6 retirement myths you need to ignore

http://www.cnbc.com/id/101268639
Anthony Volastro | Strategic Content & News Partnerships, Segment Producer

Ever find yourself around the watercooler discussing with co-workers how your 401(k) is performing—likely leading to the increasingly popular "I'll never be able to retire" discussion? It's becoming a bit of a modern-day lament, begging the question: Why do Americans have this doom-and-gloom attitude about their golden years' financial situation?

Academic, institutional and media reports tend to serve up workers with warnings—often wrapping up with a "save now and save more" silver lining. It doesn't seem to be inspiring the masses. According to a Wells Fargo study, 37 percent of Americans expect to work until they are too sick to work or die.

Given the current state of America's retirement, it's worth taking a look at how we have arrived at this point--and, in particular, the retirement myths that have persisted for decades but aren't doing current savers as much good as they (and you) probably think. We asked retirement experts to weigh in.

Let's start with the biggest retirement myth of all....

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Myth # 1: The 401(k) was created to boost your retirement dollars.

Not really. You might not have given it a second thought as to why you have a 401(k), the retirement savings standard, but the truth is, it happened by chance—not by some deliberate congressional plan.

It all started with the Revenue Act of 1978, spearheaded by Rep. Al Ullman, D-Ore., a staunch believer in tax cuts. In the 184-page bill was a rather simple and short provision called 401(k). It was essentially buried in the report and overlooked by nearly everyone. That is, until a Pennsylvania benefits consultant named Ted Benna noticed that the provision—established for such things as deferred-stock bonus plans—could be applied to joint tax-differed employee and company accounts. By 1982 companies such as Johnson & Johnson, PepsiCo, J.C. Penney and Hughes Aircraft Company were using 401(k) plans.

The kicker is that Benna has been critical of 401(k)s over the years, implying that he helped create a monster. He envisioned the plans to be simple plans on par with pensions, but more recently Benna has said he would "blow up the system" and start over again with something new.

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Myth # 2: You need 80 percent of your current income level in retirement.

The idea that you need 80 percent of your current salary in retirement might be wildly exaggerated. This "rule of thumb" is taken to task in a new report by David Blanchett, Morningstar's head of retirement research: "When we modeled actual spending patterns over a couple's life expectancy ... the data shows that many retirees may need approximately 20 percent less in savings."

The report concluded that while the 80 percent rule is a decent number, the actual replacement goal varies depending on pre- and post-retirement lifestyles. Which means you may have more money than you think to invest today in additional (and critical) elder needs, including ... (cue the next retirement myth, please)

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Myth # 3: You're too young to start paying for long-term care.

Long-term care could be the next major retirement crisis in America. The Department of Health and Human Services expects that some 70 percent of Americans over the age of 65 will need it at some point. Currently, only about 8 million Americans have long-term care coverage.

The topic has been getting more attention over the last few years as rates have been skyrocketing. The reason is that insurers didn't count on the fact that so few people would drop their coverage—about 1 percent—and that care costs would rise so much. It's forced many insurers to get out of the game. For policyholders, rates are rapidly rising an average of 40 percent.

The best move to make is to grab a long-term care policy while you are still working. "If you want long-term care insurance to pay some of the cost, you'll need to health qualify, and that starts to get tricky after age 65," said Jesse Slome, executive director of the American Association for Long-Term Care Insurance.

When is the best age to start putting your dollars in these policies? "The sweet spot is mid–50s to mid–60s," Slome said.

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Myth # 4: Don't ever touch your principal.

The 4 percenters—those who tout the idea that you never withdraw more than that from your portfolio annually—might be too dogmatic in their belief. The rule is meant to establish a withdrawal rate that pulls out dollars earned from interest and investment gains, allowing your principal to remain intact. However, touching your principal is not out of the question.

"It really is okay to spend your capital. That's what it is there for," said Dr. Tony Webb, senior research economist at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

Not touching your capital really applies to wealthy individuals who generate high returns and want to pass their capital onto heirs. For those individuals with $150,000 to $1 million in retirement savings, Webb said they should consider using some of the principal to supplement their income.

The myth and mantra of "Never touch it" starts in a worker's retirement-saving days. According to Webb, many individuals carry over that mentality into retirement and are afraid to touch their nest egg. "The idea is to spend down in retirement; that's why you save. Saving is not a goal in itself."

Anthony Bradshaw | Getty Images

Myth # 5: You can bank on your annuity.

Annuities have always been considered an option for extra retirement savings after maxing out your 401(k), IRAs and making your pension contributions. There is a perception that annuities are a source of guaranteed income. Well, think again: They aren't. According to Mercer Bullard, a law professor at the University of Mississippi and former assistant chief counsel in the Securities and Exchange Commission's Division of Investment Management, an annuity "won't be there if the insurance company fails and the resolution of that failure does not include full coverage of annuity payouts."

Bullard said that as regulators continue to allow insurance companies to take on more risk, the risk of your annuity taking a bath is increasing. The International Monetary Fund warned in its Global Financial Stability report earlier this year that life insurers were amassing positions in risky investments that could threaten their solvency—risky bets they were taking to make up for a shortfall in future obligations.

Myth # 6: Retirement shortfall warning bells are waking up Americans.

Studies and reports regarding doomsday scenarios for Americans in retirement abound, most warning that we are not saving enough and need to make up for lost time. According to the Plan Sponsor Council of America, the country as a whole saved more in their 401(k)s last year—6.8 percent of their salary vs. 6.4 percent in 2011. Yet according to Wells Fargo, only 52 percent of Americans are confident they will have enough saved to retire.

More and more workers are aware of the grim outlook when it comes to actually attaining the "American retirement dream" of golfing in Florida and finally taking those once-in-a-lifetime trips abroad. So how come more Americans are not stepping up their game?

For one, the country is still emerging from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. But there is a psychological factor that plays a big part in retirement-saving complacency.

"The present feels much more real and important than projecting a potential problem in an uncertain future." said Dr. Pamela Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Research Center. The repeated phrase of "not saving enough" has little effect, because it does not translate into something that has been experienced, Rutledge said.

Take the antismoking campaign that began in the early '80s. The ads and commercial spots had little effect. It wasn't until smoking-related deaths became more prevalent that folks began to take action.

There is also a habit-changing component to saving. "Change is hard. Saving money, when you haven't been saving means making a change," Rutledge said. Saving more requires you to break a habit, which is an upset to your normal flow, and making even small changes—like upping your contributions by a small percentage—can be a challenge for some.

Yet it's not a myth that if you make little changes, the rewards could end up being great. Changes often lead to positive results and reinforcement. "In behavior change, small changes create small victories that lead to larger and more frequent changes," Rutledge said.

