To get a reply to an email you sent, the key is to make the email rather short and slightly positive or negative. The Atlantic's Adrienne LaFrance has gone through the analysis done by email-efficiency service Boomerang on what makes the perfect email.
Boomerang found that emails that were slightly positive or slightly negative were most likely to get responses. Asking a couple of questions is good, but more than three starts working against you. "Flattery works, but excessive flattery doesn't," they wrote in a blog post about the findings. "We also don’t advise penning day-ruining screeds."
[…]
So, you know, play it cool. But not too cool. Also, no need to write long. The optimum length for an email is 50 to 125 words.
Jeff Bridges is, quite simply, far out. One of Hollywood's most esteemed and sought-after actors, the 65-year-old regularly practices Transcendental Meditation, travels with the country-folk band the Abiders, and is best known for his beloved role as a pot-smoking, robe-wearing neo-hippie nicknamed The Dude in The Big Lebowski. But even the boundary-pushing absurdity of his latest project could only make him laugh. "What can I even compare it to?" Bridges says, chuckling in his measured drawl when Details asks him to describe Sleeping Tapes, an album hosted on the website Squarespace, on which Bridges meditates, speaks quirky spoken passages, and chants; it's principally designed to help listeners get a good night's rest. For Bridges, the best part is that all profits from the album go to No Kid Hungry, a charity of which he's long been an outspoken champion. He's old enough to be a grandfather, but when speaking on the phone, Bridges remains imbued with a childlike enthusiasm. Creativity remains a vital and "wonderful thing," Bridges says while discussing his unexpected new album, fulfilling his teenage dream, and why mortality has recently started to cross his mind.
If someone send insults your way, just answer back with the same calm confindence like the "Kazoo Kid" did in this footage taken from the VHS tape "Special Friends: Starring You On Kazoo" (YouTube) from '89, by asking the question "Wait a minute…who are you?". This makes me smile everytime!
Director Brandon Loper's documentary "A Film About Coffee" (2014) captures the coffee bean's (seed) journey from seed to cup.
A Film About Coffee follows the production of coffee from farms in Honduras and harvests in Rwanda to its global consumption. Listening to farmers, buyers, roasters and baristas about the crop's economic and environmental implications both locally and abroad, the narrative travels to coffee shops in Tokyo, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco and New York, with stops in between. Dropping in on artisanal cafes to investigate how each prepares its own unique cup, the film opens a window into the little-understood world of specialty coffee.
If I experience many new things during a short period of time, let's say a week or a weekend, it sometimes feel like it happened months ago when I reflect on the experience shortly after.
Last summer, this phenomenon yet occured when me and my wife whent on a short trip outside town, and coming back it felt like days had passed when in fact we had just been away for something like 5–7 hours.
So, a popular saying says that time goes fast when having fun. For me, the combination of fun and experience new things tend to slow things down. This summer trip got me curious, and a search led me to an article on The Huffington Post called "This Simple Mental Trick Can Slow Down Time" that explained why I had felt the way I felt.
Most of us know the feeling well: As we grow up and fill our days with more busyness, time seems to fly by faster and faster. Of course, we know that time is moving at the same rate as it did during childhood, when lazy summer days seemed to stretch on infinitely. But what's changed is our perception of time. According to neuroscientific research recently highlighted by Inc. Magazine, how the brain perceives time passing determines whether our days feel luxuriously long, or short and harried -- and it's something that we have a certain level of control over. By paying attention and actively noticing new things, we can slow time down.
And in this clip, "The Speed of Life" presented by Derek Muller from the YouTube channel Veritasium, an experiment with repetitive images (at the 3:45 minute mark) supports the theory mentioned above:
Death Wish Coffee won the competition for small business owners who wanted to advertise during this year's Super Bowl. Forbes' Susan Adams, met up with founder and owner Mike Brown to talk with him about how he came to join this business in the first place, the comapany's growth, lessons learned along the way and how's business after the Super Bowl.
Adams: Before the Super Bowl commercial, how did you market the brand?
Brown: We've tried to do as much free marketing as possible. We've sent the product to news reporters, celebrities, bloggers. Ninety-nine percent of the time I don't hear anything back. But when people wrote reviews about it, we'd see a bump in sales. We also do Facebook ads and Google advertising. Facebook ads work better than Google ads. We get charged about a dollar every time someone clicks on our ad.
Love this! New York Magazine's art critic Jerry Saltz hold a spontaneous lecture on the street about graffiti artist Banky's work when finding one of his signature wall paintings on the Upper West Side in New York. And well-known graffiti artist Richard Santiago, also known as Apollo 5, is featured in this clip.
These are some powerful waves! Due to Storm Gertrude, the crew on an emergency response and rescue vessel was stranded in the North Sea about 100 miles from land and caught in the middle of a very stormy sea, with some waves being almost 100-foot high. Yikes!
Simple advice really, but I usually read just one book at a time, which actually doesn't make sense. If for example, I read a book about personal development, it will take time to process the book, so then reading something like a novel alongside seems only logical.
But, eat when your eat – that's my two cents.
There are no rules to reading so you can do whatever you want. At times, I'm reading 5 books at once. I might read 50 pages of one book in the morning and then read another book in the afternoon.
That's how I prefer it. Others like to read a book cover to cover and only then read something new.
If you're reading something that's complicated, you might want to read something that's easier for the evenings. I like to read biographies before I go to sleep because they are like stories. Fiction also works well in the evening.
