clipped from skateboard.about.com

The biggest thing is, when you fall, try to NOT use your hands to catch yourself. This might be kind of hard to learn, but if you lose your board and you are going to smash into the ground, you should try and let your shoulder and body take it, rolling with the blow as much as you can. Catching yourself with your hand is a great way to break a wrist, and while wearing wrist guards can protect you from this, it’s dangerous to get used to using your hands, because at some point you will skate without the wrist guards …

Let me repeat that. The biggest thing to remember when falling is NOT to try and catch yourself from falling. If you try too hard to resist it, you’re more likely to get hurt even more badly. Instead, go with it, try to roll into the fall. Let the momentum of the fall take you where it wants to, and just position yourself so that you’ll be able to get up and move on.

I think that’s great advice for all aspects of life, don’t you?

Image via Wikipedia

Plus Magazine tells us that the price of oil could be related to the Australian Cricket Team’s results.

It’s an interesting graph. Obviously, we know that the relation is nothing more than coincidence. But looking at the graph alone, it could be interpreted in many ways.

Just goes to show, if you look deep enough, there are connections to be found anywhere. Two implications of this. Firstly, don’t believe anything you see or read. Secondly, and more importantly in my opinion, it raises the question – are you finding the right connections and interpreting them in the right way?

There are lessons you can learn from anything around you. Practically anything you see can be connected to something else and learned from. It’s just a matter of how deep you look.

Are you making the right connections?

And well, the walk reminded me of two lessons.

Firstly, at a point during the walk (in Bedok), I made a wrong turn. I could have turned back, retraced my steps, and gone the original path. And it would have taken me just as long (or even longer). Instead, I went on, kept in mind the big picture (the rough direction I was headed), and adjusted my route accordingly. Eventually, I did make it back, and I learned more about the area because of that.The same lesson applies in life. We’re human, we’ll all make mistakes. If you’ve got the big picture in mind, if you know the general direction you’re headed, you’ll be able to readjust your plans accordingly when you do.

Secondly, and more importantly, the walk started out as just a short stroll, because I didn’t feel like going home yet. But after a while, it became a challenge, to see how far I could push myself. Honestly, I wouldn’t have expected to be able to walk all the way back home. I just wanted to see how far I could go, and in the end, I managed it.

Just goes to show that you never know how far you can go until you push your limits – and more often than not, it’s further than you’d expect.

Are you pushing your limits and stepping out of your comfort zone? Are you really going as far as you can?

We’ve all heard the high pitched squeal that results from feedback from speakers. And I’m pretty sure most of you would agree that it’s annoying. It’s not something you want to hear.

Feedback occurs when a microphone picks up it’s own sound from the speaker. The sound gets trapped in a loop (microphone picks it up from the speaker, amplifies it and sends it to the speaker, where it gets sent back to the microphone, etc), which causes that annoying whine that we all know (and most hate).

The thing is, with the power of Web 2.0, it’s very easy to get trapped in our own ‘feedback loop’. The web allows you to amplify your voice. With blogs, podcasting, Twitter and all the other Web 2.0 tools, you can speak and be heard.

But social media is a conversation. It’s not a one way broadcast. Yes, the tools help to amplify what you have to say, but if you’re just trying to build yourself up, it’s not going to work. You’ll just get annoying.

Companies which blog and only plug their products aren’t going to get much value from social media. Companies which blog and listen to what their customers say back will.

Same for individuals. You’re more likely to gain from social media if you’re listening to what others say, and feeding off each other, inspiring each other. If you’re just amplifying yourself over and over, you won’t gain value, and you won’t be adding value either. You’ll just be making noise.

How do you keep yourself from getting trap in a ‘feedback loop’?

Pick a number.

Now, how many of you picked 18? How many picked 6?

And how many of you picked 7? Or 951? Or 3000?

Why not? I didn’t say you had to pick a number that I wrote down. Yet most people assume that.

People tend to make assumptions. More specifically, people tend to make assumptions based on what they’ve seen in the past, and what they know. A list of numbers preceded the request, so an assumption is made that you were supposed to pick a number from the list.

But sometimes, these assumptions can limit your choices. You may have more opportunities than you think you have, if you get past the initial assumption.

What assumptions do you make that limit your opportunities? And how do you get past them?

Disclosure: As much as I wish I did, I didn’t think of the “pick a number” example myself. Saw it on Numb3rs, and thought it was a great lesson, so I thought I’d share it here. And admittedly, it works better in person, and not as well on a blog post, but I hope it got the point across well enough.

Is what you say the same as what your customer hears? If it isn’t, what can you do about it?

This is my entry to Brad Shorr’s Win an Ipod Nano contest.

Our brains have “novelty detector neurons“, which respond to newer sounds, and stop firing if a certain pattern of sounds is repeated over and over. Because of that, sounds that don’t change fade into the background, and we don’t hear them.

We have a natural instinct to not pay attention to things that stay constant. And on the reverse side, as marketers – and face it, we’re all marketers – you need to be different to get attention. You need to keep changing with the times, adapting your medium and message to fit the audience.

You need to provide something that others aren’t used to hearing.

Whatever you’re marketing – be it your personal brand, a corporate product or anything else – how are you getting attention, and stopping yourself from fading into the background?

And with technology, it’s so easy to edit. The problem with that, is that it makes it easy for the person to settle for a recording that’s not the best. When it’s so easy to edit, there’s the temptation to go, “that’s good enough, we’ll fix it in the edit”.

That never works out well, though. If the original recording is poor, it’s almost always very hard to fix in the mix. You’re better off doing a better recording. If the video recording is shaky, no matter how much you edit it, it will still be shaky. If the audio is distorted in the original recording, there’s nothing much you can do to fix it.

And the same can be said in any situation. It’s easy to settle for something that’s not the best, and convince yourself you can fix it after – by marketing it better, etc. But it’s always better not to settle for anything less than the best.

When you forge your own path, more often than not, it means that you’re on your own. It’s your own path. And you’ll probably have to walk it on your own.

The other thing about forging your own path, is that it’s a path that few (if any) have gone. Sometimes you won’t know for sure where you’re heading. It’s a new path, and sometimes you lose your way, or have to make it up as you go along.

It’s not easy. It can be a struggle at times (which is kind of what I’m feeling lately). But I’m pretty sure it’ll be worth it in the end.

How do you deal with the challenges of forging your own path? Or if you don’t face any challenges, maybe you could share some advice?