—By Anthony Volastro, Segment Producer, CNBC

Lima Cara Mengomunikasikan Positioning

http://the-marketeers.com/archives/lima-cara-mengkomunikasikan-positioning.html#.UrCrxNIW0Xk
 Sigit Kurniawan



Pada tulisan "Cara Bangun Positioning Merek yang Kuat" dijelaskan empat hal terkait dengan cara membangun positioning yang kuat, yakni customer, company, competitor, dan change. Tulisan berikut adalah lima cara bagaimana mengkomunikasikan positioning itu agar sampai dan mudah dipahami oleh konsumen.

1. Be Creative
Kreativitas dalam mendesain positioning mutlak diperlukan. Alasannya, desain positioning bukan standar-standar saja dan tidak memiliki daya tarik. Kreativitas ini diperlukan untuk merebut perhatian konsumen. Harapannya, positioning yang kreatif ini dengan gampang tertanam di benak para pelanggannya secara positif.

2. Simplicity
Agar gampang dipahami dan diterima oleh pelanggan, positioning harus bisa disampaikan sesederhana mungkin. Dengan penyampaian yang sederhana, pelanggan tidak usah berpikir keras untuk memahaminya.

3. Flexible
Positioning yang baik harus dinamis. Positioning ini harus dikontekstualkan dengan tren perubahan yang ada, baik tren pasar maupun tren perilaku pelannggan. Sebab itu, repositioning secara kontinu itu diperlukan.

4. Own, Dominate, Protect
Positioning yang kuat harus tersusun dari kata-kata pilihan yang ampuh merebut atensi pelanggan. Positioning juga sebisanya mendominasi kategori yang akan dimasuki. Secara kontinu, posisi dominan tersebut dipertahankan dari positioning pesaing/

5. Use Their Language
Bahasa sangat menentukan dalam penyampaian positioning. Gunakan komunikasi dengan bahasa yang digunakan oleh target pasar agar mudah dipahami dan membangun kedekatan dengan pengalaman mereka.

When talking with patients, sometimes we skip steps

ON COMMUNICATIONS
http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2013/11/talking-patients-skip-steps.html
ILANA YURKIEWICZ

“Ms. M,” the resident says, “I saw in your chart that the last time you had surgery you had a pulmonary embolism.” She nods with recognition: “I felt like I couldn’t breathe. It was really scary.” Then: “I sure don’t want that again.” The resident lifts up the covers and sees that the patient’s calves don compression boots. “Make sure you keep the boots on,” he says, pointing.

What do boots have to do with breathing? The full story of what the resident meant was this: a pulmonary embolism, or blockage of a lung artery, is most commonly caused by a blood clot formed in the leg that breaks off and travels up to the lungs. Wearing compression boots increases blood flow in the calves, helping to prevent those clots.

Perhaps Ms. M. was aware of that. But there was a mental leap involved in that conversation. By bypassing the more thorough explanation and instead jumping from the topic of lungs to legs, the resident made an implicit assumption that the patient was following his train of thought.

It’s just one example of a more widespread lapse in communication with patients: sometimes, we skip steps. We assume understanding of intervening explanations that may be missing from the words we actually say aloud.

In some ways, medical training is like learning to speak a foreign language. We spend our first two years of medical school in classrooms, trying to absorb terminology and draw conceptual connections as quickly and as comprehensively as possible. Then in our third year, we enter the hospitals and actually get to speak it. On a daily basis, we converse with words we hadn’t known two years ago and link them in ways that were not intuitively obvious. As we use that language more and more, we get better with it. The more fluent we get, however, the more terse we can become too.

I worked with one doctor who explained that style in front of patients as “talking shop.” We do it frequently on rounds. We ask one another questions and answer them with relevant physical exam findings, lab values, and imaging results – often without explaining how those findings help answer the question, as it’s taken for granted we know what they imply. She’s complaining of post-op abdominal pain, I might say, and my chief resident asks could she have an abscess? And I mention her high white cell count (implying she might). Are we worried about cholangitis? asks the attending, and I state his liver function tests within the normal range (implying it’s less likely).

It’s reflected in our questioning at the bedside, too. A man comes to the emergency room with back pain, and we might ask about urinary incontinence. A woman presents with loss of menstrual periods, and we might ask about changes in vision. To the untrained eye, some (or much) of what we ask might seem unrelated. I remember a patient presenting with abdominal pain once tried to redirect me when I asked about back pain, thinking my question was a misunderstanding: “no, no — it’s my stomach that’s hurting!”

I understand the temptation; skipping words saves times. Extra explanations may be redundant among certain crowds. And there’s something satisfying about the universal nature of the medical language, such that even if you meet healthcare workers whom you’ve never met before, you can launch into shop talk and appreciate that they’ll get it. There’s satisfaction in the fact that the same concepts will trigger similar understanding, with similar follow-up thoughts, questions, and concerns.

The glitch, however, occurs when we take those mental frameworks and communicate them to patients with similar scaffolding. We forget who speaks what.

The problem is that less than complete explanations translate to less that complete understanding — which translates to less than complete ability to follow recommendations. I’m less likely to take a daily walk, wear uncomfortable boots around my calves, or exhale into my incentive spirometer multiple times a day if I don’t know why I should. But I’m much more likely to do those things if I can connect them to the last time I was post-op and came down with trouble breathing. I’m less likely to continue my medications at home if I cannot connect them with the consequences of not taking them.

Moreover, if we don’t complete our explanations, patients may fill in the gaps themselves in ways that might not be accurate. It’s certainly not their fault. It’s human nature. Our brains try to make sense of the information we gather, accumulating bits and pieces and trying to form a coherent story out of them. Once I launched into questions about family history — including family history of cancer — and the patient, relating that with the questions I had just asked her symptoms, suddenly looked stricken: “what I have isn’t considered cancer, is it?” I had left a break in the transition, and she had filled it in with a more malignant scenario.

Granted, there’s a range of complexity involved in medical lingo, along with widely varying levels of health literacy, and the goal should not in any way resemble condescension to patients. However, we also should not presume a grasp of medical topics that require multistep reasoning. Some connections only seem intuitive because we’ve seen and said them time and time again, but are actually quite complex — just as they were to us — when heard for the first them. It’s possible to strike a balance; I’ve seen a handful of wonderful doctors, true models for excellent communication, who manage to tailor their explanations so that all their patients leave the doctor’s visit neither insulted nor confused.

I’d rather err on the side of clearer explanations. I’d rather err away from potential unexplained gaps and unanswered questions. If patients do not follow up, I hope we don’t automatically wonder where they went wrong. I hope we can instead reflect carefully on what we said — or, more likely, what we did not say.

Ilana Yurkiewicz is a medical student who blogs at Unofficial Prognosis.

