Be Nice To Be Hired

The richest CEO in private equity just wants to hire nice people

Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman may be aggressive when it comes to business, but, he says, he’s really a nice guy — and he likes his employees to be too.

“I don’t like people who are not nice,” he said at a leadership event on Tuesday, CNN Money reported.

And Schwarzman, who is the richest man in private equity, is quick to turn down candidates who lack the right personality traits — namely, niceness — when hiring for his star private-equity firm, Blackstone Group.

“They can be very, very smart, but they are the kind of person you wouldn’t want to spend time with or expose your people to,” he reportedly said.

That’s more important to him than, say, an MBA degree.

Schwarzman pointed to some of his executives who do not hold MBAs, such as Jon Gray, who runs the real-estate division.

“Jon’s got a gift. Obviously an MBA wouldn’t have improved it too much,” CNN Money quoted him as saying.

45 Valuable Life Lessons For People Of Any Age

Probably something comes up deep inside when you read some of the lessons; i.e.,

No matter how you feel, get up, dress up, and show up.

Your children get only one childhood. Make it memorable.

I should read this at least once a week and remind myself of them constantly. I will.

1. Life isn’t fair, but it’s still good.

2. When in doubt, just take the next small step.

3. Life is too short to waste time hating anyone.

4. Don’t take yourself so seriously. No one else does.

5. Pay off your credit cards every month.

6. You don’t have to win every argument. Agree to disagree.

7. Cry with someone. It’s more healing than crying alone.

8. Save for retirement, starting with your first paycheck.

9. When it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile.

10. Make peace with your past so it won’t screw up the present.

11. It’s OK to let your children see you cry.

12. Don’t compare your life to others’. You have no idea what their journey is all about.

13. If a relationship has to be a secret, you shouldn’t be in it.

14. Life is too short for long pity parties. Get busy living, or get busy dying.

15. You can get through anything if you stay put in today.

16. A writer writes. If you want to be a writer, write.

17. It’s never too late to have a happy childhood. But the second one is up to you and no one else.

18. When it comes to going after what you love in life, don’t take no for an answer.

19. Burn the candles; use the nice sheets; wear the fancy lingerie. Don’t save it for a special occasion. Today is special.

20. Over prepare, then go with the flow.

21. Be eccentric now. Don’t wait for old age to wear purple.

22. The most important sex organ is the brain.

23. No one is in charge of your happiness except you.

24. Frame every so-called disaster with these words: “In five years, will this matter?”

25. Forgive everyone everything.

26. What other people think of you is none of your business.

27. Time heals almost everything. Give time time.

28. However good or bad a situation is, it will change.

29. Your job won’t take care of you when you are sick. Your friends will. Stay in touch.

30. Believe in miracles.

31. Whatever doesn’t kill you really does make you stronger.

32. Growing old beats the alternative — dying young.

33. Your children get only one childhood. Make it memorable.

34. Get outside every day. Miracles are waiting everywhere.

35. If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone else’s, we’d grab ours back.

36. Don’t audit life. Show up and make the most of it now.

37. Get rid of anything that isn’t useful, beautiful or joyful.

38. All that truly matters in the end is that you loved.

39. Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you need.

40. The best is yet to come.

41. No matter how you feel, get up, dress up, and show up.

42. Take a deep breath. It calms the mind.

43. If you don’t ask, you don’t get.

44. Yield.

45. Life isn’t tied with a bow, but it’s still a gift.

Supersurvivors: The Surprising Link Between Suffering and Success

David B. Feldman and Lee Daniel Kravetz combine the latest research on post traumatic growth with stories of people overcoming trauma to achieve great success, such as a blind man who rowed across the Atlantic and a woman who survived the Rwandan genocide and became a President Obama appointee.

Read more:

Standing at Work: To Live a Healthier and Longer Life

Why Using A Standing Desk At Work Could Save Your Life

Three centuries after Thomas Jefferson found standing up a superior way to work, a growing number of Americans are mulling the dangers of sitting down on the job — and opting to get on their feet.

Backaches. Muscular degeneration. Heart disease. Diabetes. Colon cancer. Even premature death is on the list of the potential consequences of a sedentary working life, according to a raft of studies on the topic.

“We’re sitting ourselves to an early death,” said Rob Danoff, a family physician in Pennsylvania and member of the American Osteopathic Association with a special interest in preventative medicine.

“We are a ‘potato’ society,” he told AFP in a telephone interview.

