Yu-kai Chou

One-Two Punch and the Uppercut: The Art of Cold-Emailing

Cold-Emailing is frustrating Have you ever had the frustrating experience where you emailed someone you didn’t know very well, and never got a response? Feels pretty bad right? No one really likes cold-emailing, but in order to strive for more opportunities that wouldn’t regularly show up at your door (customers, mentors, advisors, investors, etc etc), you are [...]

The Lazy Man’s Way to Become Successful: Start Early

There’s always going to be people smarter than you and people dumber than you Everyone wants to be successful in life. However, not everyone has what it takes to get there. Life is competitive, and to constantly keep up and excel over your peers is a tough and struggling battle. Sure, some people believe that they can [...]

How to be known by Influential People using Twitter Lists

Influential people are generally too busy with their emails, meetings, tweets etc There are always benefits when more influential people know about you and think positively of you. If they like you, they are able to give you shootouts, advice, connections, and all that good stuff. However, it’s often very difficult to get their attention since [...]

Don’t be afraid to Ask

It is more blessed to give than to receive Before I start to write about this topic, I’m going to assume that you are a good natured, helpful, and considerate person who is not trying to suck out the life blood out of everyone around him. If you think my assumption is incorrect, go back to [...]

Having a Strong Core is your most Valuable Asset

Your Core is your driver It all starts here. Your Core. Without your core, you are easily swayed by others, you become a product of conformity, and you cannot be a leader. Your Core is what stops you from being an NPC (Non-playable character) and allows you to become the Hero. Have you ever talked to someone [...]

How to become Influential within your Circle

Become powerful within your existing friends There are many people who are not interested in becoming powerful and impactful in the world, but almost everyone wants to be influential and respected among their friends and peers. However, the majority of the people do not become that, mostly because they are so comfortable with their existing social statuses [...]

FD Power Coaching: helping you master the Game of Life

Power Coaching: Life Coaching for highly motivated and ambitious individuals For 2010, I am starting a series on Power Coaching. That’s basically teaching people how to become powerful in whatever fields they are in and things they care about. It is similar to the common Life Coaching, but more geared towards ambitious individuals who does not [...]

Yu-kai Chou of 2010

Today is the first day of a new decade. Yes, some argue that 2011 should be the beginning of the new decade, but I don’t care. At least my bank uses the format 1990-1999 and 2000-2009 to determine one period. Perhaps if I failed on my goals this year, next year I will say “NOW is [...]

The Free Customized Magic Mirror that Everyone Has

We have huge blindspots Most of us want to become better at what we do or become a better person in general. The problem is that we have too many blindspots for ourselves to really find out what we really need to work on. When something goes wrong, we can think of a hundred external factors [...]

A leadership lesson I learned from basketball

You cannot lead effectively if you worry about yourself This week I was playing a game of full-court basketball with my father. Unlike my Co-founder Jun Loayza, I am not good at basketball because I never really trained in the basics of dribbling, manuevering, and strategies. As a result, everytime I am point guard, I don’t [...]

How to actually save the economy with a $787 Billion Stimulus Package

Here's another article that I personally think is pretty insightful, but long and boring so no one will actually read (and of course it could be obvious or foolish instead). I'll do my best to keep it short and digest-friendly though. I do feel this topic is VERY important since the economy is going to be entirely restructured in the next two years, and how it is done is extremely important. To start, the US government is said to be $65.5 Trillion in debt. For perspective, this is more than the world GDP for one entire year and four times the US GDP for one year. In other words, the US Government literally owes the world to other nations. Right now the federal government is behaving like its US citizens who borrow from tomorrow to solve today's problems. The US borrows money from other countries to help the irresponsible people and companies clean up the mess they made and hope to "one day" be able to pay it back. As you know, when the people couldn't pay back their debts, they go bankrupt, and the banks die along with them. If the US keeps getting more debt without promise of making MORE money back, it will end up bankrupted too. The other countries will then end up like failed banks and die too. Now I'm not a doomsday person, and I like to stick to positive and actionable steps, but I do want to emphasize that in this environment EVERY dollar must be spent to its maximum efficiency. I guess we could call it Stimulus Optimization.

What the government should do

I'm going to give you what I believe is the best strategy for Stimulus Optimization, and then layout the logic that got me to this point. 1. Money should stay circulated in old lower income males, small businesses (but not large corporations), social enterprises and non-profits. 2. Money should be put into industry-creating technologies, but not just for technology development but also the commercialization of the technology. The government should support tons of startup people but pay them just enough for them to survive. 3. Money should be put into essentials of society like Education, Healthcare and Tech Infrastructure. Some of this may seem unintuitive, or possibly biased/humanitarian, but I do believe that this is most economically efficient. Let me explain why.

Why Miles Dyson from Terminator 2 is my Role Model

Myles Bennett Dyson is my Hero Most of the time, a person’s role model or hero from a movie is the main character, his/her master, or the loyal supporting character (and sometimes the Villain). For those of you who have seen Terminator 2 (If you haven’t, I strongly urge you to stop reading this blog and go [...]

Outsourcing to India creates the Illusion of Saving Money

Outsourcing Web Development to India creates the Illusion of Saving Money A lot of people talk about saving money by outsourcing to India. However, my personal experience is that it actually costs way more than doing it in the US if you are a resourceful entrepreneur. I’m sure there are some firms out there that are truly [...]

5 Dominant Techniques in Social Media Marketing

5 Dominant Techniques to Social Media Marketing After helping a variety of companies with their social media marketing campaigns in the past 2 years, I noticed that social media marketing narrows down to a few dominant techniques that work well and produce results. However, a big problem in the industry is that most people just think about [...]

TrueTwit defeats its own purpose by helping spammers

TrueTwit helps you figure out who are the spammers and who are the real people Lately I’ve come across this Twitter App service called TrueTwit. This is a service that is meant to identify who are the real people who are following you, and who are the spammers. It works pretty simple: 1. Someone follows you 2. TrueTwit sends [...]

Yu-kai Chou’s Presentation: Building Your Brand with Your Company Blog

View more presentations from Yu-kai Chou. Yu-kai Chou’s Presentation: Building Your Brand with Your Company Blog Here are the slides for my presentation on Building Your Brand with Your Company Blog Hummingbird604 made some excellent live notes on his blog. Definitely check it out!

Out of the Country. Not out of the Game. Thanks to the Virtual Office

As some of you guys know, due to family reasons and a bit more, I have temporarily left the US and am now operating from the lovely Vancouver in Canada. Leaving the Golden State was tough, and the team wondered if I could still be running the company from here. But afterall, our team was virtual [...]

A New Metrics Era: Social Media and Qualitative Traffic

The 3 Qualitative Metrics of Traffic A lot of websites out there just measure traffic. Traffic is a quantitative number that is easy to measure and helps you see important trends and how successful campaigns are. However, especially for sites that need some kind of conversion like signing up or buying a product, undifferentiated traffic can [...]

Business as usual. Death as usual.

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For Huffington Post readers who don’t know what’s the point of Twitter

OK, so first of all, I did not mean to publicly correct this Huffington Post writer on my blog. I was just reading his new blogpost called Microblogging with Shitter – I mean Twitter. I felt that he totally didn’t get the true value of Twitter, so I decided to make a long comment on [...]