Simplicity Is Key to Both Managing People and Building Products

http://hbr.org/tip/2013/12/06/simplicity-is-key-to-both-managing-people-and-building-products

The technology industry was built on amazing products, but many principles of product development correlate to smart management principles. Successful product managers know that customers respond best to simplicity, when the only features available are ones they want. Otherwise, complexity will creep in and cloud your offering. For example, between 1984 and 2003, Microsoft Word went from 40 features to more than 1,500—and many overwhelmed users turned to simpler alternatives. Simplicity is also a feature of great management. Employees in flat organizations are empowered to gather insights and pursue ideas, but they’re also overwhelmed by choices: how to prioritize their days, whether to go to a particular meeting, which emails to read. To be a superior manager, simplify. Draw a clear mission for your team, articulate group goals, and get out of the way to enable your people to make day-to-day decisions.

Diplomasi Makan Siang Jokowi, "Menang Tanpa Ngasorake"

ON HOW TO DEAL WITH PEOPLE ---
http://megapolitan.kompas.com/read/2013/12/05/1607234/Diplomasi.Makan.Siang.Jokowi.Menang.Tanpa.Ngasaroke.
Oleh Robert Adhi KSP


Gubernur DKI Jakarta Joko Widodo menggunakan diplomasi makan siang bersama untuk menyelesaikan berbagai persoalan. Dalam diplomasi makan siang bersama, Jokowi mempraktikkan filosofi Jawa, "menang tanpa ngasorake" (menang tanpa perlu mengalahkan dan mempermalukan). | KOMPAS/WISNU WIDIANTORO

ADA yang menarik dari gaya kepemimpinan Gubernur DKI Jakarta Joko Widodo. Gubernur kelahiran Solo yang akrab dengan panggilan Jokowi ini mengedepankan jalan musyawarah untuk menyelesaikan berbagai persoalan yang dihadapi Pemerintah Provinsi DKI Jakarta.

Jokowi menyelesaikan banyak persoalan dengan mengajak warga duduk bersama sambil menikmati makan siang. Cara ini belum pernah dilakukan para pemimpin Jakarta sebelumnya.

Salah satu contoh diplomasi makan siang yang berakhir dengan baik adalah ketika orang nomor satu di DKI Jakarta ini mengajak makan bareng warga Petukangan Selatan, Kecamatan Pesanggrahan, Jakarta Selatan. Setelah itu, sengketa panjang terkait dengan ganti rugi lahan untuk proyek Jakarta Outer Ring Road West 2 (JORR W2) berakhir happy ending. (Kompas, 3 Desember 2013).

Padahal, sejak 2010, warga menolak nilai ganti rugi Rp 3,5 juta-Rp 8 juta per meter persegi yang ditetapkan pemerintah. Setelah warga diajak makan siang bersama Jokowi, mereka merasa diwongke atau dimanusiakan pemimpinnya. Nilai ganti rugi diberikan tanpa perubahan apa pun. Rakyat bahagia, pemimpin senang. JORR W2 pun akhirnya dapat dikerjakan.

Jokowi juga pernah mengundang warga di sekitar Waduk Pluit dan Waduk Ria Rio serta pengusaha pemotongan unggas. Jokowi paham, berbagai persoalan tidak akan dapat diselesaikan bila tak ada komunikasi intens antara pemimpin dan rakyatnya.

Belum lama ini Jokowi bersama wakilnya, Basuki T Purnama, menggelar makan siang bersama dengan DPRD DKI Jakarta di rumah dinas Gubernur DKI. Ketua DPRD DKI Jakarta Ferrial Sofyan menyambut baik ajakan Gubernur Jokowi.

Diplomasi makan siang ini merupakan bentuk komunikasi politik yang bagus antara eksekutif dan legislatif. Sebelumnya banyak anggota DPRD DKI berkomentar melalui media. Pertemuan yang direncanakan digelar dua bulan sekali itu akan mendekatkan komunikasi Gubernur DKI dan jajarannya dengan DPRD DKI Jakarta. Yang pasti, hal itu akan dapat menghindari kesalahpahaman.

Dalam falsafah Jawa, ada peribahasa "nglurug tanpa bala, menang tanpa ngasorake", yang artinya "menyerbu tanpa perlu mengerahkan pasukan, menang tanpa mempermalukan".

Jokowi percaya, ia dapat menyelesaikan persoalan tanpa melalui cara-cara kekerasan. Ia mengedepankan sikap merendahkan hati tanpa perlu mempermalukan. Kalau kita bandingkan dengan cara-cara rezim sebelumnya, pendekatan Jokowi kali ini lebih manusiawi.

Pada prinsipnya, orang Jawa memiliki sikap andhap asor (rendah hati) dan tidak suka mempermalukan orang lain. Dalam setiap persoalan, diupayakan agar kita mencapai keinginan tanpa harus membuat orang lain merasa dikuasai atau dikalahkan.

Jokowi percaya ada sewu dalan (seribu jalan) untuk mencapai tujuan tanpa harus menempatkan orang lain sebagai lawan. Ungkapan menang tanpa ngasorake sangat tepat untuk menciptakan harmoni dalam masyarakat. Semua diarahkan untuk menghindari timbulnya konflik. Ini berkaitan erat dengan ungkapan wani ngalah luhur wekasane (berani mengalah luhur pada akhirnya).

Jokowi paham betul falsafah Jawa menang tanpa ngasorake harus dipraktikkan dalam kepemimpinannya. Dalam menyelesaikan persoalan, Jokowi tidak ingin rakyatnya merasa kalah atau dipermalukan. Bila rakyatdiwongke, dimanusiakan, persoalan lebih mudah diselesaikan. Itulah makna diplomasi makan siang yang dilakukan Jokowi.

Karyawan “Berkicau” di Jejaring Sosial, Ancaman atau Peluang?

http://www.marketing.co.id/karyawan-%E2%80%9Cberkicau%E2%80%9D-di-jejaring-sosial-ancaman-atau-peluang/

www.marketing.co.id – Twitter diblokir di Mesir gara-gara dikhawatirkan situs jejaring sosial tersebut dipergunakan para demonstran untuk menggalang dukungan. Menurut petinggi negara Mesir, Twitter dianggap ancaman bagi keamanan negara.

Tidak hanya level negara, ternyata masih banyak perusahaan di Indonesia yang merasa terancam dengan “kicauan” karyawan mereka di jejaring sosial. Apakah benar demikian? Ataukah hal ini bisa dijadikan peluang?

Jejaring sosial di Indonesia sudah merupakan bagian dari kehidupan masyarakat yang terkoneksi secara online. Bahkan Indonesia sudah menempati urutan kedua negara pengguna Facebook terbesar di dunia. Jakarta juga dinobatkan sebagai ibukota Twitter Asia.

