Daan Weddepohl (peerby.com) in een video interview bij het Founder Institute

VOIP

Let me explain a little bit what Voice-Over-IP actually means. Probably the most commonly known Voice-Over-IP or VOIP today is Skype. Even though it’s a close system and you can’t use normal phone with it, still a lot of people know it. The VOIP basically means to talk to someone on the phone by using the internet as a connection.

A VOIP is actually a standard for digital phoning. Basically the standard defines how your virtual phone line [which is the internet] should behave, who you call when you call [555 or whatever].

Advantages of VOIP

There are some advantages if you use VOIP. First, mostly it’s free. Your number is free. You don’t have to pay a monthly fee! Second, the calls are cheaper, and third, it allows flexibility. For example, I have my IP line configured in a way so I can call. When someone calls me it rings at home, at work and all my mobile phones. I can decide to take the call wherever I am at that moment.

Also, you can have several numbers connected to one phone. Obviously a lot of people have that right now, but why is that something special? Well, it is something special because I have a German, a Dutch and soon, I will have a US number, all in the same account. With just one phone ring I can get the call. This gives me the possibility to supply my clients in different countries with different phone numbers. They can all have their own number. My Dutch clients can call me on the Dutch number; my German clients call me on the German number. And this works just fine. The speech quality is good. I used to have problems with it but now I’m very happy with the quality. Sometimes I have the feeling that it is even better than the normal phone. Obviously, it’s hard to for me to say since I haven’t used the normal phone in a long time.

Install a VOIP

You can use VOIP on your computer. If you use a headset, install the computer program. Now, you can take and make VOIP calls pretty much everywhere you have an internet connection. VOIP is available at more places right now than it used to and it’s pretty cool. For example, I can take my iPhone and I’ll start up the sipgate application. Then, I can make calls and receive calls through the wireless network as if I’m just at home.

I have only touched on one feature of Voice-Over-IP and obviously this gets more and more interesting for more users. One more thing, if someone calls you and you’re not there, they’ll leave a message. You get send this message via email and people can also send you fax which makes it all the more great.

The programs that I use to make my Windows 7 computer secure include the Windows Firewall and Windows Defender. I think these applications have actually evolved quite well. I didn’t like the Microsoft security adaptations in earlier versions of Windows, but they have come a long way. If you don’t like Windows Defender, you can also use Spybot which is a great tool against Trojans and Malware. It also deals with bad cookies and all that kind of stuff. So its worth the look if you’re really concerned about security.

The Internet is a huge issue because it is used by worms and viruses. There are two components to the Internet, one is email, and the other is the Internet browser. For email, you can used a web-based tool, like Gmail, which is basically in your Internet browser. The great advantage about this is that you don’t have to download files to your computer. You can read emails online, and if they contain, for example, a PDF, you can look at that PDF right there in Google mail in the preview. You can also utilize a spam folder, and if you see a file that is not important to you, you can delete that right away.

Internet Browser

You should use an Internet browser which is safe and secure. Internet Explorer has the reputation of being notoriously bad when it comes to security. Even though there is a new version coming out soon, I don’t expect this to change for the better over the long haul. Try to use an up to date Internet browser. That can be Firefox, but Firefox to me has lost a bit of the edge it had when it first came out. It definitely is a great browser, but nowadays, I use mostly Google Chrome, which I think is kind of the new Firefox. It’s very sleek, very fast, it has a great javascript rendering engine, and in OSX I use Chrome or Safari. I don’t like using Safari on Windows for some reason. I just go with Chrome because it has better integration with it.

If you decide to use Firefox, I strongly advise you to make use of the no script plugin. This is a plugin which blocks Javascript and other scripts by default, and you need to explicitly allow them. This is great because it filters out most of the problems you can have, because Javascript is usually used to infect your computer. Flash can also be a problem, so noscript also deals with Flash.

