Welcome to the Ideas Gems newsletter! In this newsletter, we will provide insightful updates on world events, business highlights, productivity tips, tech tips, personal finance tips, and book recommendations in a digestible format. Let’s get started!
Credit: Rosy Ziegler, Pixaby
Table of Contents
What’s Happening In the World Today
Lunar New Year 2024
Chinese New Year Lights Festival, Staten Island, New York Credit: RM, Unsplash
This weekend marks the Lunar New Year, also known as Chinese New Year, celebrated by more than 1 billion people worldwide. Lunar New Year began on February 10 and the celebrities will continue until February 24th. This is the Year of Dragon. The festival is a time for family, friends, and celebrating with food.
Lunar New Year, or the Spring Festival, is celebrated in China and much of Asia, including Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, and the global Asian diaspora.
World of Business
Super Bowl 2024
Super Bowl LVIII is going to be played between the San Francisco 49ers and Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday, February 11, 2024, at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, Nevada. The singer, Usher, will be headlining the halftime performance of the Super Bowl.
With an audience of over 100 million, the Super Bowl has been a great time for advertisers to make an impression. But this year, the ads could look a little different due to the Taylor Swift effect. This is because Gen Z and millennial women have become a new audience for the US football league, the National Football League (NFL), in recent months ever since Taylor started coming to the games to support her boyfriend, Travis Kelce.
With increased women watching the NFL games, advertisers are keen to cash in on the increased female demographic during the Super Bowl. Brands like Dove and e.l.f. are taking advertisement spots during the Super Bowl.
Taylor effect may likely start the trend of more women-centric brands continuing to advertise during the Super Bowl. For the first time, the Super Bowl will be held in Las Vegas and Sin City is expecting the game to have a conservative economic impact of around $600 million but it could even go up to $700 to $800 million. Las Vegas is also expecting to become a hub for future Super Bowl games and other sporting events.
Hotel casino rooms have been sold out for weeks. It is indeed an exciting time in the world of sports and Las Vegas and will open up new opportunities!
Productivity Tips
The Power of Note-Taking
Information is the fundamental building block of everything we do. Every task we handle is dependent on us recalling, using, and managing information effectively. In light of this, it is high time that we put in place effective systems to store the information that we need to produce results instead of haplessly wasting time trying to remember things or locate our notes that may not be found.
There are three ways people try to store information:
- Level 1: People try to keep everything in their heads. This is a poor method as our brain can only hold a limited amount of information. Sooner or later the information we want to use later is going to be overwritten by new information.
- Level 2: Most people prefer to write down their notes using pen and paper but then finding the right notes can become quite difficult. This is certainly a much better system than Level 1 where we are leaving our ability to recall things to chance.
- Level 3: Digital note-taking. This is a much superior method as it gives you the ability to edit and search. Some people take down notes using pen and paper and later type the notes in Apple Notes, OneNote, Evernote, Google Docs, or Notion. Other people prefer taking notes using paper tablets like ReMarkable, or Rocketbook, or Notability on iPad using Apple pencil.
Rocketbook Smart Notebook
Remarkable 2 Paper Tablet
Apple Pencil 2nd Generation – Perfect for Notetaking on iPad
Affordable iPad Pencil
Note-taking is a good habit to develop to remember key things that resonate with you and need to be recalled for action. You can see the power of note-taking in how popular artists like Taylor Swift use it.
In his book, Building a Second Brain, Tiago Forte describes how Taylor Swift records all the thoughts that resonate with her on her phone. Taylor shared in an interview how writing the song Blank Space was like a crossword puzzle.
“Writing that song was a journey,” Swift shared. “It was one of those things where I would be writing lines years before I ended up constructing the song. I’ll be going about my daily life and I’ll think of like, ‘Wow, so you only have two real options in relationships, like it’s going to be forever or it’s going to go down in flames.’ I’ll jot that down in my notes.”
Swift continues, “I’ll come up with a line that I think is clever, like, ‘Darling, I’m a nightmare dressed like a daydream.’ I just pick them and put them where they fit and construct the bridge out of more lines. I’d come up with in the last couple years.”.
Tiago Forte said in his book that even after all her success, Taylor Swift needs a system to carry her ideas from inception all the way to completion. By integrating her notetaking with her daily life, Taylor is able to use language and analogies that are rooted in everyday feelings and experiences, forging a powerful connection with her fans.