“We sit most of the day, so we are work potatoes — and then we go home and we are couch potatoes. That combination can be deadly.”

Samsung Is About To Mess With The Winning Formula That Made It Dominant

One of the oldest criticisms of Samsung used to be that it’ll try anything and everything at least once to see what resonates with consumers. So far, that strategy worked best for Samsung with Android. It now sells more smartphones than any other company and it’s the only one making profits in mobile besides Apple. Samsung finally found the one place where it leads everyone else: Android…

From Business Insider

Why Facebook Causes a Decrease in Mood

Another reason why Facebook stock is overvalued and could be a short. If the social media doesn’t help people become happier, it means users wouldn’t stay there. The stock was closed at $58.19 on Tuesday. Facebook management also seems to think so and why they have been making acquisitions at such aggressive valuations.

The article from Business Insider citing the research below:

In a recently published study, psychologists Christina Sagioglou and Tobias Greitemeyer of the University of Innsbruck report people “expect to feel better after using Facebook, whereas in fact, they feel worse.”

Their evidence suggests it’s not Internet browsing in general, but specifically social media use that brings people down. It also points to a likely reason: The nagging feeling that you’ve been wasting time.

“Our findings suggest that-on a daily basis-hundreds of millions of people engage in an activity that they consider (not very) meaningful,” they write In the journal Computers in Human Behavior, “which in turn dampens their mood.”

Of course, it’s possible that social media usage may have long-term positive effects that counteract the short-term downward mood documented here. And of course different people use social media in different ways; If you’re on Facebook promoting a cause, that’s quite different from idly noting what your friends are up to.

But given the strong connection between our well-being and the pursuit of meaningful activities, it’s hard to see how any medium that we largely equate with time-wasting could be a net positive. Perhaps Facebook isn’t really our friend after all.

The Most Beautiful English Words

What’s The Most Beautiful Word In The English Language?, Business Insider

What’s the most beautiful word in the English language? Different people, using various criteria, will give a slew of answers.

Surveying more than 7,000 English speakers in 46 countries, the British Council decided on “mother” — an unglamorous word, yet one that conveys comfort and the deepness of human relationships. Others on their list include concepts, like “liberty” and “tranquility,” or expressions, as in “smile.”

But then we have phonoasthetics to consider. Ignoring public opinion, phonoasthetics combines the study of sound and phonology to determine the most pleasing words apart from their meaning. Author J.R.R. Tolkien famously (although not first) claimed “cellar door” wins that title. The cult classic “Donnie Darko” even gave his theory a shout-out.

Close your eyes (which might help block semantic function) and say it — slowly. Cellar door. Somehow, kind of lovely, right? “I was astonished when someone first showed that by writing ‘cellar door’ as Selladore, one produces an enchanting proper name,” C. S. Lewis wrote in 1963.

Robert Beard, a former linguistics professor at Bucknell University, also created his own list of beautiful words. Through careful research, he determined 100 English words that people seem to like most though may not use frequently. Some eccentric yet notable words include ailurophile, inglenook, and Susquehanna.

While you might consider these words beautiful without knowing what they mean, linguist David Crystal says it’s impossible to separate sounds entirely from their meaning. Words with positive connotations, like birds and flowers, naturally make us happy, while darker words, like “peril,” instill less positive feelings.

But even Crystal can’t deny some patterns appear based just on sound; humans simply find some sounds more pleasing than others. By analyzing the consonant and vowel sounds that appear in language the most and least frequently, Crystal created certain criteria that compose the most beautiful words.

DavidCrystal.comFor example, the word “tremulous” fits every category. The word contains more than three syllables, with the stress on the first. It uses “m” and “l” — letters we seem to enjoy pronouncing. It uses other consonants that appear in English with high frequency but eliminates those with low frequency. It also uses only short vowels, articulated in a mid or low position, in the front of the mouth.

The chart also gives examples of other nice words.

Despite these trends, personal preferences also play into whether “mother” sounds more beautiful than “cellar door,” “inglenook,” and “tremulous.”

Personally, I like “hullabaloo.”

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, What’s ahead for her?

Mayer is one of the ultimate superstars (or a supermanager in Thomas Piketty’s word) in the modern world: rich, influential, smart, charming, tough, young and a nerd. Though she has not founded any company. Sherly Sandberg might be comparable as a woman in business, but she doesn’t hold as strong tech background and is not a CEO yet although Facebook’s market cap is larger. It will be interesting to see what would be ahead for her in 40s, 50s and 60s+: will become CEO of a larger company or make Yahoo! much more significantly relevant in the tech industry or pursue non-business career or her career already peaked. Good luck to her. Hope she can do something meaningfully good for the world. Whatever happens to her in the future, she has been living an incredibly glamorous life so far.

