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Donna Strickland won the Nobel Prize in Physics; The third woman since 1901

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Donna Strickland from Canada, won the Nobel Prize in Physics for creating the shortest, most intense laser pulses ever created. She won along with her research partner Gérard Mourou. She is the third woman ever to win the Nobel Prize in Physics. The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics was also awarded to the American Arthur Askin.

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Joachim Horn wants engineering to feel more like cooking -- so he developed simple “ingredients” that can be easily mixed to make smart technology. By reinfusing technological engineering with joy and ease, anyone can be an inventor. SAM Labs powers K-12 educators with no frills, pedagogically sound solutions created by educators and researchers. SAM Labs brings fun and results to STEM, STEAM and coding learning.

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The art of innovation | Guy Kawasaki | TEDxBerkeley

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Technology is a core component of the human experience. We have been creating tools to help us tame the physical world since the early days of our species.

Any attempt to count down the most important technological inventions is certainly debatable, but here are some major advancements that should probably be on any such list (in chronological order):

1. FIRE - it can be argued that fire was discovered rather than invented. Certainly, early humans observed incidents of fire, but it wasn't until they figured out how to control it and produce it themselves that humans could really make use of everything this new tool had to offer. The earliest use of fire goes back as far as two million years ago, while a widespread way to utilize this technology has been dated to about 125,000 years ago. Fire gave us warmth, protection, and led to a host of other key inventions and skills like cooking. The ability to cook helped us get the nutrients to support our expanding brains, giving us an indisputable advantage over other primates.

2. WHEEL - the wheel was invented by Mesopotamians around 3500 B.C., to be used in the creation of pottery. About 300 years after that, the wheel was put on a chariot and the rest is history. Wheels are ubiquitous in our everyday life, facilitating our transportation and commerce.
Circa 2000 BC, Oxen drawing an ancient Egyptian two-wheeled chariot. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
3. NAIL - The earliest known use of this very simple but super-useful metal fastener dates back to Ancient Egypt, about 3400 B.C. If you are more partial to screws, they've been around since Ancient Greeks (1st or 2nd century B.C.).

4. OPTICAL LENSES - from glasses to microscopes and telescopes, optical lenses have greatly expanded the possibilities of our vision. They have a long history, first developed by ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians, with key theories of light and vision contributed by Ancient Greeks. Optical lenses were also instrumental components in the creation of media technologies involved in photography, film and television.

5. COMPASS - this navigational device has been a major force in human exploration. The earliest compasses were made of lodestone in China between 300 and 200 B.C.
Circa 1121 BC, An ancient Chinese magnetic chariot. The figure, pointing to the south, moves in accordance with the principle of the magnetic compass. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
6. PAPER - invented about 100 BC in China, paper has been indispensible in allowing us to write down and share our ideas.

7. GUNPOWDER - this chemical explosive, invented in China in the 9th century, has been a major factor in military technology (and, by extension, in wars that changed the course of human history).

8. PRINTING PRESS - invented in 1439 by the German Johannes Gutenberg, this device in many ways laid the foundation for our modern age. It allowed ink to be transferred from the movable type to paper in a mechanized way. This revolutionized the spread of knowledge and religion as previously books were generally hand-written (often by monks).
1511, Printing Press, from the title page of 'Hegesippus' printed by Jodocus Badius Ascensius in Paris. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
9. ELECTRICITY - utilization of electricity is a process to which a number of bright minds have contributed over thousands of years, going all the way back to Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece, when Thales of Miletus conducted the earliest research into the phenomenon. The 18th-century American Renaissance man Benjamin Franklin is generally credited with significantly furthering our understanding of electricity, if not its discovery. It's hard to overestimate how important electricity has become to humanity as it runs the majority of our gadgetry and shapes our way of life. The invention of the light bulb, although a separate contribution, attributed to Thomas Edison in 1879, is certainly a major extension of the ability to harness electricity. It has profoundly changed the way we live, work as well as the look and functioning of our cities.

