If the pictures of Lamborghinis lined up outside bitcoin conferences in Manhattan or jet skis bobbing in the crystal clear waters of Bermuda are anything to go by, working at leading cryptocurrency exchange and derivatives trading platform BitMEX was a sweet gig.
That was especially so for its first employee, Australian born and raised Greg Dwyer. Joining BitMEX in 2015, which grew into a $US3 billion ($3.9 billion) financial behemoth in just a few years, must have seemed like the opportunity of a lifetime for Dwyer. Until it all came crashing down last year.
The Australian bitcoin mogul at the centre of an epic crypto scandal
1000 Fails Lead to a Single Success
Pro freestyle mountain bike rider Matt Jones wants to try a new trick, something no one has ever done before. In this video, you see him go through the entire process of bringing a new idea or invention into the world:
- The idea. It’s based on a previous trick but is more difficult; standing on the shoulders of giants. He suspects it’s possible, but doesn’t know for sure. Only one way to find out…
- The prototype. Jones takes a bike frame (no wheels, pedals, etc.) to the local swimming pool to do flips with it off the diving board. The price of failure is low, so it’s easy to try out all sorts of different things. The mad inventor is gawked at by the public but presses on.
- Visualization. Now that his body knows how it feels to perform the motion in the pool, he can perform the trick in his mind over and over again, syncing brain & body. He’s starting to believe.
- Trial and error. With the basics down, it’s time to tinker with all the different variables — over and over and over and over and over and over again. An airbag breaks his falls, enabling experimentation.
- Failure. You see Jones try this trick over and over again in the video and very few of them are successful — and I bet a lot more failure happened off camera. Hundreds of tries, hundreds of fails. This is the way.
- Self-doubt. The trial & error, failure, and self-doubt stages all overlap. You can see him struggling with this on top of the tower. He still believes but this trick is dangerous. Body and mind are battling hard.
- Success. It all comes together at last.
This was one of three new tricks that Jones wanted to do last year and you can see more of his progress and process with those in these three videos.
Forbes – Amerca’s Best Large Employers - Forbes: “It’s a tough time to be a job seeker. Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. economy has lost nearly 10 million jobs and the unemployment rate has reached 6.3%. But the companies featured on our list of America’s Best Large Employers are trying hard to attract and retain top talent—many while trying to keep the country safe.
Take the No. 1 large employer, the University of Alabama at Birmingham Hospital, where many of its 23,000 employees are caring for thousands of pandemic-stricken patients while educating America’s future doctors and nurses. Forbes partnered with market research firm Statista to compile our list by surveying 50,000 Americans working for businesses with at least 1,000 employees. Participants were asked to rate their willingness to recommend their own employers to friends and family, and to nominate organizations other than their own. The final list ranks the 500 large and 500 midsize employers that received the most recommendations. For the full story and methodology, click here…”
Fortune – “More than being expensive, useless meetings are a quick way to stunt team productivity. Across industries, research shows that it takes 25 minutes to return your concentration back to an original task after a significant interruption. Meetings also increase the likelihood of people committing errors during a task, because they miss or repeat important components. And in one survey, 65% of workers said that meetings keep them from completing their own work. Complicating the issue is the fact that managers and employees don’t tend to operate on the same schedules.
In engineering, for example, writers and developers typically plan their workloads in units of half a day, whereas managers work in hours—so there’s an inherent misalignment when it comes to meetings. With the current need to bridge the physical distance between teams, managers are at risk of using excessive meetings to ease insecurities they have around communication. Yet at the same time, meetings have become more cumbersome than ever, as millions of employees with caregiving responsibilities need flexible schedules throughout the day (and night). Now that our heads have just about stopped spinning from the impact of the COVID pandemic, and we can ease into more permanent remote habits, we should seize this as a chance to cut the fat, stop managers from micromanaging, and empower employees to self-regulate. How? By relying less on meetings and more on data. Data is unbiased, accurate, and insightful in a way that humans can’t be (especially after the fifth meeting of the day). It can help managers better understand how teams are working, how projects are progressing, and even how employees are feeling—boosting overall trust and work quality. For many companies, data is the deciding factor in finally getting rid of useless meetings. Here’s why it’s time to follow suit in your workplace..”To beat Zoom fatigue, your workplace needs fewer meetings and more data - Fortune