People often ask me – usually at parties – if I walk around every day critiquing peoples’ outfits. While I can turn my critical eye on and off, and I certainly never go up to anyone and give them my opinion unsolicited, there are certain mistakes that I see consistently. If you’re someone who cares about how he looks (and I assume if you’re reading this article, you are), read on for three common errors and how to easily nip them in the bud.
1) Loafers with your suit – I get it. Traveling in lace-ups is no fun. Try a monkstrap instead, like the pair above. You can slip in and out of them, and they work with a suit.
2) Wearing pants that are too big in the waist – If your belt loops are pulling up when you tighten your belt like in the picture above, it means the waist on your pants is too big, and you run the risk of having diaper butt. Go down a size and your pants and belt won’t work against each other.
3) Mismatching themes – I often see guys in preppy polo shirts or khakis wearing things that are edgy in feel (like a biker jacket or boots) elsewhere in their outfit. It doesn’t work. If one piece in your outfit is preppy or conservative, the whole look should be such. Likewise, if one piece in your outfit has an edge to it, the rest of your outfit should too. For example, you wouldn’t wear a rough and tumble boot like the one above with a pair of traditional khakis. A pair of dark jeans or slim dark dress pants would suit them much better.
Have you ever made any of these mistakes? Fess up! I’d love to hear where things have gone awry for you. Leave me a comment below, and perhaps I can offer some additional solutions.
Nutrition is polarizing. Nutrition is not black and white. Nutrition can not and never should be the same for everyone. These statements are the reason we have so many diet books, nutritional questions and a population of people that have analysis by paralysis on trying to eat “healthy.”
As I have written before, not all proteins are created equal. Some contain more essential amino acids than others. To keep from rehashing old material click on the link above to read about the differences in proteins.
The biggest question I get is “How much protein should I take in?” This is a great question and one that has been researched for the past 50 years. The results may be slightly different but the one fact that stays the same is “it depends on your activity and level of intensity.” Meaning in order to know how much you should take in, you need to align your intake with your activity and how vigorous that activity is.
In a normal untrained person, the recommended protein intake is 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight (or 0.36 grams per pound of body weight). This recommendation is for sedentary people and only is a bare minimum to keep from protein degradation or the burning of muscle as fuel. In this example a 150 lbs person would take in 54 grams of protein per day. Obviously not enough to build muscle tissue.
For individuals participating in high intensity training, protein needs to go up to 1.4-2.0 g/kg (or around 0.64-0.9 g/lb) of body mass. In our 150 lbs example, this person would need to take in 95-135 grams of protein per day. A much more ideal percentage of protein.
Hold up there is more…
Beyond the basics of preventing deficiency and ensuring a baseline of protein synthesis, we may need even more protein in our diets for optimal functioning, including good immune function, metabolism, satiety, weight management and performance. In other words, we need a small amount of protein to survive, but we need a lot more to thrive.
We can only store so much protein at one time.So in order to optimally supply your body with much needed protein, you must eat it periodically throughout the day. Eating a 16 oz. steak and calling it a day, is not going to give you the overall effects that eating 5-6 servings of high protein foods will.
Can you eat too much protein? Possibly, but it would be hard. Protein can be converted to sugar and stored. However, it is an inefficient process and not one the body wants to undergo. Studies have shown that a high amount of protein intake (up to 1.2 grams per lb) has no health risks to the kidneys.
So which protein is best?
Research has shown that foods high in the essential amino acid, leucine, increase protein synthesis (breakdown of protein to be stored) higher than the other two essential amino acids. Foods high in leucine are spirulina, egg white, fish, poultry, and meat.
Take home points…
1. Shoot for at least half your body weight in grams of protein per day. If wanting to gain muscle increase to your body weight in grams.
2. If weight loss is a struggle, evaluate where and how much protein you are getting. Odds are it is not enough for your body weight and fitness goals.
