4 Ted Videos to Inspire Small Business Leaders

I love the Ted series of videos but I don't always like having to sift through the speeches to find the ones I find valuable.  I've helped found and continue to run what's become a small business for 7 years now and gone through all sorts of ups and downs, successes and failures, etc...

These four videos inspire me in different ways that are helpful but more insightful than practical in their application.  If you're a small business owner and have an hour to get rejuvenated, these videos are perfect.

Work-Life Balance from a Titan of TV

With the runaway success of shows like Scandal and Grey’s Anatomy, Shonda Rhimes has become one of Hollywood’s most powerful icons.  She goes through how she loves work too much at times and how saying yes to playing with her children is her particular outlet for getting her peak drive and motivation levels back when she hits a lull.
Takeaway It's natural to go through peaks and valleys. Am I taking that right amount time to recreate?

Built for 100 Years

Martin Reeves, a biologist by trade and now a consultant, shares six principles from living organisms to build resilient businesses that flourish in the face of change. I'm not trying to build a flash in the pan or a get rich quick company that I flip for millions or billions. I want to create a lasting impact and spend my time working on something meaningful.
Takeaway Of the 6 principles, Prudence may just be the most important trait of a small business that helps it create lasting impact.

Exploration vs. Exploitation

Knut Haanaes makes a compelling case to think more explicitly about which mode or mindset a company is spending it's time and effort within. Too much of either leads to failure while the right balance can result in wonderful growth.
TakeawayIt's critical to spend the company's time & money on the right balance of activities. Don't get complacent or too greedy with something that's working.

Frugal Innovation

Navi Radjou looks at examples of innovation in emerging markets with particular emphasis on interesting inventions from Africa and Asia that have helped millions of people by taking advantage of what resources are plentiful instead of waiting on the western world. Many of these entrepreneurs have no funding, little to no education, and yet they create remarkable solutions to real world issues in their region.
TakeawayDon't fall into the trap that more employees, more funding, more something is all I need to get over the next hurdle.

Hopefully this post about TED videos for small business leaders has guided you to some of the better TED videos from the past few years and provided a valuable time of reflection. Now, go back and keep at it.

Troubling Post about Parents and Kids Having Phones

If you are thinking about whether or not to get your child a phone and let them spend time on facebook, snapchat, twitter, etc...  You really need to read this article:  https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/

Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

Below are a few quotes that really jumped out at me.

The results could not be clearer: Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy.

There’s not a single exception. All screen activities are linked to less happiness, and all nonscreen activities are linked to more happiness.

The more time teens spend looking at screens, the more likely they are to report symptoms of depression. Eighth-graders who are heavy users of social media increase their risk of depression by 27 percent, while those who play sports, go to religious services, or even do homework more than the average teen cut their risk significantly.

 

Teens who spend three hours a day or more on electronic devices are 35 percent more likely to have a risk factor for suicide, such as making a suicide plan.

 

Children who use a media device right before bed are more likely to sleep less than they should, more likely to sleep poorly, and more than twice as likely to be sleepy during the day.

And What to Do

The article suggests that the executives in silicon valley that bring us the devices and social media services that are behind all of this are unlikely to allow the amount of use that's associated with the troublesome increases in unhappiness, loneliness, depression and suicidal thoughts.

Even Steve Jobs limited his kids’ use of the devices he brought into the world.

 

Debugging Dependencies of Django Project in Eclipse

This is another one of those posts to help myself in the future.  I've got some legacy python projects whose directions only get you a django app running in a virtualenv within eclipse but the dependencies themselves are not debuggable.

It was straightforward once I found the right advice.

If you're like me and have a build that creates a virtualenv with everything installed already by pip and a requirements.txt file.  Here's how to get the environment and eclipse changed so that you can debug any dependency.

#Step 1.  Remove the dependencies files from the virtualenv

This works for mac and uninstalls files that might have spaces in them too

python setup.py install --record files.txt
# inspect files.txt to make sure it looks ok. Then:
tr '\n' '\0' < files.txt | xargs -0 sudo rm -f --

I figured that out after a few different attempts and the best way to do it came from StackOverflow here:  https://stackoverflow.com/a/25209129

 

#Step 2. Add the source folder as an external build dependency on the Python Interpreter Path

 

 

 

 

 

Credit for this step goes to a small sentence buried here:  https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/eclipse-pydev-and-virtualenv/

 

That's it.  Restart your django server and set a breakpoint inside that internal dependency.

This will save you a ton of time vs. all those import pdb; pdb.set_trace() statements

Drawbacks

This will break the virtualenv from the command line so for things like python manage.py commands.  For those items, I went ahead and set up a second virtualenv.

django manage.py show stacktrace

This is a quick one more to save me time than anything else.

If you're looking for how to get the stacktrace when a django manage.py command crashes, the --traceback option is what you're looking for.

Use it like this:

python manage.py <methodname> --traceback