Kenyataan ini sering kali membuat korporat ngeri, jika dikaitkan dengan keterlibatan para karyawan mereka di jejaring sosial. Sebagian korporasi malah memblokir layanan jejaring sosial dengan berbagai alasan, seperti ketidakefektifan kerja, karyawan makin malas, dan lain sebagainya. “Karyawan saya jadi tidak optimal kerja, sibuk nge-Tweet melulu…,” kata seorang kepala divisi sebuah perusahaan jasa. “Lha…, kalau mereka bocorin isu yang enggak benar tentang perusahaan, bagaimana?” kata salah satu pemilik perusahaan.

Sebenarnya tidak perlu merasa panik dan antijejaring sosial seperti itu. Jika jejaring sosial di kantor diblokir, apakah bisa menjamin karyawan tidak mengakses situs jejaring sosial melalui komputer rumah mereka, melalui mobile devices, atau online devices yang lainnya?

Alih-alih kita repot membatasi kebebasan berekspresi para karyawan melalui jejaring sosial, lebih baik kalau kita memberdayakan karyawan di jejaring sosial untuk membangun kredibilitas korporat di jejaring sosial dengan langkah-langkah sebagai berikut:

Create SocMed Blueprint

Sebuah social media blueprint dapat menjadi petunjuk pelaksanaan kebijakan perusahaan seputar aktivitas media sosial karyawannya. Dalam social media blueprint dijabarkan aksi dan reaksi korporat menanggapi semua hal berkaitan dengan jejaring sosial.

Create Employee SocMed Guidelines

Beri aturan yang jelas tentang penggunaan jejaring sosial, hal-hal yang dibolehkan dan hal-hal yang tidak diperkenankan untuk di-share. Biasanya kebijakan ini hampir sama dengan kebijakan korporat dalam berkomunikasi kepada media.

Speak with Their Language

Buatlah representasi resmi korporat di jejaring sosial sebagai media komunikasi karyawan dan perusahaan. Jika memungkinkan, libatkan para pimpinan perusahaan di dalam percakapan yang terjadi. “The Good CEOs is the one who can speak the language of the people.” Ketika banyak karyawan mereka aktif di jejaring sosial, si pemimpin juga harus ikut nimbrung ngobrol di sana, biar “nyambung”.

Create a Routine SocMed Monitoring

Tunjukkan kepada karyawan kalau korporat selalu memonitor hal yang menjadi percakapan di jejaring sosial, terutama yang mengusung bahan perbincangan seputar perusahaan. Dan kebijakan tertentu akan dilakukan terhadap pelanggaran atas socmed employee guidelines. Hal ini akan membuat karyawan lebih bijak dalam memilih kalimat dan perkataan mereka di situs jejaring sosial.

Makin erat employee engagement (offline dan online), akan berpengaruh pada meningkatnya produktivitas karyawan, motivasi karyawan, dan retensi karyawan. Sedari dini, korporat harus mampu memanfaatkan basis karyawan yang loyal sebagai salah satu kekuatan yang efektif untuk meningkatkan kredibilitas perusahaan di jejaring sosial. “Every good conversation starts with a good listening.”

Dengan rutin mendengar atau memonitor percakapan dalam jejaring sosial, hal tersebut akan memberikan kontribusi yang besar dalam pemahaman kita untuk deteksi dini mengenai permasalahan internal perusahaan yang ada. Sehingga selanjutnya, perusahaan dapat meninjau kebijakan dan menetapkan action selanjutnya untuk perkembangan perusahaan ke arah yang lebih baik.

Jadi, apakah perusahaan Anda masih menganggap “kicauan” karyawan sebagai ancaman? (Catur PW)

Stile: Christie's strategy of wooing key Democrats pays off big

lesson learned: long term winning process
http://www.northjersey.com/columnists/Stile_Christies_strategy_of_wooing_key_Democrats_pays_off_big.html
By CHARLES STILE
COLUMNIST

A day after routing Jon Corzine in 2009, Republican Governor-elect Chris Christie placed a call to the Democratic mayor of Woodbridge, John McCormac, inviting him to join his transition team.

McCormac, a state treasurer under Gov. James E. McGreevey who continues to be a fixture in the state Democratic Party, was happy to sign on.

It proved to be a wise move for McCormac and his town. Three years later, Christie returned the favor, using his political muscle to help approve a 700-megawatt power plant for Woodbridge, a project expected to generate jobs and revenue for decades.

“After elections, it doesn’t matter what party” people are in, McCormac said. “We all have to work together for the benefit of our citizens.”

The “I’ll help you, you help me” alliance with McCormac, made within hours of Christie’s victory four years ago, illustrates an overlooked tactic that propelled his win Tuesday over Democrat Barbara Buono, a longtime state senator from Middlesex County.

Christie’s bold leadership during Superstorm Sandy, the shrewd marketing of his Jersey tough guy persona and several important legislative accomplishments are indeed important factors in the strong support for his reelection. But while the public was seeing all of that, Christie discreetly and methodically courted Democrats with every lever of power at his disposal. By the end, many of those Democrats would supply the manpower, money or simply the photo ops for his campaign.

Long before Buono entered a race that no other Democratic contender wanted to come near, Christie had already won the campaign. While the cameras and the social-media feeds and the political pundits focused on Christie’s forceful personality, his often over-the-top comments and his welcoming embrace of President Obama after Sandy, Christie was planting the seeds for his own reelection, Demo­cratic mayor by Democratic mayor, Democratic boss by Democratic boss, Demo­cratic union leader by Democratic union leader. As the ancient Chinese military tome “The Art of War” noted, “Every battle is won before it is fought.”

Christie won the unofficial support — and admiration — of George Norcross, the South Jersey insurance executive and the state’s most powerful Democrat, by carrying out an overhaul of the state’s higher education system that poured more money into that region. He wooed Democratic-allied construction unions by financing massive transportation projects and backing tax incentives for long-dormant mega-projects in Atlantic City and the Meadowlands. He used his clout to secure approvals for large Port Authority of New York and New Jersey projects in Democratic towns.

By the end of this campaign, Demo­crats not only endorsed Christie, they lavished him with praise, eager to demonstrate their fealty and well aware that the chances of intraparty punishment were nil. Union City Mayor Brian Stack, who is also a state senator, gave Christie a hero’s welcome — and a parade. Essex County Sheriff Armando Fontoura took the unusual step of vigorously defending Christie’s debate performance.

And although Cory Booker formally endorsed Buono, Booker, the state’s most popular Democrat, publicly praised Christie during a Newark supermarket groundbreaking. It was Booker’s first public event after winning the U.S. Senate seat last month. Events with Buono would have to wait.

But Christie’s early, old-school “outreach” worked to divide, conquer and dilute the power of the state’s ruling Democrats. Despite the party’s power on paper — 700,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans and majority control of both houses of the Legislature — Christie’s strategy exploited its divisions and realized its vaunted machinery put power and self-preservation ahead of partisan loyalty.

Christie revived the transactional, political dynamic that vanished during the rocky tenure of Corzine, his predecessor. Legislators and mayors — who care more about obtaining environmental permits and road project funding and financing for community clubhouses — fumed at Corzine’s clumsy deal-making and his CEO-like aloofness.