3. Try to eat protein in every meal.
4. Choose whole foods over supplementation. However, choose supplementation over nothing at all.
5. Can’t stress this enough, if you want to get leaner you must consume more protein!
By Lauren Mayer, on Wed Dec 17, 2014 at 8:30 AM ET
Bill O’Reilly et al. like to paint themselves as victims of a secular conspiracy to destroy the meaning of Christmas. To hear them tell it, our founding fathers based the Constitution on a mashup of the bible (only selected portions, mind you, none of that keeping kosher stuff) and the Burl Ives ‘Frosty The Snowman’ TV special. So any attempt to reflect the diversity of our country around this time of year is not only unAmerican, but it threatens the very existence of the holiday they are thus compelled to defend.
Maybe if they got out of their studio once in a while, they’ll get a sense of just how well Christmas is doing versus any other holiday. Even here in the godlessly liberal/socialist Bay Area, every mall, business, or residential street looks like an elf’s wet dream, festooned with tinsel, red & green baubles, and enough mechanical reindeer & inflated lit-up snowmen to completely confuse my dog every time I walk her. (Not to mention the fact that Christmas has totally taken over Thanksgiving, and is probably going after Halloween and Labor Day next . . . )
Meanwhile, Bob Geldof has trotted out yet another rendition of his classic/monstrosity (depending on your perspective), “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” this time to raise awareness of Ebola, but continuing in the same vein of overblown rock anthem as expressed by patronizing Westerners. (Apparently, just in Nigera there are 3 times as many Christians as in England, so it seems like they don’t need Geldof’s song to enlighten them.) So in that same spirit, here’s my own overblown anthem in an effort to raise awareness of the existence of other holidays.
By Erica and Matt Chua, on Tue Dec 16, 2014 at 8:30 AM ET
Khao San Road is the gateway to Southeast Asia, which means this is the first stop for many young and often inexperienced travelers planning a trip to the region. It has almost a spring break type atmosphere and just about anything goes, before I go into detail about “anything” lets take a quick look at history. According to wikitravel the word khao san itself means milled rice and is an attribution to the historical role of this street in the rice trade. The first business to open on Khao San Road was a small hotel aimed at serving civil servants from the provinces who came to Bangkok on business. The hotel was followed by Sor Thambhakdi, a shop selling monks’ accessories. Four similar businesses moved in after, and Khao San became known as a “religious road”. Let me tell you that the only religious thing about Khao San Road anymore is how people drink religiously when they visit. Nonetheless, Khao San Road is a must-see in Bangkok. You might not choose to stay at one of the cheap guesthouses in the middle of the action, but you may want to do one of the following:
Top Ten Things to do on Khao San Road
1. Drink, I’m not condoning binge drinking here, but this is definitely the place to grab a local Chang beer or a bucket. A bucket is just that a sand-pale style bucket filled with liquor it’s typically whiskey (the local Sang Som) and Coke, but you can pick your poison.
2. Stay awake, Khao San Road never sleeps so you can visit anytime day or night. The morning is the quietest and at night everything comes alive. Once the bars close by 2:00 am or so, the patrons will flood the street moving the party outside.
3. People Watch, this goes hand-in hand with staying awake as night offers the best people watching. Herds of young backpackers roam the streets intermingled with street vendors, lady boys and tuk tuk drivers. It’s hard not to stare at all the crazy characters hanging out.
4. Buy Art, there are some very talented artists that sell their paintings and photographs on the side of the street, it is definitely worth checking out. Remember to bargain and you could take home a fantastic painting for under $20.
5. Shop, Khao San Road is the bohemian capital of Bangkok, so if you are looking for patchwork skirts, a buddha t-shirt or want to get a singing bowl you will find it on Khao San. Make sure you bargain because all the vendors are willing to “make good price for you.”
Read the rest of… Erica and Matt Chua: The Experience that is Khao San Road
I’m not a fan of pop music but I am an innovation junkie. My daughter Alyssa, a self- professed Swiftie, has been pestering me to pay attention, if not to Taylor Swift’s music at least to her business model. She wore me down. Turns out, there’s a lot we innovation junkies can learn from Taylor Swift. Whether her music is your thing or not (I have to admit its growing on me!), you can’t help but be impressed with Taylor Swift’s business savvy during a time when the music industry is being disrupted to smithereens. I’m most impressed with her social media presence to catalyze a growing army of Swifties and her aggressive stand against Spotify as the business model war between mp3 sales and streaming services rages on.
