A Great and Well Rounded Student has a Great ROI

I have realized that young adults, in a sick kind of way, can have business ideas attached to them. I think that as a student, you should be able to brand and market yourself, learn to communicate effectively, and learn how to make yourself a fantastic ROI, or Return on Investment.

It may sound pretty bad but it is harmless.  For every hour, dollar, and trickle of sweat that your parents, your grandparents, your friends, and you yourself put into you, the return on investment, whether it be over a short period of time or along period of time, should be astronomical.

In order to do this, you should pursue and keep the following goals in mind:

1. Never quite.  I will say this again: never ever quit.  Quitting something that you begin (unless it is a task that brings negative aspects to your life) will make you less credible, less honest, and less responsible.  If someone is going to invest their time and money into you (maybe even your employer or your parents paying for your college), they want to see that you will not quit, and that your word is as good as mint icecream.
2. Pursue excellence with the little resources given to you.  Utilize your resources, finances, productivity, and time in a manner that will benefit yourself, people around you, and your community.  Even if you get the short end of the stick, make sure that the result is the best that could have ever happened.
3. Lead and develop with an amazing and unbelievable work ethic.  Work ethic is everything.  If you do a great job and you work hard at it, you will be noticed.
4. Pursue (I use that word for a reason) a good and strong attitude. The reason I use pursue is because sometimes we might forget that we are bringing a poor attitude to the table. Always remember to check up on it!
5. Sit down at least once a week to look over your goals and how you will be reaching them.  This could be anywhere between a few minutes to an hour of hard focus on your plan of attack for the following week of the next few months, or even years. Keep yourself on track, and don't let anything stupid allow you to lose focus. 

There are so many more, but just remember, be a great ROI, and people will always find pride and joy in your success; and the great thing: that is all they need to be repaid.

Google.org: Recogizing Social Responsibility When You See It

I recently took note of Google.org, Google's charitable and extra socially responsible are of their already wonderful company.  Beyond providing many of their products free of charge or cheap, they are saving the environment while doing it.  On their website, the little copy they have on the front page is dedicated to their mission:

Google.org aspires to use the power of information and technology to address the global challenges of our age: climate change, poverty and emerging disease. In collaboration with experienced partners working in each of these fields, we will invest our resources and tap the strengths of Google’s employees and global operations to advance five major initiatives: Develop Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal (RE), RechargeIT, Predict and Prevent, Inform and Empower to Improve Public Services, and Fuel the Growth of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises.

I love it!  It is great to know that a company is donating and focusing on charitable giving.  Beyond this, Google is vastly known for their fantastic benefits, cost efficiency and of course paying their employees very well. 

With Google in mind, I think there are a few specific things that have helped to create a new ideology in how to create a great company, one that attracts the best of talent, one that understands the value of our youth, and one that makes a rumble in the past ideologies of how a company should be run.

Build a Great Structure and Allow for Creativity + Innovation
     Google is well known for allowing its employees to invest their time in their own projects.  Of course these projects become the products of Google, but that I believe is a bonus: your own personal projects are thrown into a humongous market (like what, more then half of the search engine market in the world?).  Build an office or create an environment that inspires your creative juices.  This can come in the form of your dorm room, your room, study, all the way up to the company building itself.  Some things include comfortable furniture, colorful environments, a break-away from the cubicle environment, and the acceptance of personal items of inspiration.  Beyond that comes long breaks, calming areas (refer to a post earlier made about concentration (http://www.thecrazystudent.com/2008/08/how-to-concentrate-article-published-in.html), relaxation areas and techniques, and a stress free environment.  I guess what it comes down to is listening to what your employees want, or otherwise what the students around you want!

Supply the benefits as well as the perks
     Yep.  Find a way to make your group more attractive then others.  Progressive companies are great, but make sure to provide a fantastic benefits package.  NEVER, I repeat, NEVER skimp out on how you treat your employees.  Provide perks, like items discussed above, but also great food selections, free stuff, and great opportunities for employees or people to excel.  Beyond this comes the understanding of employee happiness:  not only KEEP them happy, make sure they are beyond happy about coming to work (or to your group).  If you keep them happy, you will keep the company happy, the customers happy, and the stockholders happy. 

