6 Habits of Truly Memorable People

How to stick out in the minds of your colleagues and customers--no gimmicks required.

In order to succeed, almost everyone—whether business owner or employee—must be memorable.
While you don't have to be The Most Interesting Man in the World, being known is one of the main goals of marketing, advertising, and personal branding.
Out of sight is out of mind, and out of mind is out of business.
But if your only goal is to be known for professional reasons, you're missing out. People who are memorable for the right reasons also live a richer, fuller, and more satisfying life. Win-win!
So forget the flashy business cards and personal value propositions and idiosyncratic clothing choices.
Here's how to be more memorable—and have a lot more fun.

1. Don't see. Do.

Can you speak intelligently about how clothing provides a window into the inner lives of Mad Men characters? Do you find yourself arguing about how the degree of depth lost in the Game of Thrones TV series as compared to the books?
Anyone can share opinions about movies or TV or even (I'll grudgingly admit) books. That's why opinions are quickly forgotten. What you say isn't interesting; what you do is interesting.
Spend your life doing instead of watching. Cool things will happen. Cool things are a lot more interesting and a lot more memorable.
That's especially true when you...

2. Do something unusual.

Draw a circle and put all your "stuff" in it. Your circle will look a lot like everyone else's: Everyone works, everyone has a family, everyone has homes and cars and clothes....
We like to think we're unique, but roughly speaking we're all the same, and similar isn't memorable.
So occasionally do something different. Backpack to the next town just to see how many people stop to offer you a ride. (Don't take them up on it, though. Unless you appear to be in distress, the people who want to give you a ride are the last people you want to ride with.) Try to hike/scramble to the top of a nearby mountain no one climbs. (Trust me; take water.) Compete with your daughter to see who can swim the most laps in three hours. (If you live in my house you'll lose. Badly.)
Or work from a coffee shop one day just to see what you learn about other people... and about yourself.
Whatever you do, the less productive and sensible it is, the better. Your goal isn't to accomplish something worthwhile; the goal is to collect experiences.
Experiences, especially unusual experiences, make your life a lot richer and way more interesting. You can even...

3. Embark on a worthless mission.

You're incredibly focused, consistently on point, and relentlessly efficient.
You're also really, really boring.
Remember when you were young and followed stupid ideas to their illogical conclusions? Road trips, failing the cinnamon challenge, trying to eat six saltine crackers in one minute without water... you dined out on those stories for years.
Going on "missions," however pointless and inconvenient, was fun. In fact the more pointless the more fun you had, because missions are about the ride, not the destination.
So do something, just once, that adults no longer do. Drive eight hours to see a band. Buy your seafood at the dock. Or do something no one else thinks of doing. Ride along with a policeman on a Friday night (it's the king of all eye-opening experiences.)
Pick something it doesn't make sense to do a certain way and do it that way. You'll remember it forever—and so will other people.

4. Embrace a cause.

People care about—and remember—people who care. When you stand for something you stand apart.
But...

5. Let other people spread the word.

People who brag are not remembered for what they've done; they're remembered for the fact they brag.
Do good things and other people will find out. The less you say, the more people remember.

6. Get over yourself.

Most of the time your professional life is like a hamster wheel of resume or C.V. padding: You avoid all possibility of failure while maximizing the odds of success in order to ensure your achievement graph climbs up and up and up.
Inevitably, that approach starts to extend to your personal life too.
So you run... but you won't enter a race because you don't want to finish at the back of the pack. You sing... but you won't share a mic in a friend's band because you're no Adele. You'll sponsor the employee softball team but you won't play because you're not very good.
Personally and professionally, you feel compelled to maintain your all-knowing, all-achieving, all conquering image.
And you're not a person. You're a resume.
Stop trying to seem perfect. Accept your faults. Make mistakes. Hang yourself out there. Try and fail.
Then be gracious when you fail.
When you do, people will definitely remember you because people who are willing to fail are rare... and because people who display grace and humility, especially in the face of defeat, are incredibly rare.

Read more:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/94318201

Jeff Haden learned much of what he knows about business and technology as he worked his way up in the manufacturing industry. Everything else he picks up from ghostwriting books for some of the smartest leaders he knows in business. @jeff_haden

The 140-Character Fatwa

Enormously popular, extremist Saudi clerics are promoting hatred, violence, and intolerance on Facebook and Twitter. Can they be stopped?

