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How to Overcome Perfectionism

One of the most common and destructive thought habits I have ever encountered is perfectionism.
It holds you back from actually getting all the way to done with a lot in life. It may hold you back from even trying to do something because you feel you have to do it perfectly.
And it tears your self-esteem apart.
So what can you do about it?
In today’s article I would like to share 3 of the most effective things that have helped me to replace this habit with something better.
Go for good enough.
Aiming for perfection usually winds up in a project or something else never being finished. So go for good enough instead. Don’t use it as an excuse to slack off. But simply realize that there is something called good enough and when you are there then you are finished with whatever you are doing.
Good enough in this case will most often mean that you have done a very good job on an important task or project. But that you do not have to do it perfectly.
And good enough will in some cases just mean that you have done a good enough job on some small task for example. There are many things to do in life or in a week so make choices so that you can use your limited energy and time in a smart way.
Reminder: buying into myths of perfection will hurt you and your life.
By watching too many movies, listening to too many songs and just taking in what the world is telling you it is very easy to be lulled into dreams of perfection. It sounds so good and wonderful and you want it.
But in real life it clashes with reality and tends to cause much suffering and stress within you and in the people around you. It can harm or possibly lead you to end relationships, jobs, projects etc. just because your expectations are out of this world.
I find it very helpful to remind myself of this simple fact.
Whenever I get lost in a perfectionist headspace I remind myself that it will cause me and my world harm. And so it become easier to switch my focus and thought patterns because I want to avoid making unhelpful choices and avoid causing myself and other people unnecessary pain.
Set your own bar and surround yourself with human standards.
Instead of setting the bar for yourself – or letting other people set that bar – at an inhuman standard set it at a human level.
We all fail. We all have trouble reaching our goals sometimes. That is OK and very human.
Don’t obey the bar that someone else have set for you. They may have set it out of the goodness of their hearts – or not, to for example maximize profits – but if the old standards do not work for you then it is time to find a better standard for yourself.
So set the bar at a level where you feel motivated but where you do not have to achieve inhuman results to like yourself and to be satisfied.
Then choose to take small steps and day by day and week by week rearrange your world so that it becomes more and more supportive of you and of human standards.
Reduce or cut out media sources that make you feel worse or like you have to live up to perfect standards. Replace them with magazines, blogs, books etc. filled with optimism and motivation but also kinder and more realistic expectations and standards.
Do the same thing with the people in your life. Spend more time with people who are kind, who like to grow and like living a good life in a balanced, positive and mentally healthy way.
This is your life. You decide. So set and surround yourself with the standards that help you to both do good and to feel good.

Hot Cross Bun Bread and Butter Pudding

You’ll need:
650g of hot cross buns – I used a ‘hot cross loaf’ (available in some supermarkets) and a pack of 4 supermarket buns
Butter - about 125g, softened. The drier your hot cross buns are, the more butter you’ll need
300ml single cream
350ml milk (whole or semi skimmed)
4 large eggs
100g caster sugar
Vanilla pod (or 1 teaspoon vanilla extract)
To prepare:
Cut the hot cross buns into slices about 1cm thick. I took the crusts off the loaf too and cut the slices into the same size pieces as the buns. Cut the buns downwards so you get a little bit of cross on each one. Butter each piece generously.
When you chose your baking dish you need to make sure that you have another one bigger to put the serving dish in as you’re going to make a ‘bain marie’ in the oven. You can use a roasting tin or similar.
So identify your oven proof serving dish (probably about 20-25cm long) and line the pieces of hot cross bun in the dish. They need to overlap and with the buttered layer leaning against the edge of the dish. When you’ve done the first layer, add a sprinkling of mixed fruit (couple of tablespoons, more if you wish) before putting the next layer on top. I added another sprinkling of fruit on the top.
In a large bowl whisk the eggs and sugar together until it goes pale and frothy.
Slice along the length of the vanilla pod and then put it (whole) in a non-stick pan with the milk and cream. Very gently heat the milk/cream mixture until it is hot, but not boiling. Stir regularly otherwise it will stick to the bottom. If it does stick, stop stirring and find your sieve.
Once it’s hot, you need to pour it over the egg mix, whisking all the time (to stop it scrambling). If you need to sieve it, pour it in slowly through the sieve whisking as you go. Take out the vanilla pod, scrape the seeds out with a sharp knife and add them back to the custard mix.
Pour over the hot cross buns and leave to stand for at least 10 minutes.

Let your bun and custard mixture soak

Boil the kettle and put the oven on to 180C, 160C (fan), Gas Mark 4.
Put baking dish containing the pudding into the baking tray/roasting tin. If it’s easy to lift it into the oven, fill the roasting tin with boiling water (don’t get it in the pudding) until it comes about half way up the baking dish. I have to use a baking tray so put it in the oven first and then fill the tray from the kettle.
Bake for about 45 minutes until set but with a slight wobble at the top.