Anti-virus Software

On Windows PCs you should also have antivirus software installed. I’ve been using the Avira free version for my personal computers. You can also use AntiVir , which is another program. Keep in mind that the free version is usually limited to non commercial use. I also use a program which is called fret fire. Basically, the normal antivirus program deals with all the known viruses, and it can detect some viruses without a signature, but it needs to know what’s out there and what it should block and look out for. The great thing about fret fire is that its a behavioral-based security program, which means that it doesn’t detect signatures of viruses, but it detects typical behavior. It can block attempts to gain access to important parts of your operating system. Those two programs together form a very good defense. Just make sure that you have put them in a way so they update regularly. If you install them, you need to allow the programs to pass the firewall.

Update Operating System

What’s very, important, and I think that is as important as installing the right tools, is that you keep your operating system updated. I strongly encourage you to have automatic updates enabled, and to not skip them but do them right away when they become available. This is very important, because, Microsoft, Apple, Ubuntu or Linux update pretty fast if there is a problem. Take care that you actually get the updates which might fix a security problem.

You also need to have all your other programs up to date. This can be a bit of a hassle since not all programs have an automatic update installed, or you might have locked the automatic update program from being active at startup. That’s something I do a lot because it can be a bother to have all those small programs for updates run in the background. But there are really good programs that check your whole computers for the version of a program installed, and they look on the Internet if there is a new version of that program. If there is a new version, they can download that new version automatically.

Act Responsibly

When it comes to security, tools can only do so much. It’s usually the human that makes a fault. That is by using insecure passwords, by writing down passwords, sending passwords through non-secure channels., telling people stuff on the phone without verifying their identity. It’s very important that you act responsibly. If you have doubts about a specific email, rather delete or ask the person who send it if they really did send it. If someone tries to chat you up on the instant messenger, I wanna send you a file, someone you do not know, well just do not answer. If a Facebook application is acting weird, try to Google it; try to see if there is a problem with it. If you are acting responsibly, and that means for example, knowing that pdf is not a safe file format, that in a PDF you can embed javascript, and that means you can also embed viruses in a PDF. Whereas someone gives you a USB stick, you need to be aware that there can be a virus on that USB stick. When you plug in the stick, you need to act responsibly with your computer.

What to do When a Virus Hits Your Computer

How do you know that there’s something wrong with your computer? A while ago that was really easy, because viruses were usually programmed in a bad way, or they have a funny message, or your computer is getting very, very slow. Nowadays, the viruses are really intelligent. If you have a virus installed on your computer, it’s probably doing some work for other people, which means it can make people a lot of money. Thus, they protect that asset. They use different tricks for that. One is to just not let you see that you have been infected.

But there are some things that you can do. Generally, if your computer is getting slower suddenly, and you haven’t installed anything, or there haven’t been any updates, or your computer setup hasn’t changed, then something is happening. But like I mentioned before, you don’t see that so often nowadays. Viruses and Trojan horses, they have much higher quality now. So you don’t see that as much.

Another thing that you can watch for is Internet connection and hard drive activity. Of course there can also be a lot of other reasons for Internet connectivity or hard drive activity, but if you’re seeing that for no reason you’re computer’s idle, that your Internet connection is on and it’s blinking a lot like it’s transferring data, then something could be wrong. Or if suddenly, without having scheduled automatic defragmentation, or a virus scan, your hard drive is doing lots of work, that could also be an indication that you have a program in your computer which doesn’t belong there. Last it could also be that security programs crash. The new generation of viruses tries to defend themselves against anti virus programs, which might mean that they crash or that they cant access specific files. If you see that happening, also be aware of what’s going on in your computer.