10. STEAM ENGINE - invented between 1763 and 1775 by Scottish inventor James Watt (who built upon the ideas of previous steam engine attempts like the 1712 Newcomen engine), the steam engine powered trains, ships, factories and the Industrial Revolution as a whole.
circa 1830: An early locomotive hauling freight. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
11. INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINE - the 19th-century invention (created by Belgian engineer Etienne Lenoir in 1859 and improved by Germany's Nikolaus Otto in 1876), this engine that converts chemical energy into mechanical energy overtook the steam engine and is used in modern cars and planes. Elon Musk's electric car company Tesla, among others, is currently trying to revolutionize technology in this arena once again.

12. TELEPHONE - although he was not the only one working on this kind of tech, Scottish-born inventor Alexander Graham Bell got the first patent for an electric telephone in 1876. Certainly, this instrument has revolutionized our ability to communicate.

13. VACCINATION - while sometimes controversial, the practice of vaccination is responsible for eradicating diseases and extending the human lifespan. The first vaccine (for smallpox) was developed by Edward Jenner in 1796. A rabies vaccine was developed by the French chemist and biologist Louis Pasteur in 1885, who is credited with making vaccination the major part of medicine that is it today. Pasteur is also responsible for inventing the food safety process of pasteurization, that bears his name.

14. CARS - cars completely changed the way we travel, as well as the design of our cities, and thrust the concept of the assembly line into the mainstream. They were invented in their modern form in the late 19th century by a number of individuals, with special credit going to the German Karl Benz for creating what's considered the first practical motorcar in 1885.
Karl Benz (in light suit) on a trip with his family with one of his first cars, which was built in 1893 and powered by a single cylinder, 3 h.p. engine. His friend Theodor von Liebig is in the Viktoria. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
15. AIRPLANE - invented in 1903 by the American Wright brothers, planes brought the world closer together, allowing us to travel quickly over great distances. This technology has broadened minds through enormous cultural exchanges-but it also escalated the reach of the world wars that would soon break out, and the severity of every war thereafter.

16. PENICILLIN - discovered by the Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming in 1928, this drug transformed medicine by its ability to cure infectious bacterial diseases. It began the era of antibiotics.

17. ROCKETS - while the invention of early rockets is credited to the Ancient Chinese, the modern rocket is a 20th century contribution to humanity, responsible for transforming military capabilities and allowing human space exploration.

18. NUCLEAR FISSION - this process of splitting atoms to release a tremendous amount of energy led to the creation of nuclear reactors and atomic bombs. It was the culmination of work by a number of prominent (mostly Nobel Prize-winning) 20th-century scientists, but the specific discovery of nuclear fission is generally credited to the Germans Otto Hahn and Fritz Stassmann, working with the Austrians Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch.
Austrian nuclear physicist Lise Meitner (1878 - 1968) congratulates German chemist Otto Hahn (1879 - 1968) on his 80th birthday, Gottingen, Germany, 8th March 1959. The pair collaborated for 30 years in the study of radioactivity, work which culminated in the discovery of nuclear fission. (Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
19. SEMICONDUCTORS - they are at the foundation of electronic devices and the modern Digital Age. Mostly made of silicon, semiconductor devices are behind the nickname of "Silicon Valley", home to today's major U.S. computing companies. The first device containing semiconductor material was demonstrated in 1947 by America's John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley of Bell Labs.

20. PERSONAL COMPUTER - invented in the 1970s, personal computers greatly expanded human capabilities. While your smartphone is more powerful, one of the earliest PCs was introduced in 1974 by Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) via a mail-order computer kit called the Altair. From there, companies like Apple, Microsoft, and IBM have redefined personal computing.
Cover photo: a drawing by Leonardo Da Vinci
(BONUS) 21. THE INTERNET - while the worldwide network of computers (which you used to find this article) has been in development since the 1960s, when it took the shape of U.S. Defense Department's ARPANET, the Internet as we know it today is an even more modern invention. 1990s creation of the World Wide Web by England's Tim Berners-Lee is responsible for transforming our communication, commerce, entertainment, politics, you name it.

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Technology is a core component of the human experience. We have been creating tools to help us tame the physical world since the early days of our species. Any attempt to count down the most important technological inventions is certainly debatable, but here are some major advancements that should probably be on any such list (in chronological order): 1.

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A collection of TED Talks (and more) on the topic of innovation.

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It's no secret: innovation is difficult for well-established companies. By and large, they are better executors than innovators, and most succeed less through game-changing creativity than by optimizing their existing businesses.