Christie recognized the post-Corzine hunger among the political class for a governor’s office willing to listen and deal. It made many officials easy prey for Christie’s entreaties.

“Jon Corzine continues to haunt the Democratic Party,” said state Sen. Ray Lesniak, a Union County Democrat.

Christie reopened the governor’s office, but with an implied “you’re either with me or against me” ethos. Those who worked with him — by keeping a low profile, voting for parts of his agenda or even endorsing his reelection — could count on getting their phone calls returned and their needs addressed. Those who criticized risked being locked out.

For some Democrats, it was an easy decision. They saw no advantage in tangling with a governor whose popularity only seemed to soar with every attack on sewerage authority bureaucrats, teacher union leaders and the occasional mayor, like Atlantic City’s Lorenzo Langford, one of the few big-city mayors who openly clashed with Christie.

“Mayors now feel they have a voice in Trenton,” said one Democratic mayor, who declined to be identified for fear of alienating some intraparty allies. “Why did we want to change that?”

Christie forged ties with Democrats for symbolic as well as strategic reasons. He secured the endorsement of Michael Blunt, the African-American mayor of Chesilhurst in Camden County, one of only three small towns that former Gov. Thomas H. Kean did not carry in his 1985 reelection landslide.

Blunt said he was impressed with Christie’s forthright style and the help the town received from the Department of Community Affairs in getting the town’s finances in order. And that help was boosted by a $200,000 special state aid package for economically distressed towns in 2011.

“We received transitional aid when a lot of other towns didn’t receive any,” Blunt said.

Christie won the endorsement of Harrison Mayor Ray McDonough after the governor secured approval from the Port Authority for a $250 million PATH transit hub for the downtown. Harrison was also the beneficiary of a $2 million state aid award in 2012.

Christie also attracted mayors with the promise of access and assistance in the future.

River Edge Mayor Sandy Moscaritolo, who endorsed Christie last month, was part of a group of Democratic mayors Christie invited to Drumthwacket, the governor’s mansion in Princeton.

He said “I understand the political position you are in,” Moscaritolo said. “But if you can support me, I would really appreciate it.”

Some Democratic donors also helped Christie with their checkbooks. He received $6,300 from lawyers at DeCotiis, FitzPatrick and Cole of Teaneck. Listed among the donors is Al DeCotiis, a longtime member of the Democratic National Committee and a fundraiser for Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Michael DeCotiis, who served as chief counsel to McGreevey.

Buono received nothing from the firm. The DeCotiis family members were unavailable for comment, said William Murray, a spokesman.

Several lobbyists, who declined to be identified, said many traditional donors didn’t want to waste money investing on a long shot like Buono. One veteran lobbyist said he didn’t want to put his career or his clients in “harm’s way” — meaning they didn’t want to risk being cut off by Christie if their names appeared on Buono’s donor lists.

Political veterans say Christie is simply following an “outreach” path hewn by his mentor, Kean, who fostered generally warm relations with urban Democrats in the 1980s. But Christie adapted the approach in his own aggressive style.

While he brought down Democratic Party bosses across the state during his seven-year turn as U.S. attorney for New Jersey, Christie as governor eagerly collaborated with those who still retained their grip on the political machinery.

His relationship with Norcross began with quiet, behind-the-scenes negotiations that evolved into a warm partnership publicly celebrated at news conferences.

Norcross and his allies, particularly Democratic state Senate President Stephen Sweeney, delivered crucial Democratic votes on the key Christie achievements, such as legislation forcing public employees to pay more for health and pension benefits or a law limiting annual property-tax hikes to 2 percent.

Christie also relied on his relationship with Democratic Essex County Executive Joseph DiVincenzo, which some say took root in 2002, when then-U.S. Attorney Christie took the unusual step of writing a letter declaring that DiVincenzo was not a target of a federal grand jury investigation into Essex County government.

When Christie was pushing for stricter rules on arbitration awards for police and fire union contracts, Christie turned DiVincenzo into a de facto lobbyist. During a heated legislative session, DiVincenzo persuaded Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver — who is also DiVincenzo’s underling in her job as an assistant Essex County administrator — to withdraw a weaker version of the bill.

Christie rewarded DiVincenzo with influence and largess — a new senior center in Belleville, $4 million to finance a new technology wing at the Essex County Vocational Center, $7 million in Port Authority aid for a new waterfront park in Newark.

DiVincenzo returned the favor by publicly endorsing Christie’s reelection. Christie praised DiVincenzo as a bold bipartisan leader and refused to distance himself from DiVincenzo after the state Election Law Enforcement Commission charged him with using his campaign account for personal items such as trips to Puerto Rico and gym memberships. His lawyer denies that they were personal expenses.

“The person who controls the budget is the governor,” DiVincenzo said in April, distilling the bottom-line dynamic of their relationship. “When you want to get things done, you go to the governor.”

Christie’s relationship with these two Democratic leaders effectively doomed Buono’s chances. DiVincenzo deployed the Essex campaign machinery for Christie. Norcross, Sweeney and the Democratic allies focused almost entirely on the legislative races. And their vaunted fundraising machine produced only token support for Buono.

Christie’s legendary clashes with teachers and other public employee unions helped make him a hero among Republican audiences, but he also quietly courted trade unions, including those who backed Corzine in the 2009 race.

Only a few months after Christie took office, in mid-2010, a group of labor leaders found themselves at the governor’s mansion in Princeton, listening to the new Republican governor deliver his pitch.

“He said he wants to be our friend,” said Ray Pocino, the powerful leader of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, recalling Christie’s overture. “You know of any legislation that is important to you? You tell me what the reasons are and I’ll do what I can to make it happen.”

Christie’s biggest prize was Pocino’s Laborers Union of 20,000 members. Christie grabbed the endorsement last December — even before the Democrats had settled on a nominee.

Shortly after Christie’s election, Pocino, who serves as a commissioner on both the Turnpike and Port Authority boards, publicly criticized Christie for canceling construction on a long-planned second rail tunnel under the Hudson River in 2011.

But that disappointment was smoothed over by Christie’s decision to spend money dedicated to the project to replenish the state’s Transportation Trust Fund, which finances road and rail projects, and other large-scale projects, such as the raising of the Bayonne Bridge and repairs to the Pulaski Skyway.

“That’s going to create a hell of a lot more jobs,” Pocino said. And Christie’s support for tax incentives to revive the American Dream mall in the Meadowlands and the stalled Revel Casino and Spa in Atlantic City also won labor support.

The Laborers signaled that they intend to invest in Christie’s future — they donated $300,000 to the Republican Governors Association, which Christie is set to lead next year.