Wrap Up

So this has been a lot on security. Basically, let me all wrap that up. What do I think is the best and most secure way to work on a computer with Microsoft Windows? Have Microsoft Windows 7 installed. It’s much better than XP or Vista. Run the 64 bit version of Windows 7 with any virus program, fret fire, Windows Defender, and the Firewall. Use Google Chrome as your standard browser, and also use it to read emails. Use Google Docs for writing documents and stuff. Also use it for looking at PDFs. That way, I think, you’re pretty safe. What can you do when you get hacked or if you have a virus? You can prepare beforehand; have a second installation on your computer with a Linux on it. You can then use that Linux installation, boot from that installation, and then check what’s wrong with your Windows. It’s very hard to infect the Linux system. If you haven’t done that, you could have a friend or colleague download a Linux distribution from the Internet that is specifically geared to disinfect computers. At least you might get access to your files and save the important ones. Often times, I think it’s better to completely reinstall your operating system after you had a virus.

Yeah, so that’s pretty much it. I hope you like that post. This is not really the technical version of how to have the most secure computer but I think if you follow these tips in your daily work, this will help you to have a more stable working environment, and that will help your computer to be a lot more stable. This is going to be a must read article for all my employees from now on, because I’ve met many people that spread the viruses in word documents or in other files. If you’re actually depending on your computer for income, you want that thing to work, and you don’t want to have no income for a week or something, until you can get your computer fixed.

Furthermore, a good boss knows that even if his employees make a mistake, that is a part of their learning process, and they will eventually be very good at what they are doing. On the other hand, employees may not accept the work delegation, because they are afraid they may not do the job properly, or that they don’t have the time to work on the tasks, or that you haven’t given them enough information regarding how to do their tasks. Therefore, you should supply them with all the necessary information and time to fulfill their tasks. Pretty soon, these tasks will become second nature to them.

What Should you Delegate

You should delegate your tasks if you think that this will cost you less in terms of hourly rate. Furthermore, you can give the tasks to your employees if you know that they can do a better job with it. But if you can do it better than them, you can still give them the task so that they will become independent. You should also delegate tasks just because you already have too many tasks, and giving some of those to your employees will lighten the load. Most importantly, your employees will grow and have expanded perspectives regarding their roles in your team.

Of course there are tasks that you should not delegate; tasks that are personal, confidential, routine, and tasks that do not give your employees the chance of learning anything valuable.

How to Delegate Work

You can delegate work in different ways. You can start with small chunks, like throwing out the trash, cleaning the glass or the sink. You can also delegate a bigger chunk, like having someone do an after-party clean up of your place.

People doing the bigger chunks have ownership of their tasks. They are free how to go about their own ways of fulfilling or accomplishing the tasks given. For those who are given smaller chunks, you usually give instructions to go with the tasks and how you want things to be done. Big chunks require lots of trust. It has to be give to the right people. There are people who do not want to be given these big chunks of work. These people tend to go for the smaller tasks.

Here’s what I see in my business. I’ve been working with two people from the Philippines for about three months now. This is a process which started off with giving little tasks that were fully explained. Gradually, if trust grows or develops, and if people understand the whole process better, you can start giving bigger chunks.

I did it wrong at the beginning by starting off with chunks that were way too big. I’ve started all over with smaller tasks and having people get accustomed to what and how I would like things to be done. They can still be given the liberty to somehow do things their own way.

Links Have Semantic Meaning

A link makes a connection from one piece of content to another piece of content. This relationship has a semantic quality. What that means is the relationship is defined by the words of the link and of the link title. A good example is from sometime between 2004 to 2006. There were a lot of people linking to the website of George W. Bush with the link called “The Dumbest Man Ever.”

Let’s take this from a different angle. How do people learn meaning? When you were young, you learned meaning when you connect different words to different objects or activities. If you have an apple, and you say “apple”, you would hear your parents confirming and acknowledging it. This way, you get to connect a semantic meaning to the object.