Today News on Mayer’s Life

Yahoo’s Geek Goddess

As one of Google’s highest-ranking women, Marissa Mayer became a Silicon Valley superstar, but inside the search giant her dazzle sometimes wore thin, with colleagues rebelling against her imperious style. In the wake of Mayer’s jump to run the struggling Yahoo, Bethany McLean asks whether she will be its savior or its next big problem. A year and a half in, the results are mixed.

By now the headline-getting series of events has become business lore. In the fall of 2011, New York moneyman Daniel Loeb, who runs the $14 billion hedge fund Third Point Capital, staged a raid on Yahoo, the well-known but struggling Silicon Valley company. After a brutal fight to depose the company’s C.E.O., he helped raid Google for one of its longest-serving and most famous executives, Marissa Mayer, then often called “the face of Google” or “Google’s glamour geek.” Last summer, on the same day that Yahoo announced that Mayer would be its new C.E.O.—becoming the youngest woman, at 37, to lead a Fortune 500 company—Mayer announced she was pregnant, thereby completing her journey from nerdy small-town Wisconsin girl to Stanford-educated engineer to business superstar to cultural idol.

An Unauthorised Biography

Marissa Mayer and Cupcakes

Marissa Mayer in Vogue

Marissa Mayer and Dan Loeb

Entrepreneur Story, Niman Ranch, Beef, Antibiotic, BN Ranch

Why is so difficult to find healthy and inexpensive meats? The Bill Niman story tells some.

Why The Godfather Of Natural Beef Cut Ties With Niman Ranch

Bill Niman spent more than three decades building Niman Ranch into one of the most beloved natural meat suppliers in the nation from just 200 acres of land and six calves. Dozens of high-end chefs, including Jean-Georges and Alfred Portale, as well as the popular burrito chain Chipotle, post the Niman Ranch name on their menus like a badge of honor. But today, Niman has nothing to do with his namesake company. He severed ties in 2007 and began raising cattle and heritage turkeys on a new farm, called BN Ranch.

Niman started BN Ranch in Marin County, Calif., with his wife, Nicolette, to return to his passion of ranching and to prove that raising grass-fed, antibiotic- and hormone-free beef can be a sustainable business model.

“We’re at a point with the cattle business where we were in the early ’80s where we raised the animals without antibiotics and hormones and at that time, the industry laughed at the stuff we were talking about and doing,” he said. “Those things, fortunately, have now become mainstream.” BN Ranch cattle spend their entire lives grazing in open pastures.

Bill Niman’s next move

I point out that Niman Ranch was profitable on the pork side, while the beef business had consistently lost money — mainly because Niman had insisted on buying cattle from his rancher network when they were ready for the feedlot. He had also insisted on owning the feedlot in which the cattle would be fattened up prior to slaughter. In contrast, Niman Ranch did not purchase pigs until they were slaughtered and then bought only as many as it could sell. On the pork side, the company avoided having capital tied up in inventory for long periods of time. But on the beef side, it had cows, barns, real estate, and feed, not to mention exposure to the risks posed by inevitable fluctuations in the prices of all four. Hurlbut and McConnell had argued that Niman Ranch could become profitable just by applying the pork business model to beef. Indeed, that’s essentially what Swain has done. Looking back, did Niman wish he had relented and let Hurlbut have his way?

“That’s a really tough question,” he says. He pauses. “Considering how much the values and ethos of the brand have changed, yeah, I think that would have been a better outcome. Rob would have done a better job of maintaining the values. Would I have been able to stay with it? I don’t know.”

Why not? “Well, remember I got into this because I had a ranch and needed to sell my livestock profitably. I really didn’t want to be in the meat business. As advantageous as it might seem on a spreadsheet to divest all the agricultural parts of the enterprise, that was not appealing to me. I also thought that our standing in the marketplace came from our involvement as ranchers. I wanted Niman Ranch to be the gold standard.”

He pauses again, and his mind wanders. “Yes,” he says at length, “if I had it to do all over, I wouldn’t have given up control, that’s for sure. How did it happen? Little by little, led on by delusions of grandeur and a big payday.” For a moment, he seems lost in thoughts of what might have been.