Tag Archives: Business

One Minute Read from the Take Control of Your Business

Business, Self-Gamification, , , , , ,

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Here is the tenth blog post in a series featuring videos on YouTube, where I read from one of my motivational books for one minute.

In this video, I read from my book Take Control of Your Business: Learn What Business Rules Are, Find Out That You Already Know and Use Them, Then Update Them Regularly to Maximize Your Business Success.

I am reading from the chapter titled “T – Terminating Your Product or Service, When and How to Do This.”

Here it is if you want to read along, prior, or afterward.

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Excerpt from the Take Control of Your Business

This business rules type is often forgotten or ignored. Not many want to think about terminating the existence of their product or service, hoping it will be there forever.
But it won’t. At least not in its very first shape or version. Besides, the updates might be so crucial that at some point you will have something entirely new and different than merely an upgraded product or service.

I can guarantee that sooner or later you will need to discard one (and most probably more) of your products or services or various parts of them.

What do you have to know then?

In this case, as before, the answer becomes clear as soon as you focus your attention on your customers’ interests.

When you do this, the following important question appears:

How will the termination of, or a significant change in, your product or service affect your customers?

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The next step

To take the next step in maximizing your business success, I invite you to read Take Control of Your Business. To look at the book and buy it on Amazon, click on its title above or this image below:

If you want to see where else you can buy it, then go to the book’s page on this website here.

Alternatively, you can subscribe to my page, Optimist Writer, on ko-fi for $5 a month, and besides supporting what I do, you will also get access to all my motivational books, which I share there once a month or each time a book is out. Right now, you can get access to four of my books there — one upon subscription or one-time support and three in the posts solely for subscribers. Take Control of Your Business will appear later this year or sooner upon explicit request from the subscribers.

I wish you a beautiful, productive, fun, creative, and gameful day!

There Is Always a Possibility as Long as You Want to Play

Self-Gamification, , , , , , ,
(Image courtesy of the author)

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Regardless if you own a business or make a part of it as its employee, I guess you care about its success. You are aware of its goals, and you are aware of the goals in your projects.

Defining goals often involves planning the path towards reaching them. However, the exact rules of your business “game” may never be known to you completely because they evolve together with you.

There are games where you don’t know about its goals and rules until you start playing them.

Here is one example:

“A game like Portal turns our definition of a game on its head, but doesn’t destroy it. The four core elements of goals, rules, feedback, and voluntary participation remain the same—they just play out in a different order. It used to be that we were spoon-fed the goal and the rules, and we would then seek feedback on our progress. But increasingly, the feedback systems are what we learn first. They guide us toward the goal and help us decode the rules. And that’s as powerful a motivation to play as any: discovering exactly what is possible in this brand-new virtual world.” — Jane McGonigal, Reality is Broken

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Businesses are like games

Running a business or managing a project is often such a game — you find the rules and some of its goals during play.

It can appear daunting, but there is one great fact about the goals and rules in a business or project game. You are not only the game’s player, but you are also its designer or at least co-designer. You can define your own goals, rules, and reporting (feedback) system or adjust those already in place so that the project or task at hand excites you to engage in it.

In some business areas and comprehensive programs and projects, the rules defining how to reach the business’s and projects’ goals got the following term: business rules.

I learned about business rules in a community implementing an international technical standard but discovered that I also had many business rules as an author and entrepreneur. This concept is handy in defining and maintaining the knowledge base of all decisions and choices I make along building my business and pursuing various projects.

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An idea

To help others understand and use the business rules concept, I came up with an anagram to define various types or categories of business rules for any business or project. I described this anagram and ten categories I defined in a book called Take Control of Your Business: Learn What Business Rules Are, Find Out That You Already Know and Use Them, Then Update Them Regularly to Maximize Your Business Success.

Click on the link with the book’s title above or on the image below to view and buy it on Amazon:

If you want to see where else you can buy it, then go to the book’s page on this website here.

Alternatively, you can subscribe to my page, Optimist Writer, on ko-fi for $5 a month, and besides supporting what I do, you will also get access to all my motivational books, which I share there once a month or each time a book is out. Right now, you can get access to four of my books there — one upon subscription or one-time support, and three in the posts solely for subscribers. Take Control of Your Business will appear later this year or upon explicit request from subscribers.

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Enjoy discovering and developing the rules of your business and project games! ?

How to Conquer the Information Overload Gamefully

Gameful Practice, Self-Gamification, , , ,
Image by the author

(An excerpt. Read the full article on Medium)

The challenge

In the internet interconnected world, the information becomes a much too easily accessible good.

There is even a well-known term for that — the information overload.

“Information overload (also known as infobesity, infoxication, information anxiety, and information explosion) is the difficulty in understanding an issue and effectively making decisions when one has too much information about that issue. Generally, the term is associated with the excessive quantity of daily information.” — Wikipedia

Today, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when most of the world is online for big chunks of the day (especially during the working hours), there is even more information every day. Those of us, who don’t work on the “front line” during the pandemic, can express our generosity mostly online nowadays. So there are valuable short and long bits of information in all possible digital formats. These come from official sources, press, entertainment industry, our families, friends, bosses, employees, colleagues, communities we joined, and social media we frequent. But there are also libraries giving free access to books, films, and more, museums, zoos, culture centers, and theaters offering online tours and performances, and so many more.

The workdays for all of us have become a fusion of our work and personal lives.

The oncoming information, especially the one about the COVID-19 situation, lockdowns, and reopening, affects both our work and personal lives, and it has never been more challenging to draw a line between them.

The main effect of that multidimensional information overload is a profound confusion and a feeling of being lost.

How can we handle all this overflow of the information, especially when we start a workday?

The gameful solution

A perspective change is often the best solution in confusing situations.

How can we view the information flow differently?

I discovered that the gameful approach to life provides effortless and joyful resourcefulness in all areas of our lives and most circumstances, including times of crisis.

While writing the Book 1 of the “Gameful Life” series, Gameful Project Management, I have discovered that what I was creating with my non-fiction books and articles on Self-Gamification, were not the ideas to replace the well-establisher others. Instead, I was creating “awareness boosters.”

Even the subtitle of the Gameful Project Management book has the phrase in it: Self-Gamification Based Awareness Booster for Your Project Management Success.

To find out what an awareness booster is and how information coming upon us can become such a booster, we need first to identify what awareness boosters are. Let’s start with awareness.

(Continue reading on Medium)