Pocino’s members comprise the hard-hat crews on construction sites. For this election, the Laborers and scores of Democrats from city halls to the State House helped pave the road for Christie’s reelection and his future. It is a road paved with the tried-and-true political macadam of horse-trading and alliances of convenience.

10 Warning Signs You're Not Cut Out to Be an Entrepreneur

http://smallbusiness.foxbusiness.com/entrepreneurs/2013/10/31/10-warning-signs-youre-not-cut-out-to-be-entrepreneur/?intcmp=sbcfeatures
By Nicole Fallon



Think you're ready to start a business? Let's say you've got a great idea, a solid business plan and even a decent amount of startup money. If you have these things, you might be able to successfully launch your business. But are you really cut out to be an entrepreneur?

Dan Steenerson, a business speaker, consultant and author, doesn't want anyone to be disillusioned by the allure of being your own boss: Starting a business isn't easy, and it certainly isn't glamorous, he warned would-be entrepreneurs. While there's no formula for the perfect entrepreneur, the commitment and dedication it takes to be a business owner does require a few key personality traits, and they aren't ones that everyone naturally has.

Steenerson identified 10 warning signs that a person isn't meant to start and run a business. If any of these "red flags" apply to you, you might want to reconsider your entrepreneurial goals and stick to your day job.

[Can Entrepreneurship Be Taught?]

You can't stand the heat. Before you jump into self-employment, make sure you're very comfortable being uncomfortable. Every day, you'll need to try something new for the first time. You have to be ready to put yourself out there and do things you’ve never done before — all with less financial security.

You have professional ADD. If you get bored and frustrated easily, or you're the type of person who likes to go in a new direction every 60 days, business ownership may not be for you. Being an entrepreneur requires unwavering laser focus to achieve your business goals.

You get stage fright. As a business owner, you are the primary spokesperson for your company. You need to be ready and willing to take center stage and spread the word whenever possible. If you're uncomfortable in the spotlight or you don’t like public speaking, you'd better master these competencies before you launch.

You hate roller coasters. As a business owner, you never know what’s around the corner. It could be a really steep hill or gut-wrenching free fall. There will be countless ups and downs, and you need to be prepared to hang on and enjoy the ride.

You think complexity is cool. Complexity may be cool, but it's hard to create, market and sell. The simplest solutions are the most successful, and as a business owner, you need the ability to distill concepts to their simplest forms so they can be easily communicated.

You can't explain the steps of shoe-tying. Tying a shoe is a complicated. So is running a business. You have to be able to delegate tasks and to direct others, meaning you need the ability to break big ideas into easy, actionable steps for implementation.

You don't believe in marketing. Marketing makes the business world go round. If you don't embrace it, you'll never succeed. You need to be ready to dedicate effort and money to the task of marketing your company, and give it time to work using a variety of mediums. There's no silver bullet.

You're easily winded. Once you get past the adrenaline rush of starting your own business, you'll encounter a portion of the journey called the "middle mile." This is where you face challenge and drudgery. Your feet will hurt and your breathing will be labored. Despite these inconveniences, you must be able to place one foot in front of the other and press on.

You're a problem passer. In business, there are problems that must be decisively resolved by the owner. Sometimes customers and employees will be unhappy with your decisions and that's OK. Successful entrepreneurs never postpone difficult choices.

You're on the quest for quick cash. Profit shouldn't be the reason you are in business. You are in business to solve problems and to serve others. If you find a way to deliver a better solution or service than your competitors, you will make plenty of money, but it doesn't happen overnight.

Flicker on my murky days

Note on Sunday, March 26,2006 7:35:03 AM

Sent by a very considerate friend

Titik Terendah
Oleh : Kafi Kurnia (peka@indo.net.id)

TITIK terendah, atau yang populer disebut "the lowest point", seringkali menjadi posisi yang dihindari banyak orang. Secara strategis tidak akan menguntungkan. Tetapi bukan berarti tidak bisa dimanfaatkan. Paul Arden, penulis buku kontroversial, It's not How
Good You Are, It's How Good You Want to be, menulis bahwa titik terendah seringkali menjadi posisi terbaik untuk beriklan.

Misalnya saja Bali saat ini. Sejak peristiwa bom kedua di Jimbaran, Bali secara perlahan dan pasti terasa semakin sepi. Hampir semua industri pariwisata berteriak karena bisnis menurun secara drastis. Tingkat hunian hotel banyak yang hanya di bawah 20%.

Hal itu saya rasakan ketika mengunjungi Bali, minggu lalu. Ketika tiba di depan hotel, saya disambut secara ramah dan luar biasa. Guest relations hotel malah memberikan pelayanan istimewa. Kamar hotel saya di-"upgrade" ke tingkat yang lebih mewah. Tapi, ketika esoknya membayar biaya kamar, saya kaget bukan main. Harganya cuma Rp 600.000 nett, sudah termasuk pajak dan makan pagi. Murah sekali. Ini harga 50% dari biasanya. Saya kaget bukan main.

Selama di Bali, saya sempat jalan-jalan. Biasanya saya menyewa mobil dan sopir seharga Rp 350.000 untuk 10 jam. Kali ini, karena sepi luar biasa, sang sopir pasrah dan tidak menentukan tarif. Menurut pegawai hotel, tarif mereka turun hingga Rp 250.000. Ketika berjalan-jalan, saya sempat kecewa, beberapa toko favorit saya untuk berbelanja ternyata tutup. Mereka bangkrut karena sepi pengunjung.

Restoran-restoran juga mengalami hal yang sama. Uniknya, karena situasi sepi ini, kualitas pelayanan naik tajam. Hal ini saya rasakan ketika makan di restoran dan berbelanja. Saya mendapat pelayanan khusus. Lebih diperhatikan. Saya merasa tersanjung sekali. Tiba-tiba saya merasakan kenikmatan yang ekstra dan berlebih, tetapi uang yang saya keluarkan justru lebih sedikit. Kesimpulannya, kalau Anda ingin menikmati Bali, inilah saat yang paling
baik. Murah, sepi, tetapi Anda bisa menikmati pelayanan lebih baik.

Sepulang dari Bali, saya kirim e-mail ke teman-teman saya yang doyan pelesir ke Bali, satu di Milan, satu di Amerika, dan satu lagi di Singapura. Berkat cerita saya yang menggiurkan, akhirnya mereka semua langsung ingin berlibur di Bali bulan depan. Peristiwa ini menampar imajinasi saya. Andaikata pemerintah memanfaatkan nasihat Paul Arden, dan mempromosikan Bali di titik terendah ini, maka situasi Bali justru akan cepat pulih. Sayangnya, pemerintah lebih kelihatan kehilangan akal.

