I grew up with Jack LaLanne. I used to watch him, his wife Elaine (yes, Elaine LaLanne), and his german shepherd Happy every morning on TV. Jack taught me a lot of things about life — especially to stay positive all the time.

Why be like Jack? You might know him from his juicer — but he was so much more.

1. Make a bold change. At 15, he was a wreck — sickly, skinny, and eating all the wrong foods. He realized it was a dead end and radically changed his diet, behavior and focus.
2. Break the mold. Up until Jack LaLanne, gyms were for men who wanted to box or wrestle. Jack opened the prototype for the fitness spas to come — a gym, juice bar and health food store.
3. Keep true to your vision (and yourself). Jack said, “People thought I was a charlatan and a nut. The doctors were against me — they said that working out with weights would give people heart attacks and they would lose their sex drive.”
4. Think BIG. Jack then took his idea national — “The Jack LaLanne Show” made its debut in 1951 as a local program in the San Francisco area, then went nationwide on daytime television in 1959.
5. Speak to your audience — all the time. “My show was so personal, I made it feel like you and I were the only ones there. And I’d say: ‘Boys and girls, come here. Uncle Jack wants to tell you something. You go get Mother or Daddy, Grandmother, Grandfather, whoever is in the house. You go get them, and you make sure they exercise with me.’ ”
6. Keep it simple. Most of his exercises on TV were done with a chair or broomstick.
7. Keep fresh with new ideas and offerings. He invented the forerunners of modern exercise machines like leg-extension and pulley devices. He marketed a Power Juicer to blend raw vegetables and fruits and a Glamour Stretcher cord, and he sold exercise videos and fitness books.
8. Know when to get out. Expanding on his television popularity, he opened dozens of fitness studios under his name, later licensing them to Bally.
9. Be a showoff. At 60 he swam from Alcatraz Island to Fisherman’s Wharf handcuffed, shackled and towing a 1,000-pound boat. At 70, handcuffed and shackled again, he towed 70 boats, carrying a total of 70 people, a mile and a half through Long Beach Harbor.
10. Walk the talk. He ate two meals a day and shunned snacks. Breakfast, following his morning workout, usually included several hard-boiled egg whites, a cup of broth, oatmeal with soy milk and seasonal fruit. For dinner,  a salad with raw vegetables and egg whites along with fish — often salmon — and a mixture of red and white wine. He never drank coffee.
11. Stay positive — all the time. He brimmed with optimism and restated a host of aphorisms for an active and fit life. “I can’t die,” he most famously liked to say. “It would ruin my image.”

Jack passed away a few weeks ago at a ripe old age of 96. He brought a lot of energy, motivation and happiness to millions of people. I hope someday, I can do that too.

It’s tough today. It’s hard when everything is coming at you. Hard to think. Hard to act. Hard to react. As they always say — the first step is always the hardest.

You’re constantly focused on getting the work done — satisfying your boss, your clients . . . just keeping your job!

It’s now time for you to step back and look at the long view:

Where you’ve been
Where you are
Where you want to go

This isn’t time consuming, but it isn’t easy. The only thing I ask is that you don’t give into the “Executive ADD” that creeps in when we try something that is new and difficult.

“Oh, this won’t work” or “Let me just put this down for a second and I’ll get back to it tomorrow.”

Stop doing that. Now.

Take the first step and let the tide take you. But don’t stop.

I have something to help you — I’ve used it with thousands of executives. And guess what? IT WORKS.

The BEST part? It’s FREE. Click Here to download this life-changing solution.

A lot of us get stuck in inaction — procrastinating, doing a lot of unimportant tasks to avoid the important stuff, worrying about failing or about being perfect, having a hard time starting, getting distracted, and so on. It’s time to start forming the Action Habit instead. Get all Ninja on your actions.

By Leo Babauta at Zen Habits.

And it’s really not that hard if you focus on it for a little while. Like any other habit, start in small doses, little tasks, just short bursts, and then build on that momentum.

Some quick steps for forming the Action Habit:

1. Figure out your key actions. Focusing on the right actions is just as important as the doing. Don’t spend a lot of time in this step — just quickly decide your Top 3 actions for today.

