Almost Alchemy: Make Any Business Of Any Size Produce More With Fewer And Less by Dan Kennedy
Almost Alchemy challenges your existing beliefs and self-imposed limitations―forcing you to re-imagine, reinvent, and reorganize your business to achieve and exceed goals in a systematic and sustainable way.
Kennedy destroys the myth that “Knowledge is Power” by exposing 20 different proven strategies to ensure business sustainability and maximize wealth extraction. It is thought-provoking, cage-rattling and mind blowing all in one.
Alchemy isn’t writing slightly better copy or tweaking your marketing to take advantage of some new media or some other hot trend. Instead, it’s about reinventing the way you think about your business, recognizing the “brutal realities” that few dare to embrace or refuse to even recognize… and turning information into ACTION and PROFIT.
In its mythical context, Alchemy was about one thing and one thing only: transforming ordinary metals into gold. And like thousands of others, you may start this book thinking you’re in an ordinary business and finish realizing you instead have a different, bigger, better, more valuable one.
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5 Signs You’ve Been Doing Too Much for Too Long
Busyness is an illness.
Think about your own life and the lives of those close to you. Most of us have a tendency to do as much as we possibly can — cramming every waking minute with events, extravagances, tasks and obligations. We think doing more will get us more satisfaction, success, etc. When oftentimes the exact opposite is true. Less can be far more rewarding in the long run. But we’re so set in our ways that we can’t see this.
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Mobile, in-store pickup helped drive record-setting Black Friday weekend, but will profits shine?
Revenues are up by double-digits, but deep discounts and tougher advertising competition can cut into retailers’ margin. t’s been a record-breaking several days online, and the holiday season is tracking at 14.5% growth in online sales compared to last year, according to Adobe Analytics, which tracks transactions at 80 of the top 100 retailers in the U.S. Online revenue for November was up 16.5% year-over-year, reaching $68.2 billion, Adobe Analytics reported.
Online-to-offline drivers. Meanwhile, in-store sales were off 6.2% on Black Friday according to ShopperTrak. A bright spot is “buy online, pick up in-store” (BOPIS) and curbside pick-up services. Since November 1, these online-to-offline orders have grown 43.2% year-over-year, according to Adobe. “These services are breathing new life into physical stores, and we expect growth to climb as we get closer to Christmas,” the company predicts.
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The Eighty Five Percent Rule for optimal learning
Researchers and educators have long wrestled with the question of how best to teach their clients be they humans, non-human animals or machines. Here, we examine the role of a single variable, the difficulty of training, on the rate of learning. In many situations we find that there is a sweet spot in which training is neither too easy nor too hard, and where learning progresses most quickly. We derive conditions for this sweet spot for a broad class of learning algorithms in the context of binary classification tasks.
For all of these stochastic gradient-descent based learning algorithms, we find that the optimal error rate for training is around 15.87% or, conversely, that the optimal training accuracy is about 85%. We demonstrate the efficacy of this ‘Eighty Five Percent Rule’ for artificial neural networks used in AI and biologically plausible neural networks thought to describe animal learning.