Pak Bob Sadino, pemilik pasar swalayan terkenal Kem Chicks, pernah bercerita kepada saya. Katanya, harga cabe di pasar seringkali tidak stabil. Pasar sering mengeluh banyak pasokan, dan harga cabe jatuh. Tidak jarang pasokan menjadi terlampau banyak, dan cabe membusuk. Menurut pengamatan Pak Bob Sadino, hal ini terjadi karena petani gagal
memanfaatkan titik terendah.

Umumnya petani bergairah ikut menanam cabe ketika harganya sedang naik karena pasokan rendah. Malah petani tidak jarang berebut menanam cabe ketika harga cabe sedang berada di titik tertinggi. Akibatnya, ketika mereka rame-rame panen, pasokan cabe berlimpah, dan harga cabe mau tak mau ambruk. Andai kata mereka jeli, justru mereka harus menanam cabe pada saat cabe berada di titik harga terendah. Ketika panen, harga cabe akan berada di titik tinggi karena pasokan kurang.

Teori Pak Bob Sadino ini saya ceritakan kepada sejumlah perternak unggas, minggu lalu, dalam serangkaian seminar marketing yang disponsori Asosiasi Pemasaran Kacang Kedelai dari Amerika. Peternak unggas mengeluhkan hal yang sama bahwa mereka berada pada situasi yang SOS, yaitu titik terendah karena flu burung.

Saya justru memotivasi mereka dengan memanfaatkan studi kasus Bali dan petani cabe. Saya anjurkan mereka menjadi aktivis flu burung, dan memanfaatkan situasi ini untuk mempromosikan perusahaan mereka.

Teori Paul Arden memang ampuh. Titik terendah bukanlah situasi yang ideal. Tetapi titik terendah punya peluang yang unik dimanfaatkan. Yaitu situasi kondusif untuk berpromosi. Dosen komunikasi saya pernah memberikan nasihat unik. Menurut beliau, bayangkan di sebuah ruangan yang penuh sesak dengan orang. Dan semua orang berbicara hiruk-pikuk.
Ruangan akan sangat ribut, dan saat itu proses komunikasi akan sangat sulit karena kita harus bicara keras-keras. Menguras energi dan membuat tenggorokan lecet.

Tapi, sebaliknya, kalau pada titik terendah, ketika semua orang diam. Lalu hanya satu orang berbicara. Mungkin orang itu cukup berbicara pelan saja, tapi semua orang akan mendengar dan menyimak. Semua atensi ditujukan pada pembicara. Komunikasi berjalan lancar.

Jadi, kalau Anda berada di titik terendah, jangan putus asa. Manfaatkan!

TUHAN Memberkati

Scott Adams' Secret of Success: Failure What's the best way to climb to the top? Be a failure.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304626104579121813075903866
SCOTT ADAMS


"Dilbert" creator Scott Adams talks to WSJ editor Gary Rosen about how to draw lessons, skills and ideas from your failures—and why following your passion is asking for trouble. Photo: Scott Adams

If you're already as successful as you want to be, both personally and professionally, congratulations! Here's the not-so-good news: All you are likely to get from this article is a semientertaining tale about a guy who failed his way to success. But you might also notice some familiar patterns in my story that will give you confirmation (or confirmation bias) that your own success wasn't entirely luck.

If you're just starting your journey toward success—however you define it—or you're wondering what you've been doing wrong until now, you might find some novel ideas here. Maybe the combination of what you know plus what I think I know will be enough to keep you out of the wood chipper.

Let me start with some tips on what not to do. Beware of advice about successful people and their methods. For starters, no two situations are alike. Your dreams of creating a dry-cleaning empire won't be helped by knowing that Thomas Edison liked to take naps. Secondly, biographers never have access to the internal thoughts of successful people. If a biographer says Henry Ford invented the assembly line to impress women, that's probably a guess.

But the most dangerous case of all is when successful people directly give advice. For example, you often hear them say that you should "follow your passion." That sounds perfectly reasonable the first time you hear it. Passion will presumably give you high energy, high resistance to rejection and high determination. Passionate people are more persuasive, too. Those are all good things, right?

Here's the counterargument: When I was a commercial loan officer for a large bank, my boss taught us that you should never make a loan to someone who is following his passion. For example, you don't want to give money to a sports enthusiast who is starting a sports store to pursue his passion for all things sporty. That guy is a bad bet, passion and all. He's in business for the wrong reason.

My boss, who had been a commercial lender for over 30 years, said that the best loan customer is someone who has no passion whatsoever, just a desire to work hard at something that looks good on a spreadsheet. Maybe the loan customer wants to start a dry-cleaning store or invest in a fast-food franchise—boring stuff. That's the person you bet on. You want the grinder, not the guy who loves his job.

For most people, it's easy to be passionate about things that are working out, and that distorts our impression of the importance of passion. I've been involved in several dozen business ventures over the course of my life, and each one made me excited at the start. You might even call it passion.

The ones that didn't work out—and that would be most of them—slowly drained my passion as they failed. The few that worked became more exciting as they succeeded. For example, when I invested in a restaurant with an operating partner, my passion was sky high. And on day one, when there was a line of customers down the block, I was even more passionate. In later years, as the business got pummeled, my passion evolved into frustration and annoyance.

On the other hand, Dilbert started out as just one of many get-rich schemes I was willing to try. When it started to look as if it might be a success, my passion for cartooning increased because I realized it could be my golden ticket. In hindsight, it looks as if the projects that I was most passionate about were also the ones that worked. But objectively, my passion level moved with my success. Success caused passion more than passion caused success.

So forget about passion. And while you're at it, forget about goals, too.

Just after college, I took my first airplane trip, destination California, in search of a job. I was seated next to a businessman who was probably in his early 60s. I suppose I looked like an odd duck with my serious demeanor, bad haircut and cheap suit, clearly out of my element. I asked what he did for a living, and he told me he was the CEO of a company that made screws. He offered me some career advice. He said that every time he got a new job, he immediately started looking for a better one. For him, job seeking was not something one did when necessary. It was a continuing process.

This makes perfect sense if you do the math. Chances are that the best job for you won't become available at precisely the time you declare yourself ready. Your best bet, he explained, was to always be looking for a better deal. The better deal has its own schedule. I believe the way he explained it is that your job is not your job; your job is to find a better job.

This was my first exposure to the idea that one should have a system instead of a goal. The system was to continually look for better options.

Throughout my career I've had my antennae up, looking for examples of people who use systems as opposed to goals. In most cases, as far as I can tell, the people who use systems do better. The systems-driven people have found a way to look at the familiar in new and more useful ways.

To put it bluntly, goals are for losers. That's literally true most of the time. For example, if your goal is to lose 10 pounds, you will spend every moment until you reach the goal—if you reach it at all—feeling as if you were short of your goal. In other words, goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary.

If you achieve your goal, you celebrate and feel terrific, but only until you realize that you just lost the thing that gave you purpose and direction. Your options are to feel empty and useless, perhaps enjoying the spoils of your success until they bore you, or to set new goals and re-enter the cycle of permanent presuccess failure.