The most successful businesses today are movements more than companies. Movements don’t market. Movements inspire and engage. They create an emotional connection through storytelling. Not stories to be enjoyed passively but stories we see ourselves in, stories we can actively participate in. What Taylor Swift realizes, that most businesses haven’t figured out, is that “social” isn’t an extension to an existing business model, it is an entirely new business model. Social isn’t a bolt on, its central to how movements start and grow.
Over the last two years the bottom has fallen out of the U.S. album market with sales plummeting 20%. Taylor Swift’s new album 1989 defies gravity with amazing launch week sales of 1.28 million copies exceeding all expectations according to Nielsen SoundScan. Swifties everywhere mobilized to make it so. My daughter, the fangirl, drove this innovation lesson home for me. Alyssa maintains a tumblr site dedicated to all things Taylor Swift. I didn’t pay attention until the day she called home proclaiming that the pop star had followed her and had actually responded to her question about all important lipstick choices. My daughter was so excited you would think it was a national holiday! That’s what I call fan engagement.
As if that wasn’t enough to lock in a fan for life, my daughter’s next post was a video of her 3 year-old twin nieces (our granddaughters) dancing to Shake It Off. Cute, aren’t they? When Taylor Swift tweeted out the video to her 46 million followers, our granddaughters went viral. Now everyone in our family is a Swiftie!
Multiply the ripple effect from this example of personal engagement thousands and thousands of times and you begin to see how social isn’t about pushing a message out to potential customers, its about pulling people into a movement. Talk about force multipliers. Social business is redundant. All business is social.
There is also an important innovation lesson in the way Taylor Swift has staked out her position in the music industry business model wars. Album sales are declining rapidly because consumers are flocking to free streaming services like Spotify with over 40 million active users. Only about 25% of those active users pay for a premium service without ads, the rest stream for free. 40 million streamers can put a serious dent in album sales. Spotify pays per stream royalties of between $0.006 and $0.0084 which is significantly less than an artist can make through mp3 sales.
Not many artists have Taylor Swift’s market clout but when she announced she was pulling her music off of Spotify it sent a clear message to the market. Content matters and should be paid for. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed and in a Yahoo interview she makes her point of view clear.
“Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for”.
“I’m not willing to contribute my life’s work to an experiment that I don’t feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists, and creators of this music”.
In a world where content can be digitized and the marginal cost of global distribution is virtually zero consumers have been conditioned to get content for free. It’s a business model free for all. Content producers have been squeezed mercilessly. Journalists, authors, and musicians are being decimated. Newspaper and magazine journalists have been let go in droves left to scramble to make ends meet as free agents. Authors bear the brunt of collateral damage from the battle between Hachette and Amazon. Fewer and fewer musicians can make a living pursuing their passion.
A dangerous narrative has emerged in which content creators are supposed to just accept that their content will be free. Authors are expected to write articles and books for free so they can make money giving speeches and doing consulting work. Musicians are expected to release music for peanuts so they can make money on the road doing concerts.
I have personally fallen into this trap as a steady content producer including tweets, blogs, articles, and even a book. How many of us keep pumping out content for free or very little money in the hopes that it will translate into value in other ways? Taylor Swift is taking an impressive stand. Yes it is in her best interest to do so but it is also in the interest of content creators everywhere.
Many new business models will emerge in the digital era. It will be messy while the market sorts out and balances consumer, platform, and content creator interests. Business models that don’t recognize the power of customer engagement and fully value the contribution of content creators are unsustainable. This new Swiftie is rooting for Taylor Swift’s continued success.
Have you ever wondered how you rate on a scale of 1-10? Winter is practically here, and the holidays right after that. Those are key times to be exuding confidence and looking your best.