Hot Cross Bun and Butter Pudding ready to serve

Serve with ice cream, cream, custard.
Enjoy x

Source :- Bake Yummy

Home Business

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Stability & Longevity

The mark of a successful company can be seen in its track record. SFI is now in its 14th year, with millions of dollars in annual sales and millions paid in commissions to thousands of affiliates around the world. SFI's parent company, Carson Services, Inc., is now in its 28th year of business, is a Bronze (10+ years), A+ rated Member of the Better Business Bureau and is registered with Dun and Bradstreet. SFI affiliates operate with the peace of mind brought about by associating with a proven, debt-free organization with a long, successful history.

Company Leadership

SFI Founder
Gery Carson

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It is April Fools' Day.

Facebook is testing out a new button

It seems like Facebook is just testing out a whole bunch of new features, and it doesn’t look like it has any intention of stopping anytime soon. Today, it was discovered that Facebook is testing out a new button on the desktop version of its service. The new button appears on the top right of your Facebook page, right next to your profile link. The button pops up the “How are you feeling” post-a-status screen.
The button was first discovered by Mashable’s Alex Fitzpatrick. The button appears to be rolling out to a small test group, and it’s still up in the air about whether or not this button will be rolled out to the rest of Facebook’s users. It allows users to update their status no matter which page they’re on. So if you’re on your friend’s Facebook page, and you just thought of something you want to send to the entirety of your Facebook friends list, you can just click the button to update your status.

Many people are speculating that Facebook is borrowing its features from Twitter. The button looks awfully similar to Twitter’s “Compose a tweet” button, especially with the pop-up button over a faded background. Facebook also renamed its “subscribers” to “followers”, and is planning on implementing a hashtag feature in its service soon, a feature that was popularized by Twitter.

Alongside the upcoming addition of the “post-a-status” button, Facebook has also added an update to Facebook Events. Event planners, as well as event attendees, will now be able to see the weather conditions for their upcoming events. Facebook is also rolling out a new feature to Facebook Pages that organizes comments in more simple, threaded conversations. Facebook has been constantly testing out new features this month, so it’ll be interesting what else will pop out in the next few days.
[via Mashable]

First boss : Few companies today would have hired Steve Jobs

SAN FRANCISCO: When Steve Jobs adopted "think different" as Apple's mantra in the late 1990s, the company's ads featured Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Amelia Earhart and a constellation of other starry-eyed oddballs who reshaped society.

Nolan Bushnell never appeared in those tributes, even though Apple was riffing on an iconoclastic philosophy he embraced while running video game pioneer Atari in the early 1970s. Atari's refusal to be corralled by the status quo was one of the reasons Jobs went to work there in 1974 as an unkempt, contemptuous 19-year-old. Bushnell says Jobs offended some Atari employees so much that Bushnell eventually told Jobs to work nights when one else was around.

Bushnell, though, says he always saw something special in Jobs, who evidently came to appreciate his eccentric boss, too. The two remained in touch until shortly before Jobs died in October 2011 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.

That bond inspired Bushnell to write a book about the unorthodox thinking that fosters the kinds of breakthroughs that became Jobs' hallmark as the co-founder and CEO of Apple. Apple built its first personal computers with some of the parts from Atari's early video game machines. After Jobs and Steve Wozniak started Apple in 1976, Apple also adopted parts of an Atari culture that strived to make work seem like play. That included pizza-and-beer parties and company retreats to the beach.

"I have always been pretty proud about that connection," Bushnell said in an interview. "I know Steve was always trying to take ideas and turn them upside down, just like I did."

Bushnell, now 70, could have reaped even more from his relationship with Jobs if he hadn't turned down an offer from his former employee to invest $50,000 in Apple during its formative stages. Had he seized that opportunity, Bushnell would have owned one-third of Apple, which is now worth about $425 billion - more than any other company in the world.

Bushnell's newly released book, 'Finding The Next Steve Jobs: How to Find, Hire, Keep and Nurture Creative Talent', is the latest chapter in a diverse career that spans more than 20 different start-ups that he either launched on his own or groomed at Catalyst Technologies, a business incubator that he once ran.

He has often pursued ideas before the technology needed to support them was advanced enough to create a mass market. Bushnell financed Etak, an automobile mapping system created in 1983 by the navigator of his yacht and later sold to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Bushnell also dabbled in electronic commerce during the 1980s by launching ByVideo, which took online orders through kiosks set up in airports and other locations.