I have a friend who is a gifted salesman. He could have sold anything, from houses to toasters. The field he chose (which I won't reveal because he wouldn't appreciate the sudden flood of competition) allows him to sell a service that almost always auto-renews. In other words, he can sell his service once and enjoy ongoing commissions until the customer dies or goes out of business. His biggest problem in life is that he keeps trading his boat for a larger one, and that's a lot of work.

Observers call him lucky. What I see is a man who accurately identified his skill set and chose a system that vastly increased his odds of getting "lucky." In fact, his system is so solid that it could withstand quite a bit of bad luck without buckling. How much passion does this fellow have for his chosen field? Answer: zero. What he has is a spectacular system, and that beats passion every time.

As for my own system, when I graduated from college, I outlined my entrepreneurial plan. The idea was to create something that had value and—this next part is the key—I wanted the product to be something that was easy to reproduce in unlimited quantities. I didn't want to sell my time, at least not directly, because that model has an upward limit. And I didn't want to build my own automobile factory, for example, because cars are not easy to reproduce. I wanted to create, invent, write, or otherwise concoct something widely desired that would be easy to reproduce.

My system of creating something the public wants and reproducing it in large quantities nearly guaranteed a string of failures. By design, all of my efforts were long shots. Had I been goal-oriented instead of system-oriented, I imagine I would have given up after the first several failures. It would have felt like banging my head against a brick wall.

But being systems-oriented, I felt myself growing more capable every day, no matter the fate of the project that I happened to be working on. And every day during those years I woke up with the same thought, literally, as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and slapped the alarm clock off.

Today's the day.

If you drill down on any success story, you always discover that luck was a huge part of it. You can't control luck, but you can move from a game with bad odds to one with better odds. You can make it easier for luck to find you. The most useful thing you can do is stay in the game. If your current get-rich project fails, take what you learned and try something else. Keep repeating until something lucky happens. The universe has plenty of luck to go around; you just need to keep your hand raised until it's your turn. It helps to see failure as a road and not a wall.

I'm an optimist by nature, or perhaps by upbringing—it's hard to know where one leaves off and the other begins—but whatever the cause, I've long seen failure as a tool, not an outcome. I believe that viewing the world in that way can be useful for you too.

Nietzsche famously said, "What doesn't kill us makes us stronger." It sounds clever, but it's a loser philosophy. I don't want my failures to simply make me stronger, which I interpret as making me better able to survive future challenges. (To be fair to Nietzsche, he probably meant the word "stronger" to include anything that makes you more capable. I'd ask him to clarify, but ironically he ran out of things that didn't kill him.)

Becoming stronger is obviously a good thing, but it's only barely optimistic. I do want my failures to make me stronger, of course, but I also want to become smarter, more talented, better networked, healthier and more energized. If I find a cow turd on my front steps, I'm not satisfied knowing that I'll be mentally prepared to find some future cow turd. I want to shovel that turd onto my garden and hope the cow returns every week so I never have to buy fertilizer again. Failure is a resource that can be managed.

Before launching Dilbert, and after, I failed at a long series of day jobs and entrepreneurial adventures. Here are just a few of the worst ones. I include them because successful people generally gloss over their most aromatic failures, and it leaves the impression that they have some magic you don't.

When you're done reading this list, you won't have that delusion about me, and that's the point. Success is entirely accessible, even if you happen to be a huge screw-up 95% of the time.

My failures:

Velcro Rosin Bag Invention: In the 1970s, tennis players sometimes used rosin bags to keep their racket hands less sweaty. In college, I built a prototype of a rosin bag that attached to a Velcro strip on tennis shorts so it would always be available when needed. My lawyer told me it wasn't patentworthy because it was simply a combination of two existing products. I approached some sporting-goods companies and got nothing but form-letter rejections. I dropped the idea.

But in the process I learned a valuable lesson: Good ideas have no value because the world already has too many of them. The market rewards execution, not ideas. From that point on, I concentrated on ideas that I could execute. I was already failing toward success, but I didn't yet know it.

Gopher Offer: During my banking career, in my late 20s, I caught the attention of a senior vice president at the bank. Apparently my b.s. skills in meetings were impressive. He offered me a job as his gopher/assistant with the vague assurance that I would meet important executives during the normal course of my work, which would make it easy for him to strap a rocket to my backside—as the saying roughly went—and launch me up the corporate ladder.

On the downside, the challenge would be to survive his less-than-polite management style and do his bidding for a few years. I declined his offer because I was already managing a small group of people, so becoming a gopher seemed like a step backward. I believe the senior vice president's exact characterization of my decision was "[expletive] STUPID!!!" He hired one of my co-workers for the job instead, and in a few years that fellow became one of the youngest vice presidents in the bank's history.

I worked for Crocker National Bank in San Francisco for about eight years, starting at the very bottom and working my way up to lower management. During the course of my banking career, and in line with my strategy of learning as much as I could about the ways of business, I gained an extraordinarily good overview of banking, finance, technology, contracts, management and a dozen other useful skills. I wouldn't have done it any differently.

Webvan: In the dot-com era, a startup called Webvan promised to revolutionize grocery delivery. You could order grocery-store items over the Internet, and one of Webvan's trucks would load your order at the company's modern distribution hub and set out to service all the customers in your area.

I figured Webvan would do for groceries what Amazon had done for books. It was a rare opportunity to get in on the ground floor. I bought a bunch of Webvan stock and felt good about myself. When the stock plunged, I bought some more. I repeated that process several times, each time licking my lips as I acquired ever-larger blocks of the stock at prices I knew to be a steal.

When the company announced that it had achieved positive cash flow at one of its several hubs, I knew that I was onto something. If it worked in one hub, the model was proved, and it would surely work at others. I bought more stock. Now I owned approximately, well, a boatload.

A few weeks later, Webvan went out of business. Investing in Webvan wasn't the dumbest thing I've ever done, but it's a contender. The loss wasn't enough to change my lifestyle. But boy, did it sting psychologically. In my partial defense, I knew it was a gamble, not an investment per se.

What I learned from that experience is that there is no such thing as useful information that comes from a company's management. Now I diversify and let the lying get smoothed out by all the other variables in my investments.

These failures are just a sampling. I'm delighted to admit that I've failed at more challenges than anyone I know.

As for you, I'd like to think that reading this will set you on the path of your own magnificent screw-ups and cavernous disappointments. You're welcome! And if I forgot to mention it earlier, that's exactly where you want to be: steeped to your eyebrows in failure.

It's a good place to be because failure is where success likes to hide in plain sight. Everything you want out of life is in that huge, bubbling vat of failure. The trick is to get the good stuff out.

Mr. Adams is the creator of Dilbert. Adapted from his book "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big," to be published by Portfolio, a member of Penguin Group (USA), on Oct. 22.