If you want to get serious about your style, and be taken seriously as a result, I invite you to watch the video I made for you explaining how it all works. I’ve worked with hundreds of men worldwide, and it’s been my incredible privilege to observe how much their lives improve and what opportunities come their way when they upgrade their style.
On the same page as the video, you can also take my style quiz. It will show you how you measure up, and what you can do to get to a 10.
About 3 hours ago I had dinner with an old friend I had not seen in a while. During our conversation she let me know that over the last several weeks she had been incredibly busy with holiday activities. Work parties, ugly sweater parties, keg parties and hell maybe even an egg nog party. I say that in jest however I know she has been busy with the holidays.
I can only imagine what it would be like for someone who was married and had kids. All the events leading up to the Christmas or Hanukkah must be exhausting, let alone the events themselves. I purposely put off a grand opening event at my new studio just because it was December and I didn’t want to monopolize anymore of my people’s time.
What I am getting at is time is limited. Food choices are plenty but they can be very unhealthy and not what we would classify as “JB friendly.” All in all this time of year is hard on everyone, including our fitness goals. SO…after thinking about what I wanted to say tonight, I decided to share with you all my 5 Pillars for success. They also happen to be my companies core values.
Inspiration
It can often be hard to get inspired to workout or eat right during this time of year. However, we must all realize that one bad meal does not mean you have to eat another and another. Stop the snowball effect by realizing this is marathon and not a sprint. Also, become inspired to inspire others. Others that may be going through something that you have been through. This is an important pillar of success. What goes around comes around.
Motivation
It can be just as hard to become motivated to keep good patterns rolling. Motivation can come from within or it can be external. However, do not be a procrastinator and say you will get to it after the first of the year. Time is ticking and time waits for no one. Start now or continue the path that you have been on. Do not quit.
Accomplishment
A big thing for me with clients are “small victories.” Whether it being able to walk up the stairs without feeling faint or being able to hop off the table with no issue or being able to accept their body for what it is, accomplishment is huge. This time of year we should all reflect on things we have accomplished and continue to build as we move into 2015.
Greatness
“The way you do anything is the way you do everything.” That quote defines greatness. If you are going to do it, do it all the way. No half-stepping. Go all in and never turn back.
Experience
“Life is the about the journey.” Enjoy the ride and hope that every experience can be learned from and built upon for future encounters.
Do not sweat the small stuff and keep your head on straight during the 20 plus days. January will be here before you know it. If you want to get a quick start on your New Year’s Resolution, look no further than yours truly.
By Erica and Matt Chua, on Tue Dec 9, 2014 at 8:30 AM ET
The saga of Sapa begins in the small hill tribe villages, whose civilizations have yet to reap the benefits of modernization. They have recently been inundated with tourists, however many of the traditions of the Black H’mong and Red Dao people persist. In particular the traditions that dictate love hold strong and the courtships of very young villagers are short and arranged, but I learned from our young trekking guide Coo that it is a little more complicated than that.
At first glance Coo looked like the twelve year old daughter of one of the travelers in her bright pink, rhinestone studded jacket talking on her cell phone. Upon closer examination I could here that she was clearly speaking in a foreign tongue, wearing a traditional skirt and had long, silky black hair to her knees. As we began our trek I hurriedly caught up to Coo as I had lots of questions for her, much to my pleasure she was happy to chat and eager to share her life with me. We became fast friends.
She was only sixteen years old, but clearly wise beyond her years. She had gone to school up until high school as her family could no longer afford to send her and she could contribute more by supporting her family as a trekking guide. It was clear that her dreams lie in Hanoi where she could get a proper education and have some independence before she married at 25 rather than fourteen like many of her peers that by sixteen already had one or two children. She was rare in the villages surrounding Sapa with her hopes of delaying marriage and going to school, but the constant Western influence of trekking tourists surely swayed her opinions.
As told by Coo the traditional path to marriage in many of the small villages surrounding Sapa started with a “kidnapping” of the fourteen year old soon-to-be-wife to their future husbands home to meet his family and gain their approval. A dowry was arranged for the girl, which often included a combination of money, animals and textiles. The steps that followed were quick, starting with the new wife taking up residence in her husband’s family’s home and then quickly moving into child bearing and child rearing. Love may or may not ever be part of the equation at any step in the process. Her feelings on the subject were clear, fourteen was much too young to marry.