Innovation and creativity

Yet hard as it is for such organizations to innovate, large ones as diverse as Alcoa, the Discovery Group, and NASA's Ames Research Center are actually doing so. What can other companies learn from their approaches and attributes? That question formed the core of a multiyear study comprising in-depth interviews, workshops, and surveys of more than 2,500 executives in over 300 companies, including both performance leaders and laggards, in a broad set of industries and countries (Exhibit 1). What we found were a set of eight essential attributes that are present, either in part or in full, at every big company that's a high performer in product, process, or business-model innovation.

Since innovation is a complex, company-wide endeavor, it requires a set of crosscutting practices and processes to structure, organize, and encourage it. Taken together, the essentials described in this article constitute just such an operating system, as seen in Exhibit 2. These often overlapping, iterative, and nonsequential practices resist systematic categorization but can nonetheless be thought of in two groups. The first four, which are strategic and creative in nature, help set and prioritize the terms and conditions under which innovation is more likely to thrive. The next four essentials deal with how to deliver and organize for innovation repeatedly over time and with enough value to contribute meaningfully to overall performance.

To be sure, there's no proven formula for success, particularly when it comes to innovation. While our years of client-service experience provide strong indicators for the existence of a causal relationship between the attributes that survey respondents reported and the innovations of the companies we studied, the statistics described here can only prove correlation. Yet we firmly believe that if companies assimilate and apply these essentials-in their own way, in accordance with their particular context, capabilities, organizational culture, and appetite for risk-they will improve the likelihood that they, too, can rekindle the lost spark of innovation. In the digital age, the pace of change has gone into hyperspeed, so companies must get these strategic, creative, executional, and organizational factors right to innovate successfully.

Aspire

President John F. Kennedy's bold aspiration, in 1962, to "go to the moon in this decade" motivated a nation to unprecedented levels of innovation. A far-reaching vision can be a compelling catalyst, provided it's realistic enough to stimulate action today.

But in a corporate setting, as many CEOs have discovered, even the most inspiring words often are insufficient, no matter how many times they are repeated. It helps to combine high-level aspirations with estimates of the value that innovation should generate to meet financial-growth objectives. Quantifying an "innovation target for growth," and making it an explicit part of future strategic plans, helps solidify the importance of and accountability for innovation. The target itself must be large enough to force managers to include innovation investments in their business plans. If they can make their numbers using other, less risky tactics, our experience suggests that they (quite rationally) will.

Establishing a quantitative innovation aspiration is not enough, however. The target value needs to be apportioned to relevant business "owners" and cascaded down to their organizations in the form of performance targets and timelines. Anything less risks encouraging inaction or the belief that innovation is someone else's job.

For example, Lantmännen, a big Nordic agricultural cooperative, was challenged by flat organic growth and directionless innovation. Top executives created an aspirational vision and strategic plan linked to financial targets: 6 percent growth in the core business and 2 percent growth in new organic ventures. To encourage innovation projects, these quantitative targets were cascaded down to business units and, ultimately, to product groups. During the development of each innovation project, it had to show how it was helping to achieve the growth targets for its category and markets. As a result, Lantmännen went from 4 percent to 13 percent annual growth, underpinned by the successful launch of several new brands. Indeed, it became the market leader in premade food only four years after entry and created a new premium segment in this market.

Such performance parameters can seem painful to managers more accustomed to the traditional approach. In our experience, though, CEOs are likely just going through the motions if they don't use evaluations and remuneration to assess and recognize the contribution that all top managers make to innovation.
Strategy & Corporate Finance
Choose

Fresh, creative insights are invaluable, but in our experience many companies run into difficulty less from a scarcity of new ideas than from the struggle to determine which ideas to support and scale. At bigger companies, this can be particularly problematic during market discontinuities, when supporting the next wave of growth may seem too risky, at least until competitive dynamics force painful changes.

Innovation is inherently risky, to be sure, and getting the most from a portfolio of innovation initiatives is more about managing risk than eliminating it. Since no one knows exactly where valuable innovations will emerge, and searching everywhere is impractical, executives must create some boundary conditions for the opportunity spaces they want to explore. The process of identifying and bounding these spaces can run the gamut from intuitive visions of the future to carefully scrutinized strategic analyses. Thoughtfully prioritizing these spaces also allows companies to assess whether they have enough investment behind their most valuable opportunities.