It is not about the money, it is about your capacity and more
    Yes I understand that these things do affect the bottom line, but it isn't about how much everything costs, right?  Well, yes and no.  Do what is within your budget and your capacity (+ more).  Be creative, and go after the most important items that you can.  Ask your employees what they value the most in the perks you have come up with.  As them for their most favorite, down to the one that they would like to have but can do without.  Again, be creative.  Think of things that are cheap, but affective.

Well, I guess it is time for me to go back to the drawing board for my own company, but also all the student organizations I have led in the past. 

Good luck!

The Myers-Briggs

So I recently took a free Myers-Briggs today.  It is located here: http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp.

After taking this think provoking test, I found out I am an ENTJ, otherwise known as a fieldmarshal aka the executive.  After reading the description, I could not believe how truthful the description was looking back.  I think I might purchase a book on this so that I can learn about other people, their types, and how they communicate with each other.

I suggest that you take yours!  There is a bunch of free information on it all over the web about how you work well and interact!

Taking a Quick Glance at Your Competition

So I have been constructing my marketing strategy for my company over the past few days, and I am currently working on the competitive analysis piece.

In order to take a simple glance over my competition, I went to their websites. Because I am in the web design industry, their website is their first line of selling power (besides themselves of course).

In order to find your competition, type your location as well as your industry into google. Mine, for example, was "Minneapolis Web Design". I took not of all the top websites, and then started to go to each one taking notes.

When you go to their website, answer the following questions in depth:

1. What is the background of the company? "About Us" would help.
2. What benefits do they offer if the client goes to them. This includes years of experience, specific bonuses, and quality guarantees.
3. What disadvantages does the company have in a competitive industry? Try to root out their weakness.
4. Take a closer look at their website: How do they advertise themselves, how do they attract the client, and how to do they convert the lead to a contact. What are the marketing goals of their website?
5. Take a closer look at their product or service: what do they sell and how do they sell it? What is the process? Is it easy/hard? How focused are they or specialized on a certain area of certain product in the market? What is their methodology? How do they describe their product or service? Who do they market too?
   
6. After you do this for multiple competitors, make a list of how you will do a better job with your company, market your company, and how you can modify your website for a better sales prospective.

As I said, quick glance. It should take between 30 minutes and an hour to glance over your competition for your competitive analysis. You are trying to find quick things that you could do to show your services better, but also to find ways to gain a competitive advantage in your market.

My continued project: The Entrepreneur's Journal

Okay, so a while back I wanted a place to take notes on all the business, tax, marketing, and web books I read. I decided a simple composition notebook would do, and I started taking it everywhere with me. I recorded the following items in it:

• Notes from any educational books related to entreprenuership that I read. Anything about business or anything that seemed remotely useful for later use I wrote down.
• I kept it with me when I went to go hear speakers, seminars, or classes. I took notes off of what they were saying, as well as obtaining contact information in order to network and connect later.
• Wrote down ideas that could be further expanded into later.
• If there was a task during the day that I needed to do, such as brainstorming or writing a list of documents a proposal needed, or even just compiling a quick task list for a project, I wrote it in there.
• I brought it with me to client meetings to take notes, create action statement, and write down any ideas for products or services that came to mind while in this meeting.

I numbered every page, only wrote on the right side (which keeps the pages neat and easy to navigate), and used symbols or letters at the top of the page in order to mark that page for ideas, contacts, network opportuniy, or a task.

I have recently finished my first, and when I get time I am going to create a table of contents for it with word, and hopefully take advantage of the notes ASAP. Otherwise, when I write things down it gives me the opportunity to learn things faster and remember things easier.

Hopefully I can find a way to standardize it and find a great way to track the notes and make them easy to retrieve. I'll keep you posted!

Seeking Happiness and Laughter

So I have discovered that a lot of us are very fun people. We like to have fun, when we are in the right mood we can create a lot of laughter, we can have a very good time, and of course enter into the "laugh attack" where we cannot stop laughing. This mood, hopefully in a sober condition, allows us to have fun and laugh. It gives us happiness.

The other form of happiness comes from two things: calm/relaxation, and doing something that makes us happy/excited.

The reason I am posting this is because I think I have been in a serious mood for too long, when I go to parties I am not able to tap into that laughter and the fun side of myself, and I lull there. So the question is: How do I tap into that fantastic ability to laugh? How do I tap into that ability for me to change my mood completely and crack jokes, have fun, and laugh like crazy. How do I do that (without drugs of course)? I have done it before, I haven't been able to do it for a long time.

