Many of us have dreamed about a simple and wholesome life making something at home with our own hands and selling it to make a living.
That’s cool when you’re selling samples of your handiwork to friends and family, but how will you fare on the open market with real customers making real buying decisions? They have the power to buy whatever they need from Amazon with a few clicks, and will generally only buy things with lots of five star reviews.
The world always needs new songs. They put a spring in our step as we hear them on the radio, help us reflect on painful experience and offer new angles on love, sex and death. As an important part of what makes us human, songs are always going to be valid cultural currency. And there will always be a need for people who write good ones.
Writing is lonely and bad for your back, but it’s also a thrilling adventure of self-discovery and a potential money spinner. Those who feel driven to write will write regardless of what anyone says – but many a desk drawer is full of manuscripts that never see the light of day. Furthermore, writing can be a very slow process if most of the time is spent staring out of the window waiting for inspiration to strike.
Masterclass is an educational company offering online classes delivered by astonishingly big names in their fields. We are talking bona fide A-list people. Looking at their course list, one can’t help wondering “How on Earth did they get Helen Mirren and Samuel L. Jackson to teach acting? Gordon Ramsay to teach cooking? Annie Liebovitz to teach photography? Steve Martin to teach comedy?”
Sometimes you meet people who can recite the entire family tree of rock: which bands spawned which other bands, which members left and formed their own bands, where they came from, who produced them, the names of all their albums in chronological order, what was on the B side of all of their hits, and what their pets were called.
If you are visiting a foreign country, you might take along a pocket guide to the language to help you order things in restaurants or explain to the local police what the person who snatched your cell phone looks like. It beats pointing and grunting or shouting in English, and the natives will admire you for making the effort, even if they bring you squid instead of chicken.
What did the Romans ever do for us? Well, they gave us roads, sanitation, a legal system, and lots of cool gadgets. The Greeks weren’t half bad either. Some of the great engineering feats of history were accomplished two millennia or so before our own era, which we tend rather arrogantly to consider the pinnacle of technology.
The Open College in the UK is offering a course in Dog Psychology. Upon completion you will have earned the right to have after your name the designatory letters Dip.Dog.Psy and will be awarded with a Diploma Certificate bearing the title.
It’s a cruel fact that the world’s call centres and fast food restaurants are full of workers who have an arts degree but don’t know how to capitalise on it. World famous Central Saint Martins arts and design college aims to change this. It doesn’t just train people to be arty and then release them into the wild to fend for themselves – it also offers a trio of courses in business skills aimed at helping students live their dream and make a living from it.
Despite globalization, each country and region has its own business systems and culture. From one country to another there can be dramatic differences in how people view authority, how much personal responsibility they take for their companies’ fortunes, and how organisations are structured. Finance and accounting methods vary widely. HR practices are by no means homogeneous around the globe. So executives working in global business need to be made aware of these regional differences and develop the ability to function effectively within them and transition smoothly between them.
Bletchley Park, a suburb of Milton Keynes in England, was central to World War Two intelligence efforts. Scientists including Alan Turing designed the first ever electric programmable computer there (Colossus) and used it to crack the Nazi’s Enigma Code. Bletchley Park is synonymous with British codebreaking and also now houses the National Museum of Computing.