BY JONATHAN SCHANZER, STEVEN L. MILLER | MAY 9, 2012

Despite assurances from the Saudi government that it is cracking down on religious radicalism, the kingdom's top clerics continue calling for attacks on Christians across the Arab world. And in the Internet age, these voices of hate have been handed a larger megaphone than ever before.
You don't have to look hard to find examples of religious intolerance emanating from the very top of the Saudi religious hierarchy. On a visit to Kuwait in March, Saudi Arabia's grand mufti, Abdulaziz al-Sheikh, told the Revival of Islamic Heritage Society -- which has been designated as a "specially designated global terrorist" entity by the United States and the United Nations for arming and financing al Qaeda -- that it is "necessary to destroy all the churches in the Arabian Peninsula." And there's more where that came from. The mufti also believes that proponents of women's rights are "advocates of evil and misguidance."
These sentiments are particularly troubling as Saudi clerics flock to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and mobile apps to amplify their messages. Despite Saudi religious figures' historical opposition to modern technologies, they now see online social media as a crucial means of communicating with the Saudi public and the Muslim world. The top three Saudi clerics on Twitter -- Salman al-Odah, Mohamad al-Arefe, and Aidh al-Qarnee -- all have well over 1 million followers.
To put this in perspective, Arefe's 1.5 million Twitter followers rival the number who follow football phenom Tim Tebow. Tebow's religious messaging may be controversial, but Arefe has him beat. In a July 2010 sermon, Arefe declared, "The desire to shed blood, to smash skulls, and to sever limbs for the sake of Allah and in defense of his religion, is, undoubtedly, an honor for the believer."
Qarnee spews similar invective. Shortly after Israel and Hamas completed the prisoner swap for Israel Defense Forces soldier Gilad Shalit in October 2011, Qarnee rushed to the defense of a fellow Saudi cleric who offered $100,000 to any Palestinian who could capture another Israeli soldier. Qarnee lauded "all who struggle with their tongue, their money, their blood, or their knowledge [against] the Zionist entity."
This is just a taste of the messaging we sampled in our six-month study, conducted from Jan. 1 to June 30, 2011, to learn what these clerics are saying online and how they spread their messages.
With the help of ConStrat, a Washington-based technology company, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies collected and analyzed more than 40,000 social media entries in both English and Arabic. ConStrat's researchers combed through the online data, which included content Saudi clerics posted personally, as well as content referencing the Saudi clerical establishment. ConStrat then assigned a sentiment to each post and flagged them by topic to help us better digest the large amount of data.
Alarmingly, of the thousands of messages ConStrat scored, 75 percent could be described as xenophobic, bigoted, or openly hateful. Some Saudi clerics like Abdul Rahman al-Sudais, head imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, still describe Jews as "sons of monkeys and pigs." Saleh al-Fawzan of the Council of Senior Ulema (CSU) ruled that fathers may arrange marriages for their daughters "even if they are in the cradle." And the Permanent Committee for Research and Ifta, one of the kingdom's highest religious bodies, suggested in December 2011 that repealing the Saudi ban on female driving could "provoke a surge in prostitution, pornography, homosexuality, and divorce," predicting that in 10 years, there would be "no more virgins."
Calls for violence accounted for only a small percentage of our total content -- less than 5 percent -- though such messages are still getting out. This appears to be the direct result of the Saudi crackdown on "deviant" ideologies after the 9/11 attacks. Since then, clerics have adapted and found ways to promote intolerance without running afoul of Riyadh. But not every cleric understands the state's red lines, and some have paid the price for crossing them. In September 2008, Saleh al-Luhaidan, another CSU cleric, declared it "morally permissible" to kill the owners of satellite television channels that promoted "moral depravity." To the monarchy, the statement was beyond the pale, and King Abdullah fired Luhaidan from his position as chief judge of the Saudi Supreme Judicial Council.
To put it mildly, Saudi Arabia has never been known for freedom of speech and assembly. But now the kingdom faces an even tougher challenge -- balancing greater freedom of expression with the need to counter extremist and hateful language. As social networks have enabled clerics to disseminate their radical Wahhabi sentiments more widely, the monarchy is now trying to temper the views it once promoted.
The Saudis endured three major confrontations with religious figures in the 20th century alone. In the 1920s, Islamist marauders rebelled against the state, leading to a 10-month battle for control of the Saudi state. In 1979, a violent group of Salafi separatists seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca. And in the early 1990s, the Sahwa (Awakening) clerics denounced the U.S. military presence in the Gulf and demanded a more Islamic government. Indeed, this was a message that Osama bin Laden leveraged to build support for his nascent al Qaeda network.
In all those situations, Riyadh successfully quelled dissent by co-opting its challengers or crushing them through harsher measures. In co-opting the radicals, the regime embraced their dangerous worldview, but carefully channeled it elsewhere, "exporting" radicalism abroad. This approach worked, but only to a point. Indeed, extremists re-emerged within the kingdom in each instance to challenge the regime again.
Saudi Arabia, like the rest of the Arab world, confronts a new, rapidly changing political environment. For decades, the Saudi state has attempted to cater to radical elements of the religious establishment while also placating Washington's demands for moderation and reform. This balancing act is now more difficult than ever, however, due to the clerics' use of social media and growing demands for change.
For Washington, the challenge is to ensure that the Saudis keep social media free from draconian censorship while simultaneously ensuring that the radicals who employ it cannot threaten international security. But with radical clerics gaining Twitter and Facebook followers at eye-popping rates, it won't be easy.