Google Learns from Links

Links basically work the same way.  Who are we teaching? It’s Google.  Think of Google as a child who wants to know what everything around him is about.  Making a link which says ‘very good winery,’ you teach Google that this site winery.com, just an example, is a site that you consider to be about a good winery.  Google actually learns what you think this object, in this case site, is – which is about a good winery.  However, Google learns from hundreds of links, and not only from your link, but everyone’s link as well.  Some people would consider winery.com is about a bad winery. If there are a lot of people who thinks it’s about a bad winery and you’re the only one who thinks otherwise, Google might ‘think’ you are wrong.

That is how Google learns what a website is. It actually will influence your search results. If a lot of people link to you with a specific name in the link and in the title of the link, Google will assume your site is about that. An actual example is the product and service I offer, which is doing Search Engine Optimization for a WordPress blog.

Rank Higher in Google With Meaningful Links

Whenever I can, and when people visit my site, I ask them to link to my site using good WordPress SEO and Internet Marketing.   This is what I want Google to know, what I’m all about.  This also helps me to write better for these kinds of work.

When a lot of people link to me using “WordPress SEO”, I will get higher in the Google rankings under SEO.The links should always include a semantic meaning. It doesn’t make sense to link and call that link Click Here or Read More.  No meaning is captured in these links. It has to be meaningful. This is what you should do to all the links on your site.

Make sure you link from a meaningful text and make a meaningful title text on your link.  It should be pretty much the same with only a slight difference.  Keep your links consistent across your site.  It becomes easy if you designed an SEO keyword for every page on your website.

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“It’s a lie to think that you are not good enough – it’s a lie to think that you are not worth anything.”

Nick Vujicic

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mznQld0q3p4

Our bodies, cognitive processes, and way of thinking are still geared towards our environment, pretty much like a caveman would live in. There will be wild animals, hunger, and there will be a group hierarchy or just a group that is important for your survival.  The relationship that you have with your kin or with your group, these will be important to your survival as well.  Everything is a bit amplified, just like your basic needs and how to get to those basic needs.

Finding Security in a Group

These are the things that I look at when trying to understand human behavior.  What are the dominant motives and goals?  It’s basically food, security and having a good relationship with your group.           It can actually mean a lot things and it doesn’t mean you always need to be the alpha male.  It also means you have to think about how you fit in the group and how you find security within the group.  It’s also about how you keep others from taking what is yours.

Having a Simpler Understanding of the Situation

The Caveman Principle is very handy when analyzing what is happening to social media today.  Often, technology and today’s society is just too much and it clouds the way for the basic principles which we, as humans, are drawn to.  Let’s say you have a problem.  Try to think about this problem from a caveman’s perspective.  It simplifies the problem because you will not be worrying about smart phones, or communication technologies.  You will not be worrying about MTV, the news or the Internet.  You bring it down to the very basic human survival in a society, in this case, your group.

Ask yourself how this can help you understand situations better and how this can help you understand how and why people act in a certain way.

Thinking Logically

An example of a logical thought would be to say if A is B, and B is C, then C is A.  Another would be, if Socrates was a human, and all human were beautiful, then Socrates was beautiful.  This is logic and we use it in many ways.  One example would be the use of logic in mathematics.  We use a lot of logical thinking in decision making.  We use rational, logical thinking as the preferred way in analyzing a problem.

The Brain Prefers Multi-dimensional Thinking

Now, here’s the problem.  Our brain is not made to think in a rational way.  It is not made to think in bullet points, in mathematical equations, in categories, or in a one dimensional way.  Actually, the brain is a tool that prefers multi-dimensional and associative styles of thinking.  I think the best way to show how your brain works is to let it loose, like when you dream or imagine things.  If you cut down on the external input and focus on the internal input which the brain gives itself, this makes the brain a wonderful, self-organizing system.

With your brain let loose, you are actually dreaming.  When you are dreaming, this is the stage which shows us how your brain functions in the purest way.   It also tells us what your brain actually likes.

I always think of my brain as a Kubrick movie.  I dream in pictures, mostly black and white and at other times in colors, too.  These things morph into each other, associating, with things jumping from A to B, B to C, then C back to A.  These associations do not necessarily mean things are equal to some other things.  Things can be the same but not the same.  There is no single category.  This is the way we think.  Frankly, the way we think is different from how we were taught how to think.

