extroverted networker, and they might approach you.

If they do, you’re almost home-free!

4. Make the group do most, if not all, of the work

Once you’ve got a good rhythm going, and are now referring to people in your group by their names, allow them to do most of the talking.

If someone tells a joke and everyone in the group starts laughing, whoever that you look at while laughing will build a stronger bond with you, and gain the impression that the two of you are the closest in the group.

You would have made a very strong impression on them, and didn’t have to speak! Allow the new group dynamic to take over.

Being an introvert is not a curse. While others are busy trying to curry one-another’s favor and make impressions, you’re observing and waiting for the perfect opportunity to speak up.

The problem with this approach is that the opportunity may never come.
Networking is about leaving an impression and taking risks.

Don’t let your fears hold you back from participating in a memorable evening!

Photo credit: Edu Lauton

You’ve read 4 Ways To Trick Others Into Thinking That You’re An Extrovert, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

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The night sky over Joshua Tree National Park is a glittering…

The night sky over Joshua Tree National Park is a glittering dome of sparkling stars, bright planets and streaking meteors – but most people no longer get to see it where they live. In urban and suburban settings, artificial lighting and atmospheric pollutants wash out the light of the stars. Boasting some of the darkest nights in Southern California, Joshua Tree offers many visitors the chance to admire the Milky Way for the first time in their lives and was recently designated an International Dark Sky Park. Photo by Brad Sutton, National Park Service.