The more we talked the more complex it got; for those of her friends that didn’t have a traditional path to marriage they risked being kidnapped and sold just over the border into China. With China’s strict laws on having just one child, many people abandon girls in hopes of having a boy. This has created an abundance of boys with no prospects for marriage. Girls in Sapa may also be considered a burden or embarrassment to their families because they were not married off. All of this is slowly changing and Coo is an example of that, but she was still saddened when she spoke of friends that had disappeared, presumably to China.
All of this sixteen year old drama was interrupted frequently by her cell phone buzzing, which indicated another incoming text message. One from a Singaporean she had guided on a trek a few months ago and another from a local boy telling her he loved her and wanted to get married. All of this made me a little more suspicious of her dramatic love stories, she may be wise beyond her years, but she is still “sweet sixteen.” All of my conversatios with Coo led to one clear conclusion, village love is certainly much different from courtships and weddings at home.
This is the ninth of a series of conversations originally published on the Time site, authored by Nicha Ratana and myself, with transformational leaders who will be storytellers at the BIF10 Collaborative Innovation Summit in Providence, RI.
“Today, smaller and smaller teams are building bigger and bigger things, faster,” he explains. In today’s marketplace—which is streamlined by technology and defined by abundant choice— “corporate muscle mass” such as factories and storefronts have lost the clout they had 50 years prior.
“What customers really crave is a sense of humanity,” claims Taylor.
“Leaders of economically successful organizations are every bit as rigorous about the human side of their enterprises as they are about R&D and acquisitions,” he maintains. Taylor encourages us to recognize the influence of passion brands. “Apple, Google, HBO” he lists, all have dominated their industry sectors thanks to the might of a zealous group of consumers.
“Ultimately, your culture is what sustains your strategy.”
The aspect of technological revolution that currently fascinates Bill Taylor is the power of businesses that are facilitated by technology, but driven by a human touch.
As a primer, he shares three guidelines for companies looking to embrace this new culture of work:
Capitalize on what makes you unique.
Breakaway success requires a commitment to the unprecedented.
“If your customers can live without you, eventually they will,” warns Taylor. “You can’t just be the best at what you do—you have to be the only organization that does what you do.”
Taylor looks up to an early adopter of this principle: Southwest Airlines. “They were never a “low-cost” airline,” he argues, “they were a “big idea” airline.”
Taylor says, “Southwest’s purpose from day one was to ‘democratize the skies,’ to give rank-and-file families the freedom to fly. In the early 1970s when they began to operate, air travel was a luxury of business travelers and the well-to-do.”
Southwest was successful because “their strategy was completely at odds with the rest of the airline industry.”
Create meaning and camaraderie at every level of the organization.
Instead of giving their employees the chance to amass power to get rich, companies must instead help them unleash freedoms from within, allowing people in their ranks to give input about the goods and services they produce.
“People want their work to be consistent with what they care about as human beings,” Taylor says. “The best leaders unearth the passion, energy, and commitment of their people by enabling them to make a real difference to their customers and one another.”
He urges companies to examine themselves. He asks them, “What does it mean—in terms of the language, the daily rituals—to be a member of your organization?”
Taylor shares a revolutionary tip: “The real use of social media is not so that we can market our product to a broader audience, but to give our people the capacity to humanize our brand.”
Be kind—it’s more important than being clever.
We can’t thrive in a corporate world that sacrifices humanity for the sake of profit, Taylor maintains.
At a BIF Summit several years ago, Taylor shared a story of two automobile dealers his father encountered while shopping for a car.
The first dealer sold Cadillacs, a brand Taylor’s father had long been loyal to. Cadillac sent the man a $1,000 customer-loyalty discount in the mail, but because he wanted to buy a car 24 hours after the coupon expired, the dealer refused to honor it.