So here is my plan, which you could use for yourself if you are in the same condition:

1. Take note of the items that crack me up. What makes me laugh? What kind of jokes? What kind of humor? WHO makes me laugh? Which people's general everyday personalities crack me up?
2. After taking note of those things, I need to find what turns on my fun side. What kind of environment, items, or people turn it on? What kind of day did I have to be able to tap into the laughter, the jokes, the loud and fun side that I have seen only on occasion?
3. Beyond laughter, what things bring me calm? What things bring me relaxation? Do these items bring me happiness as well?
4. What items excite me? What things put me in a mode of fun excitement?

These are the only things I need to look for. I guess if you know what makes you happy, what makes you excited, what makes you laugh, and what makes you relax, you would be able to tap into those things more often and help release the pressures and the seriousness of the day.

Hopefully this help! I know that I will be paying attention to these things!

The Expensive Oil Argument

I found a great article by Mark Shead on how expensive oil is benefiting the USA. It has a great list of bullets that are all very likely true, and all looking to the future of the USA and where we are going. I thought it was a very thoughtful article. It made me believe that in all reality the United States is going to do okay in the end, and that innovation will for the most part take over.

Check out he article here: http://www.productivity501.com/benefits-of-expensive-oil/990/

Ideally, this relates to your pocket book as well as the ideas of exploring how students today will be interacting with each other in the future.

I once spoke with a good friend of mine, Luke, and he told me that he is going into the industry of bio engineering because that is where the money is, and that is where he can "actually make change and do something about this crisis". I believe that the answer lies in the next great fuel, one that is renewable and one that doesn't hurt our environment.

Good luck students, remember, we are the future!

"How to Concentrate" Article Published in 1930

I was reading a post at http://www.academicproductivity.com/ about an article that was written in 1930 found on http://www.oldandsold.com/articles06/memory-18.shtml.

I found it extremely interesting. I have always been interested in the ideas of meditation, or concentration, and how it can affect what you do day to day and how well you can do a single task.

Some quick quotes from the read:

• Make a business of doing one thing at a time with all your soul. Chesterfield was right when he said, " There is time enough for everything in the course of a day if we do but one thing at a time, but there is not time enough in a year if we try to do two things at a time."

• All great mental achievement has been preceded by periods of absolute rest or relaxation!

• Take your breathing spell before the battle.

• When harassed by the three devils, hurry, worry, and fear, the mind never has a fair chance to center on anything. (Free your mind from everything but the task at hand).

• Seek a quiet place free from all distractions (and noise is a terrible distractor), a place free from all interruptions which may break your train of thought (and a telephone is a terrible interruptor), a place where you can be alone, free from all outside influences (and a friend who " must drops in " is a terrible outside influence), and a place of pleasing environment, beautiful or otherwise, where the atmosphere is right for you.

• Choose your own place for concentration, but remember that solitude has always been, in all the history of mental achievement, a requisite for great work.

• And today right in this practical present—thousands of our most successful business men have learned this secret—that by getting alone—they can gain new efficiency—and think out better plans for managing their daily affairs.

• Your daily schedule helps to focus the mind, holds it steadily to one thing at a time and in the right order. Following a logical sequence tends to eliminate confusion.
  

To summarize: Relax. Free the Mind. Find Quite Solitude. Follow Your Daily Schedule. These are the things that will lead to great concentration.

(This article used citation from "Concentration is the Most Important Intellectual Habit of Man." located at http://www.oldandsold.com/articles06/memory-18.shtml)

Thanks Jose for the great lead! ( http://www.academicproductivity.com/)

"My Plate" is a Great Way to Organize Your Time

So I recently used Microsoft Word's charts and wrote down all the items that encompass and take up time in my life at this moment (in the future, this is called a "Refocus" sheet, which I will post an article about).

I call it "My Plate", which is a pie chart that takes all the time I usually have in a day and divvies it up according to how I budget my time. Simple, right? Yes, but its about getting everything that takes up your time written down. My Plate allows you to focus on the time in your day, focus on efficiently using all of it, and allows you to have a nice image of what takes up a lot of your time (or should take up a lot of your time) as well as what should take of very little.