2. Pick one key action, and visualize the outcome. How will it look when you’re done? Again, don’t spend a lot of time here — just form a quick picture in your mind.

3. Just start. Tell yourself, “Do it now!” Make it a mantra. Don’t mess around with tools, with distractions, with anything that will get in the way of doing this task. Strip away everything but the task, and get going!

4. Focus on the moment. Just be in this task, don’t worry about the future or what mistakes you might make or might have made before. Just focus on doing this task, as best you can. Immerse yourself in it.

5. Get to done. Complete the task. Feel good about it! Pat yourself on the back!

Now repeat with the next task. The more you practice this habit, the better you get. Do it in small doses, and keep practicing. You’ll fail sometimes. See the next section for how to deal with that. But don’t let failure stop you — just practice some more.

Barriers to the Action Habit:
But what if you’re having trouble actually taking action? Some quick thoughts:

Don’t worry about perfect. Too often we want to create the perfect plan, but while it’s important to know where you’re going, it’s more important not to get stuck in the planning mode. And while it’s important to do your best, perfection isn’t necessary.

Stop fiddling. Are you messing around with your software or other tools? Are you playing with fonts and colors and other non-essential things? Stop! Get back to the task.

Remove distractions. Turn off the phone, email, IM, Twitter, etc. Shut off the world around you, and just focus on the doing.

Improve it later. Just do it now. You can make it better later. Writers call this the sh*tty first draft — and while it sounds bad, it’s actually a good thing. You’re getting it done, even if it’s sloppy.

Break it into smaller chunks. Sometimes the task is too intimidating. If the task takes more than an hour, start with a 30-minute chunk. If that’s too big, do just 10 minutes. If that’s too hard, do 5. If you have to, just do 1 minute, just to get going.

Stop thinking so much. Thinking is a good thing. Overthinking isn’t, and it gets in the way. Put aside all the thinking (analysis paralysis) and just do.

If you can’t do something … figure out why. Maybe you don’t have the tools. Maybe you don’t have the authority. Maybe you need something from someone else. Maybe you’re missing some key info.

Maybe you don’t know how to do something and need to read up on it, or be taught how. Maybe you just don’t want to do it, and you should drop it altogether. Figure out what the barrier is, and solve it.

“Every leader should routinely keep a substantial portion of his or her time—I would say as much as 50 percent—unscheduled. … Only when you have substantial ’slop’ in your schedule—unscheduled time—will you have the space to reflect on what you are doing, learn from experience, and recover from your inevitable mistakes. Leaders without such free time end up tackling issues only when there is an immediate or visible problem. Managers’ typical response to my argument about free time is, ‘That’s all well and good, but there are things I have to do.’ Yet we waste so much time in unproductive activity—it takes an enormous effort on the part of the leader to keep free time for the truly important things.” – Dov Frohman

Making time to reflect and think is a critical leadership practice. In its simplest form, reflecting is just thinking about what happened. It’s the process of thinking about and examining what we’ve experienced, how we reacted and what changes we need to make to become more effective.

There are few people who make a conscious effort to learn from their experiences and fewer still learn from their mistakes. This is because reflection is not an automatic process for most people. Most of use make our way through life simply reacting to circumstances. To be effective leaders must make reflection a regular practice.

“Leaders like everyone else, are the sum of all their experiences, but, unlike others, they amount to more than the sum, because they make more of their experiences.” – Warren Bennis, Why Leaders Can’t Lead

A simple way to start the practice of reflection is by asking questions, questions about how we feel, about the results we are getting in our life, and what we can do differently to get different results. For example, find a quite place where you are not going to be disturbed then, take an issue that’s important to you, and ask yourself the following questions:

What happened?
What was I trying to achieve?
What went well and why?
What didn’t go so well and why?
How did it affect me?
How did it affect others?
What were the consequences (positive or negative) for myself and others?
What could be done differently next time?
Would this change improve the consequences?

“Reflection is asking the questions that provoke self-awareness” – Warren Bennis, On Becoming a Leader

As leaders much of our success is dependent on the way we think. Given this, it’s important that we schedule regular time-out to reflect on how we are behaving, how we are thinking about a situation and what adjustments we might need to make to improve our effectiveness. When was the last time you spent reflecting on an issue that is important to you?