Think in a Way that Suits You

This makes a lot of people miserable, thinking they had acted on their emotions.  Some are threatened by the many ideas that run through their minds even while awake, fearing that they daydream all the time.  They wish they can concentrate in a rational way.  Or, when making decisions, some people doubt themselves and think they should have made a rational decision and not allow their emotions to take over.

However, you should think in a way that suits you and not force a different kind of thinking on yourself.  Let that sink in a little bit as it is profound.  Don’t’ try to think in a way that you think is good but trust your own instinct, emotions and thinking, that all these will be just fine whatever these lead you to do.

How to Enhance Creative Thinking

The question now is, how can you enhance this process of creative thinking? There are a few things you can do, and one is to change your language of thinking. Make your language more free; think less in categories but more in association. Another thing you can do is just try to daydream and build on your imagination. Imagination is a very important tool and a lot of people use it. Imagine is great and can achieve or get to more solutions to a problem just by daydreaming or imagining the solutions.

Mind Mapping

We are coming to an age where it becomes obvious to a lot of people that intuition and emotion are more than just by-products of our coming into our current thinking processes.  The rational part of thinking is just a tiny bit of all the thinking that goes on or that should go on in your brain.  In fact, you can use mind mapping to enhance and retain your cognitive back to a more associative and creative way. It is geared towards letting you see connections that are not completely logical or rational. These are probably things that you don’t understand yourself, but you somehow feel connected to. More often, these are bits of the puzzle that play the most important part when thinking.

Come to think of it, what experiences do you have with creative thinking?  How do you use it?  Do you use it at all or think it is just rubbish?  Let me know.  I’ll be interested.

Expand Your Options

For most people, they have a limited set of what they are doing every day. It’s fine if you’re just doing one thing, and you’re not looking at something else that is different, and you happen to like this situation where you really don’t have a choice. But there isn’t any evolution going on in this situation. What you need to do is introduce some sort of competition in your daily life. It is very important to go through a learning phase of doing lots of different things before you start to focus.

Assessing What I Want to Do

That is what I did for the last couple of years.  I have looked at a lot of business models, different jobs, and things that I’m interested in.  I have tried to find the perfect job or business for myself.  I’m not really sure if I succeeded, because It’s hard to find the perfect job, although I’ve done pretty well in assessing what I want to do.

I have done that by doing a lot of different things.  Looking at it all, I saw what I liked and what I didn’t like.  The one problem I have is to stop or finish things I have started.  This technique requires that you end things that don’t give you what you want.  If there are people involved, it can be very tricky.

Stopping Things I Started: Vacation

What I have done is mixed that up with the idea of going on vacation. When you go on vacation, it makes it easier to stop a lot of things because you’re going anyway.  It’s not only a question of wanting to stop something, but it’s also a question of wanting to start something.  If you’re on vacation, it will be a great time for evaluating things and deciding if you want to continue doing something or not.

Plan a vacation during the year that is long enough for you to make a stop, like two weeks.   Plan this for about five times with two weeks duration.  Make these the deciding points to decide whether you want to continue or stop something.  In between every period, try something new.  Try to get your own personal evolution going with the things you’re busy with, both professionally and personally.  What you’ll see is a development of the things that you do.

Stopping Things Help You Grow

If you can stop things, at least it will help you to grow.  You can focus in a natural way.  For example, there are five activities in your daily life.  Pick one of those activities and renew it.  Every couple of months, you look at what you’ve been doing.  Drop one of those activities which does not give you much or which you don’t really like, and replace it with a new activity.  Repeat this cycle every two months.

This probably has a lot to do with my personal opinion on how to live life.  This is actually how I do it.  Let’s see what will come out of it.  Ask me again in ten years if it was a successful method.