1. I have listed all the items that take up my time
   a.) Academics and Classes
   b.) Student Organizations and Extracurricular Acts.
   c.) Gym and Exercise
   d.) My company (the DRH Design Group [http://www.thedrhgroup.com/])
   e.) Personal and Learning Goals
   f.) On-Campus Job
   g.) Scholarships Apps, Finances, Blogging, and Reading
   h.) Free Time/Extra Sleep
   i.) Sleeeeep of course
2. After that I find out how many waking hour I have in a day. Remember that I included "Extra Sleep" for days that I would like to sleep in a little bit.
   a.) A day has 24 hours
   b.) Find out how many hours you sleep on average: 8 hours for me!
   c.) Subtract that from 24: 16 hours to get things done!
3. Take that amount of hours and divvy it up among your activities
   a.) Academics and Classes: 6
   b.) Student Organizations and Extracurricular Activities: 1
   c.) Gym and Exercise: 1
   d.) My company (the DRH Design Group [http://www.thedrhgroup.com/]): 2
   e.) Personal and Learning Goals: 1
   f.) On-Campus Job: 1.5
   g.) Scholarships Apps, Finances, Blogging, and Reading: 0.5
   h.) Free Time/Extra Sleep: 2
   i.) Sleeeeep of course: 9
4. Put this information into pie chart using Microsoft Word or your favorite online charting program. This will give you a nice image of where you should be spending your time. It could look something like this:

As usual, use this for guidance and possibly integrate it into your daily task list and plugging in times. Good luck, and God speed!

Dustin Huibregtse

The Activity and Ability Recall Exercise

I think the smartest move I could make is listing off the activities in high school I participated in, but also look to the activities I am currently involved in. I will note the skills and abilities and some of the things I learned from them. Otherwise, the purpose of this exercise is to be able to recall the activities I have taken part in, as well as take note of specific things that these activities have helped me build. Let's call this the Activity and Ability Recall Exercise. This exercise also helps me with understanding some areas of interest I have so that I can develop what i call "dream job characteristics", identifying things that I like to do and wouldn't mind being paid for.

When you are doing your own activity and ability recall exercise, make sure to focus on lesson you learned, skills and abilities that you have expanded, as well as things you liked and did not like. Keep building on it in a document on the computer or in a journal. This little exercise can act as a recall for your resume, application, or college/scholarship app.

So below I list my past activities, or activities that are not active on my calendar/to-do list. I only want to list the activities I did in high school because those are the ones that have built up my skills and abilities the most. This list might also allude other high school students to join activities that may build the following skills!

• Student Government: leadership, project management, time management, an understanding of the "big picture", working with staff and students, being a liaison between staff and students, setting up meetings, creating minutes, affective mass communications, advertising, marketing, design, cash management, opportunities and idea building, and of course an attitude to accomplish tasks and achieve at levels that I could never have before. And of course , how to have fun and be serious at the same time :).
• National Honor Society: leadership, teamwork with small group of people, and learning how to lead a volunteer organization that has an amount of non committed students but also a group that really wants to participate.
• Tonka Leadership Challenge: is an interesting one. This organization has re birthed itself so many times that no one really knows what it is anymore. I guess I learned how to effectively manage change in a leadership organization and how to manage a large amount of members.
• Skipper Film Festival: gave me insight on how to manage difficult situations and creating a situation of fairness. It also gave me insight on how to bring together both the technical side of a film festival and business side. Management of new projects (always fun) and developing documentation for future events. Training, fairness, and learning how to work with people that are so passionate about their product that they are somewhat unstable ( ;) ).
• Other activities were always nagging at the side of "My Plate" (will discuss later). With a continued focus on these extra activities in lieu of all the other ones above and below, I was able to learn how to manage my time, prioritize, and figure out when too much is too much. The great thing about learning how much is too much is sometimes you can take on a higher load when you have a good productivity ethic and some great productivity tactics in your suit case. I like to call this "work capacity", and it grows as you get older, but also as you learn new ways to become organized and manage your project more efficiently. If you want to be a crazy student, study up on those skills, and continually try to build on them!
• The old jobs: Having a job in high school is a wonderful thing. A steady source of income creates a larger amount of independence as well as give you money so that you don't have to ask your mom for any. Love it. You can also buy stuff out of the Christmas/Birthday seasonal big purchase months (which was a big deal back in the day). A job though, truly, builds a resume and gives you leverage in pursuing better and higher paid jobs. In respect to you young kids: make sure to go for a job, any job, at first. Even if the job sucks, it still is building your resume and giving you a leg up. Don't worry, your first job really only needs to last a year at the most, and then you (by my suggestion) can move on to a job that is probably more competitive and has a higher pay. "Base Hits" as my mum's boyfriend once said. Beyond all of this: great customer service and communication. I have learned that it is important to learn to communicate, and communicate well. Find a love for public speaking, and also learn some quick things that you can do to provide excellent customer service.