In his most costly mistake, Bushnell lost nearly all of a $28 million investment in Androbot, another 1980s-era start-up. It developed three foot tall robots that were supposed to serve the dual role of companion and butler. (Bushnell relied on Apple's computers to control the early models.)

Bushnell's best-known accomplishments came at Atari, which helped launch the modern video game industry with the 1972 release of 'Pong', and at the Chuck E Cheese restaurant chain, which specialises in pizza, arcade entertainment and musical performances by animatronic animals. It's an odyssey that led actor Leonardo DiCaprio to obtain the film rights to Bushnell's life for a possible movie starring DiCaprio in the lead role.

While at Atari, Bushnell began to break the corporate mold, creating a template that is now common through much of Silicon Valley. He allowed employees to turn Atari's lobby into a cross between a video game arcade and the Amazon jungle. He started holding keg parties and hiring live bands to play for his employees after work. He encouraged workers to nap during their shifts, reasoning that a short rest would stimulate more creativity when they were awake. He also promised a summer sabbatical every seven years.

He advertised job openings at Atari with taglines such as, 'Confusing work with play every day' and 'Work harder at having fun than ever before'. When job applicants came in for interviews, he would ask brain-teasing questions such as: "What is a mole?"; "Why do tracks run counter-clockwise?" and "What is the order of these numbers: 8, 5, 4, 9, 1, 7, 6, 3, 2?"

Bushnell hadn't been attracting much attention in recent years until Walter Isaacson's best-selling biography on Jobs came out in 2011, just after Jobs' death. It reminded readers of Bushnell's early ties to the man behind the Macintosh computer, iPod, iPhone and iPad.

Suddenly, everyone was asking Bushnell about what it was like to be Jobs' first boss. Publisher Tim Sanders of Net Minds persuaded him to write a book linked to Jobs, even though Bushnell had already finished writing a science fiction novel about a video game hatched through nanotechnology in 2071.

"The idea is to become a best-selling author first and then the rest of my books will be slam dunks," Bushnell said. To get his literary career rolling, Bushnell relied on veteran ghostwriter Gene Stone, who also has written other books, including 'Forks Over Knives', under his own name.

Bushnell's book doesn't provide intimate details about what Jobs was like after he dropped out of Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and went to work as a technician in 1974 at Atari in Los Gatos, California. He had two stints there, sandwiched around a trip to India. During his second stint at Atari, in 1975, Jobs worked on a 'Pong' knock-off called 'Breakout' with the help of his longtime friend Wozniak, who did most of the engineering work on the video game, even though he wasn't being paid by Atari. Jobs left Atari for good in 1976 when he co-founded Apple with Wozniak, who had been designing engineering calculators at Hewlett-Packard.

Jobs and Bushnell kept in touch. They would periodically meet over tea or during walks to hash out business ideas. After Bushnell moved to Los Angeles with his family 13 years ago, he didn't talk to Jobs as frequently, though he made a final visit about six months before he died.

There are only a few anecdotes about Bushnell's interaction with Jobs at Atari and about those meetings around Silicon Valley.

The book instead serves as a primer on how to ensure a company doesn't turn into a mind-numbing bureaucracy that smothers existing employees and scares off rule-bending innovators such as Jobs.

Bushnell dispenses his advice in vignettes that hammer on a few points. The basics: Make work fun; weed out the naysayers; celebrate failure, and then learn from it; allow employees to take short naps during the day; and don't shy away from hiring talented people just because they look sloppy or lack college credentials.

Many of these principles have become tenets in Silicon Valley's laid-back, risk-taking atmosphere, but Bushnell believes they remain alien concepts in most of corporate America.

"The truth is that very few companies would hire Steve, even today," Bushnell writes in his book. "Why? Because he was an outlier. To most potential employers, he'd just seem like a jerk in bad clothing."

Bushnell says he is worried that Apple is starting to lose the magic touch that Jobs brought to the company. It's a concern shared by many investors, who have been bailing out of Apple's stock amid tougher competition for the iPhone and the iPad and the lack of a new product line since Tim Cook became the company's CEO shortly before Jobs' death. Apple's market value has dropped by 36 percent, or about $235 billion, from its all-time high reached last September.

The incremental steps that Apple has been taking with the iPod, iPhone and iPad have been fine, Bushnell says, but not enough to prove the company is still thinking differently.

"To really maintain the cutting edge that they live on, they will have to do some radical things that resonate," Bushnell said. "They probably have three more years before they really have to do something big. I hope they are working on it right now."

Bushnell is still keeping busy himself. When he isn't writing, he is running his latest start-up, Brainrush, which is trying to turn the process of learning into a game-like experience. He says he hopes to fix an educational system that he believes is "incorrect, inefficient and bureaucratic - all the things you don't want to see in your workforce of the future."

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