Vacation Gets Everything Done

When I’m lying on a beach in Africa, or looking at the waterfalls, or enjoying a traditional meal, I won’t be haunted by all those things that were on my to-do list for ages.  Why were there so many to do lists?  I can’t really answer that question.  I just know they are gone now. One good reason to go on vacation is it helps you get everything done by setting a deadline for everything that needed to be done.

You can Practice Being Unavailable

There are some other advantages when you’re on vacation. Let’s assume you’re a business owner with some people working for you. When you’re on vacation, you should be unavailable. Trust me, it’s a beautiful thing. Vacation time gives you a good chance to practice being unavailable.

What does being unavailable mean for a businessman?  It means you don’t check your mail and you don’t take business phone calls.  The best thing you can do is you is to turn off your phone, and don’t bring your laptop or iPad with you.  Get away from everything that can beep, except for the car if you want to drive somewhere.

What does this do?  The work system of your business will adjust itself to cope with you not being there.  For people who might think they are very important, this may come as a shock.    Ninety-nine point nine percent of these cases, the system can actually work.  You’re not really needed.  You’re part of the system and when you’re there the people rely on you.  If you’re gone, the people will find other ways to get things done, to have decisions made, and to move on.

Having Other Free Resources in Your Daily Life

This is a good thing because when you come back, you have free resources in other areas of your daily life.  Lot’s of the daily chores and hassles would have been taken away from you.  You need to make sure that when you do this, and when you comeback, you won’t be dragged into the business as usual.  It’s important to realize that when you come back, people will probably try to get you back into normal mode.  They will try to let you do the things you did before.

Learning Lessons While You’re Away

It’s very important to take the lessons you have learned while you were away.  See if there are things you can adjust so that the system will run smoothly.  For most business owners, it probably makes more sense to think about strategy, other important things, and not to be too much involved in daily business life.  Being away for a time gives the system to adjust for itself, and when you come back you will be freed of other things.

Vacation Allows you to Step Out

Another good thing, vacation it allows you to step out.  You are given the chance to step back and give a chance to readjust.  Why is it important to readjust?  Sometimes, when we’re working hard, and our day is totally planned, we lose perspective.  When we lose perspective we can no longer tell what’s important and what’s not.  Everything somehow stresses you the same way.  A vacation is a great time to distress.  You have a chance to think about what’s really important and to see things from the outside; a different perspective.  After a vacation, you will have a clearer sense of priorities.  You will have a clearer view of the important things in your professional life:  your core business, what’s important for the client, and what is important for you.  You will have a better focus on these things.

Breaking Bad Habits

You are given a fresh start after a vacation.  You can break away from bad habits but beware of a bad environment which is also an influential aspect in work.  There are things you do when you’re on vacation that you’d like to continue when you return to work.  Somehow, these things disappear once you get back to work.  A simple example is drinking coffee.  You stayed away from caffeine during your vacation but once you returned to work, and then something stresses you, the next think you know you’re drinking coffee again.

If you make a structured plan of what you’d like to do differently, prepare yourself by imagining situations.  Then practice new behavioral reactions to these situations. You really need to rehearse new behaviors in your mind before you can act them out in real life.  When you do this, you have the chance to change things.  It’s hard to break the habit if it’s something you do daily.  If you have a few days or a few weeks off, you can break the habit more easily.  Beware, these things need to be well planned and well rehearsed.

Being With People Who Matter Most

While on vacation, you can be with the people who matter most to you.  If you’re a successful business owner, chances are you spend more time at your business than with your spouse and your children.  Or at least, you spend more time with other things than you should.  A vacation not only realigns your business values and priorities, but also your personal ones.

To be successful in business, it’s very important to have support at home; people who understand what you’re doing, why there are times you can’t be available, or why sometimes you need to reallocate resources like time and attention to things outside the family.

This is pretty much everything that I know why you should take a vacation.  I could probably tell you more when I’m back. Thanks.