My current activities

• Running a biz: DRH Design Group (www.thedrhgroup.com). This has been a monumental experience, and one that I could never have gone without. The DRH Design Group works with small business owners to develop an affordable online presence in order to help their business grow. I have learned things about marketing, guerilla marketing, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, finance, taxes, small biz taxes, management of a small business, branding, leads and prospects maangement, as well as how to offer a better service to my clients. It has been a remarkable experience, and I continue to develop the c0mpany for the larger reasons of learning everything that it requires. I will be posting a good amount of information about stuff I have experienced, learned, and developed in order to make starting up a small business less of a hassle and more or a rewarding endeavor. Besides this I have leared how to communicate quickly and consistently.
• On my way to college: The University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Carlson School of Management (www.umn.edu): Ahh the transition to college. All I know is that there are sooo many things to look forward to when it comes to college. Things I have learned? Well I have certainly learned that with such a big split of friendships in everyone's life can cause people to only hang out with their close friends, and further focus on the things ahead. Beyond that...it has caused people to let loose a little bit because they have a certain expectation for what college should be. On the contrary, it is who I was and who I am now that got me in, and I expect that who I will become will be a product of the past and the present, not of what I believe the future should be. Confusing yet? Sorry. if anything, I learned to keep true to myself and keep moving forward.

From the many things I have gotten into over the course of the last four or five years, I have realized that you have to slow down once in a while in order to speed up. By this I mean take an hour a week to develop a plan, refocus on your goals, and acknowledge your accomplishments while looking to the tasks at hand. This slow down is what I call a "Refocus", which I will of course speak about in a later article.

Well that was nice. I spent a few minutes looking at my accomplishments, my activites from the past and the present, and taking a quick gander at some simple lessons. In essence you may learn a lot of things, but you need to write things down, remember them, and "recall" them in order to keep yourself focused.

Good luck, and I will catch you later.

Buying a Domain Name from Google: Great Applications!

Now that I purchased a domain name from google (through godaddy) for $10, I am ready to start my blog. The domain name is http://www.thecrazystudent.com.

After I made this purchased I noticed all the tools that google provides you with. Also known as "google apps for (domain name)", I can register up to 200 user on The Crazy Student. Further, each user gets an email address (eg dustin@thecrazystudent.com), access to your own renowned Google Doc library (under the user name dustin@thecrazystudent.com), Google Calendar, Google Sites, and Google Web Pages. All these tools come together to create a great backend for a website and really makes it a tool for any group of individuals that are trying to run a comprhensive website.

The great thing about the added services is that it is free on top of your purchased domain! All you have to do is buy a custom domain through blogger for 10 dollars (cheaper then most!)through your advanced settings and walaa!

Now the only thing that is missing is google analytics to watch traffic and see where your traffic is coming from. Hopefully this feature can be added easily.

The Beginning of A Great Journey

Hello,

My name is Dustin Huibregtse. I am a student (and forever will be student) at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. I will be a Freshmen soon. Being a student with so much on your plate you learn ways to be more productive, faster, and more intelligent in every process. School, yes it may be hell sometimes, is really a way to learn how to be more productive and affective in this world. Some people would call a student that continually tries to be productive, well, crazy. So I guess I am just another one of those crazy students.

There are multiple things that have made me who I am today: continually trying to aim for the top of my class at Minnetonka High School, jumping onto many committees and getting involved in to many fun but all too busy things, aiming for scholarships, managing my own learning, and of course now starting a business. I will talk about many of these things later, but this blog is about the lessons I have learned throughout life, but it is also about exploration of some of the newest techniques in productivity, new note taking techniques, as well as exploration into the current items that are driving me to become better. I will discuss items I am learning, and hopefully y0u'll get the chance to take part.

Good luck, and I'll see you in my next post.
D-Homes