4 Ways to Build Your Social Capital by Ivan Misner

4 Ways to Build Your Social Capital

Get outside the cave, and into a network.

By Dr. Ivan Misner

comment email print article rss feed share on More »

Social capital works for everybody, not just people who purposely set out to become networkers.

A colleague of mine works in a profession—writing and editing—which entails minimal day-to-day interaction with others. He handles a limited number of projects, usually no more than two or three books at a time, and works long hours and days in isolation; he occasionally surfaces to communicate with an author or publisher about details. You might say he works in a cave with only a few air holes.

How does a cave dweller build social capital?

One day, this particular editor, feeling his isolation, crawled out of his cave to look for company. He joined a small band of writers and formed a professional writers’ organization. Energized, he joined their efforts to build the organization, attract new members, publish a newsletter, schedule presentations and speakers, arrange conferences with editors and agents, and even throw a few parties to lure other writers out of their caves, too.

All of this work was done by volunteers who were excited to build a service organization that would help writers network with one another and achieve success.

The organization grew and became the largest writers’ networking organization in the nation. While this was happening, my friend the editor made several new friends among the organization’s founding members. One of them told him of a job opening that turned into a 12-year position; this gave him steady income to support his family.

Another friend, a low-volume publisher of high-quality books, gave him several editing projects and, after his salaried job ended, gave him a full schedule of freelance work.

Many of the authors this publisher referred to the editor returned repeatedly with more projects. I was one of these authors, and have since worked on over a dozen books with the cave-dwelling editor.

Although the editor didn’t know it when he began this low-key form of networking, he was building social capital when he thought he was only having fun. Over the years, this social capital began flowing back to him in many different forms, with no direct connection to the benefits he had helped provide to other writers.

Relationships Are Currency

How many times have you seen an entrepreneur (maybe even yourself) go to a networking event, meet a bunch of people, then leave and never talk to them again?

Too often, right?

And it’s not because he doesn’t like them or ever want to see them again, but because he’s a busy—busy—person with so much going on that he can’t even remember what he had for breakfast, let alone reconnect with individuals he just met.

It’s a shame, because such new contacts are where future business is born. Don’t be misled; it’s not the number of contacts you make that’s important—it’s the ones you turn into lasting relationships. There’s quite a difference. Try making ten cold calls and introducing yourself. How well did that go?

Now call five people you already know and tell them you’re putting together a marketing plan for the coming year and you would appreciate any help they could provide, in the form of either a referral or new business.

Better results behind Door #2, right? Of course. You already had a relationship with these folks, and depending on how deep it was, most of them would be glad to help you.

So here’s the question: How can you deepen the relationships with people you already know to the point where they might be willing to help you out in the future? Here are four quick steps to get you moving in the right direction.

1. Give your clients a personal call. Find out how things went with the project you were involved in. Ask if there’s anything else you can do to help. Important: Do not ask for a referral at this point.


2. Make personal calls to all the people who have helped you or referred business to you. Ask them how things are going. Try to learn more about their current activities so you can refer business to them.


3. Put together a hit list of 50 people you’d like to stay in touch with this year. Include anyone who has given you business in the last 12 months (from steps 1 and 2) as well as any other prospects you’ve connected with recently. Send them cards on the next holiday.


4. Two weeks after you’ve sent them cards, call them and see what’s going on. If they’re past clients or people you’ve talked to before, now is the perfect time to ask for a referral. If they’re prospects, perhaps you can set up an appointment to have coffee and find out if their plans might include using your services.

See how easy that was? After a few weeks, you’ll have more than enough social capital to tap into the rest of the year.

Social capital is the international currency of networking, especially business networking. If you take as much care in raising and investing your social capital as you do your financial capital, you’ll find that the benefits that flow from these intangible investments not only will be rewarding in themselves but will multiply your material returns many times over.

Called the "father of modern networking" by CNN, Dr. Ivan Misner is a New York Times bestselling author.  He is the Founder and Chairman of BNI, the world's largest business networking organization.  For more writing by Dr. Misner, visit his blog at www.BusinessNetworking.com.

Tags: June 2011 Edition, networking, social capital