The second dealer sold Buicks. After a conversation with Taylor’s father, this dealer offered to honor the expired Cadillac discount. The same dealer let the man test-drive the car over a weekend, and, when an emergency surgery prohibited timely return of the vehicle, sent a lovely bouquet of flowers with a “hilarious note.”
“Which car do you think my father bought?” Taylor asks.
“Small gestures of kindness send big signals about who we are and why people should want to affiliate with us.” He adds, “It was the highest ROI on a bouquet of flowers in history.”
Bill Taylor says he “always looks forward” to the Collaborative Innovation Summit, hosted by the nonprofit Business Innovation Factory (BIF) in Providence, RI. Taylor has joined the lineup of radical business thinkers at BIF Summit more than once.
“I’m proud to say I crashed the first BIF Summit in 2004,” he says, “because I’ve been back every year since. It is one of the most exciting and authentic learning laboratories I’ve ever encountered.”
“Community is an overused word, but BIF truly is a community. We come together once a year, and learn from and support each other all the rest of the year.”
“I live for months off the energy that I get from the BIF Summit,” he professes. “It’s a poetry slam for innovators. What a refreshing break from standard operating procedure.”
The BIF Collaborative Innovation Summit combines 30 brilliant storytellers with more than 400 innovation junkies in a two-day storytelling jam, featuring tales of personal discovery and transformation that spark real connection and “random collisions of unusual suspects.”
It used to be that sporting glasses was reserved for nerds like Lewis and Gilbert above. There was a stigma attached to it, so the people who did wear them only did so because they absolutely had to, and/or because they didn’t really care that much about their appearance.
But over the course of the past decade, all that has changed. There are tons of options for stylish frames, and glasses are now used as a tool for expressing one’s personal style. Check out heartthrob Jon Hamm in a classic black frame below. The look is clean, confident and smart.
If you’re thinking about updating your look, glasses are a fantastically handy way to do so. Read on for my tips on choosing a pair of frames. And by the way, if you don’t need glasses, don’t feel left out. Plenty of people sport specs sans prescriptions.
SHAPE
1) Angular-shaped glasses read as authoritative, while glasses with rounded shapes make you look approachable.
2) There’s a lot of information out there about what shape faces should wear what shape glasses. To me, it’s less about rules and more about choice. If you wear the same shape glasses as that of your face, you’ll reinforce that face shape; if you wear the opposite shape, it will balance your face shape. So there’s no “bad” or “good” here. Rather, it’s what you choose to play up. As a specific example, if you have a round face and want to look tougher and more commanding, I recommend wearing glasses that are squared off. Luxottica CEO Andrea (above) is doing just that.
3) The sides of your glasses should end between the corners of your eyes and the sides of your face. (However, if you have a long and narrow face and want to balance that, look for shapes that extend slightly beyond your temples so as to create width in your face. Also, people with long and narrow faces should avoid very small frames.)
COLOR AND MATERIAL
4) A very dark frame can make a strong, dramatic statement (it’s also trendy). If this is what you’re going for, be careful that the dark frame doesn’t overwhelm your own coloring. Check out the guy on the left above — his own coloring and features stand up to the heavy frames. In comparison, the dark frames on the right dominate Brad Pitt’s facial features. On him, you see the frames first before you see his face.
5) Choose a color or type of metal that works with your own coloring. If your skin tone is warm, go with warm-colored frames; if it’s cool, go with cool-colored frames. Hint: if you have grey hair, a silver frame can play off of that nicely.
6) Metal frames have a more modern and dressy feel, and plastic reads more casual. Tortoise frames have a preppy and collegiate vibe.
7) Avoid transition lenses, as they often end up in an unflattering middle-ground of lens color — not quite dark enough to be sunglasses and distractingly shaded for when out of UV-light. They also don’t darken inside vehicles, so they don’t work as driving glasses.
Read the rest of… Julie Rath: Glasses — Not Just for Nerds Anymore
2) Wearing pants that are too big in the waist – If your belt loops are pulling up when you tighten your belt like in the picture above, it means the waist on your pants is too big, and you run the risk of having diaper butt. Go down a size and your pants and belt won’t work against each other.