Behind the scenes of our favorite actors, musicians, athletes, or creators, there is a process they follow turning their new ideas into creative output. This starts with note-taking of things that resonate with them. Creativity depends on a creative process.
Tech Tips
There are a whopping 1.1 billion to 1.5 billion people using Microsoft’s Productivity Services, which includes Microsoft Excel. In other words, more than 1 in 8 people on the planet uses Excel. Office users typically spend more than a third of their time using Excel. That being said, most people don’t consider themselves an expert in Excel and haven’t got any formal training in it.
These are some tips on using MS Excel more efficiently.
- Creating a drop-down list. See this video for details.
- Copying visible cells only
If some cells, rows, or columns on a worksheet do not appear, you have the option of copying all cells—or only the visible cells. By default, Excel copies hidden or filtered cells in addition to visible cells. If this is not what you want, follow the steps in this article to copy visible cells only. For example, you can choose to copy only the summary data from an outlined worksheet.
Follow these steps:
- Select the cells that you want to copy For more information, see Select cells, ranges, rows, or columns on a worksheet.
Tip: To cancel a selection of cells, click any cell in the worksheet. - Click Home > Find & Select, and pick Go To Special.
- Click Visible cells only > OK.
- Click Copy (or press Ctrl+C).
- Select the upper-left cell of the paste area and click Paste (or press Ctrl+V).
Tip: To copy a selection to a different worksheet or workbook, click another worksheet tab or switch to another workbook, and then select the upper-left cell of the paste area.
Note: Excel pastes the copied data into consecutive rows or columns. If the paste area contains hidden rows or columns, you might have to unhide the paste area to see all of the copied cells.
Personal Finance Tips
Jen Sincero writes in her best selling book, You Are a Badass at Making Money:
One of the biggest obstacles to making lots of money is not a lack of good ideas or opportunities or time, or that we’re too slovenly or stupid, it’s that we refuse to give ourselves permission to become rich.
Nature is constantly changing, growing, evolving and expanding. Likewise, you are not meant to just survive, to stay stagnant, to settle; you are meant to keep growing and thrive. You are meant to reach your fullest potential and to use whatever resources you need along the way.
Understand that your gifts, talents, and desires were given to you because you are meant to thrive in the world as only you can. Please allow yourself to get as rich as you need to be to reach your full potential.
Jen shares a success story below as an example.
SUCCESS STORY: IF HE CAN DO IT SO CAN YOU
Charles, 54, went from making $20,000 a year to over $145,000 a year in less than seven months. He had grown up poor in a broken home and the message he received growing up was that I’m not worth anything. So throughout his life, as opportunities came along he would somehow allow that underlying belief to sabotage any success.
Charles started saying mantras of encouragement to himself about his greatness, and to thank the Universe for things he hadn’t received yet. It changed him and elevated him to become a more positive person. He went forward doing things that he didn’t believe were possible, but he did it anyway. He also began learning skills to improve himself.
He practiced interviewing for jobs by doing hundreds of interviews until he got good at it. Charles realized that he was more knowledgeable and better skilled than other applicants or even the people who were interviewing him. This led to his confidence slowly developing.
Charles continued interviewing and landed his present job, where he makes over $145,000 a year.
This positive story just shows us that anything is possible if we set our minds to achieve something. So, get out of your own way. Own that you want to make more money and that you have all the building blocks to achieve this target
Practice the skills you need to gather to achieve this goal. Then go after the opportunities that seem impossible to you. Anything is possible if you get determined to achieve it!
Read this article for more inspiration.
Book Recommendations
We will highly recommend the two books that were referenced in this post. These will provide you strategic insights from a productivity perspective to building wealth.
- Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte. Goodreads choice. “One of my favorite books of the year. It completely reshaped how I think about information and how and why I take notes.” —Daniel Pink, bestselling author of Drive
A revolutionary approach to enhancing productivity, creating flow, and vastly increasing your ability to capture, remember, and benefit from the unprecedented amount of information all around us. - You Are a Badass at Making Money by Jen Sincero. #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER with more than 5 Million copies sold. The first ever self-development book to help millions of people around the globe transform their lives using humor, irreverence, and the occasional curse word—now updated and expanded for its 10th anniversary with a brand-new foreword, reader’s guide, and more!
Building a Second Brain
You’re a Badass at Making Money
We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter and the tips provided. Keep learning, keep growing. Until next time!
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