Malcolm Gladwell is one of today’s most innovative ‘connectors’ of knowledge. His most recent New Yorker article again proves he is the master.

Gladwell again uses history to reinforce his argument that with the proper planning and doing something different — something that your opposing team (i.e., competition) isn’t expecting — even though you are the underdog — You Will Succeed.

Enough of my blather — go read this great article!

If you show a client a highly polished computer layout, they will probably reject it.

By Paul Arden in It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be (an incredible book!)

There is either too much to worry about or not enough to worry about. They are equally bad. It is a fait accompli.

There is nothing the them to do. It’s not their work, it’s your work. They don’t feel involved.

If they don’t like the face of the girl in your rendering, or the style of the trousers worn by the man on the right., or your choice of the car he’s driving, they will reject it.

They won’t see the big idea. They will look at the girl’s face and think, ‘I don’t like her, this doesn’t feel right.’ It is very difficult for them to imagine anything else if what you show them has such detail.

Show the client a scribble.

Explain it to them, talk them through it, let them use their imagination. Get them involved.

Because you haven shown the exact way it’s going to be, there’s scope to interpret it and develop and change it as you progress.

Work with them rather than confronting them with your idea.

Advertising guru Paul Arden is a creative genius whose extraordinary drive and energy is allied to a kind of common sense that just isn’t, well, common. In 1993 he set up the London-based production company Arden Sutherland-Dodd where he is now a commercials director for clients such as BT, BMW, Ford, Nestle and Levis.

I suffer from something called Ménière’s disease-don’t worry, you cannot get it from reading my blog. The symptoms of Ménière’s include hearing loss, tinnitus (a constant ringing sound), and vertigo. There are many medical theories about its cause: too much salt, caffeine, or alcohol in one’s diet, too much stress, and allergies. Thus, I’ve worked to limit control all these factors.

However, I have another theory. As a venture capitalist, I have to listen to hundreds of entrepreneurs pitch their companies. Most of these pitches are crap: sixty slides about a “patent pending,” “first mover advantage,” “all we have to do is get 1% of the people in China to buy our product” startup. These pitches are so lousy that I’m losing my hearing, there’s a constant ringing in my ear, and every once in while the world starts spinning.

Before there is an epidemic of Ménière’s in the venture capital community, I am trying to evangelize the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points. While I’m in the venture capital business, this rule is applicable for any presentation to reach agreement: for example, raising capital, making a sale, forming a partnership, etc.

Ten is the optimal number of slides in a PowerPoint presentation because a normal human being cannot comprehend more than ten concepts in a meeting-and venture capitalists are very normal. (The only difference between you and venture capitalist is that he is getting paid to gamble with someone else’s money). If you must use more than ten slides to explain your business, you probably don’t have a business. The ten topics that a venture capitalist cares about are:

• Problem
• Your solution
• Business model
• Underlying magic/technology
• Marketing and sales
• Competition
• Team
• Projections and milestones
• Status and timeline
• Summary and call to action

You should give your ten slides in twenty minutes. Sure, you have an hour time slot, but you’re using a Windows laptop, so it will take forty minutes to make it work with the projector. Even if setup goes perfectly, people will arrive late and have to leave early. In a perfect world, you give your pitch in twenty minutes, and you have forty minutes left for discussion.

The majority of the presentations that I see have text in a ten point font. As much text as possible is jammed into the slide, and then the presenter reads it. However, as soon as the audience figures out that you’re reading the text, it reads ahead of you because it can read faster than you can speak. The result is that you and the audience are out of synch.

The reason people use a small font is twofold: first, that they don’t know their material well enough; second, they think that more text is more convincing. Total bozosity. Force yourself to use no font smaller than thirty points. I guarantee it will make your presentations better because it requires you to find the most salient points and to know how to explain them well. If “thirty points,” is too dogmatic, the I offer you an algorithm: find out the age of the oldest person in your audience and divide it by two. That’s your optimal font size.

So please observe the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. If nothing else, the next time someone in your audience complains of hearing loss, ringing, or vertigo, you’ll know what caused the problem. One last thing: to learn more about the zen of great presentations, check out a site called Presentation Zen by my buddy Garr Reynolds.