During this process, companies should set in motion more projects than they will ultimately be able to finance, which makes it easier to kill those that prove less promising. RELX Group, for example, runs 10 to 15 experiments per major customer segment, each funded with a preliminary budget of around $200,000, through its innovation pipeline every year, choosing subsequently to invest more significant funds in one or two of them, and dropping the rest. "One of the hardest things to figure out is when to kill something," says Kumsal Bayazit, RELX Group's chief strategy officer. "It's a heck of a lot easier if you have a portfolio of ideas."

Once the opportunities are defined, companies need transparency into what people are working on and a governance process that constantly assesses not only the expected value, timing, and risk of the initiatives in the portfolio but also its overall composition. There's no single mix that's universally right. Most established companies err on the side of overloading their innovation pipelines with relatively safe, short-term, and incremental projects that have little chance of realizing their growth targets or staying within their risk parameters. Some spread themselves thinly across too many projects instead of focusing on those with the highest potential for success and resourcing them to win.

These tendencies get reinforced by a sluggish resource-reallocation process. Our research shows that a company typically reallocates only a tiny fraction of its resources from year to year, thereby sentencing innovation to a stagnating march of incrementalism.

Discover

Innovation also requires actionable and differentiated insights-the kind that excite customers and bring new categories and markets into being. How do companies develop them? Genius is always an appealing approach, if you have or can get it. Fortunately, innovation yields to other approaches besides exceptional creativity.

The rest of us can look for insights by methodically and systematically scrutinizing three areas: a valuable problem to solve, a technology that enables a solution, and a business model that generates money from it. You could argue that nearly every successful innovation occurs at the intersection of these three elements. Companies that effectively collect, synthesize, and "collide" them stand the highest probability of success. "If you get the sweet spot of what the customer is struggling with, and at the same time get a deeper knowledge of the new technologies coming along and find a mechanism for how these two things can come together, then you are going to get good returns," says Alcoa chairman and chief executive Klaus Kleinfeld.

The insight-discovery process, which extends beyond a company's boundaries to include insight-generating partnerships, is the lifeblood of innovation. We won't belabor the matter here, though, because it's already the subject of countless articles and books. One thing we can add is that discovery is iterative, and the active use of prototypes can help companies continue to learn as they develop, test, validate, and refine their innovations. Moreover, we firmly believe that without a fully developed innovation system encompassing the other elements described in this article, large organizations probably won't innovate successfully, no matter how effective their insight-generation process is.

Would you like to learn more about our Strategy & Corporate Finance Practice?

Evolve

Business-model innovations-which change the economics of the value chain, diversify profit streams, and/or modify delivery models-have always been a vital part of a strong innovation portfolio. As smartphones and mobile apps threaten to upend oldline industries, business-model innovation has become all the more urgent: established companies must reinvent their businesses before technology-driven upstarts do. Why, then, do most innovation systems so squarely emphasize new products? The reason, of course, is that most big companies are reluctant to risk tampering with their core business model until it's visibly under threat. At that point, they can only hope it's not too late.

Leading companies combat this troubling tendency in a number of ways. They up their game in market intelligence, the better to separate signal from noise. They establish funding vehicles for new businesses that don't fit into the current structure. They constantly reevaluate their position in the value chain, carefully considering business models that might deliver value to priority groups of new customers. They sponsor pilot projects and experiments away from the core business to help combat narrow conceptions of what they are and do. And they stress-test newly emerging value propositions and operating models against countermoves by competitors.

Amazon does a particularly strong job extending itself into new business models by addressing the emerging needs of its customers and suppliers. In fact, it has included many of its suppliers in its customer base by offering them an increasingly wide range of services, from hosted computing to warehouse management. Another strong performer, the Financial Times, was already experimenting with its business model in response to the increasing digitalization of media when, in 2007, it launched an innovative subscription model, upending its relationship with advertisers and readers. "We went against the received wisdom of popular strategies at the time," says Caspar de Bono, FT board member and managing director of B2B. "We were very deliberate in getting ahead of the emerging structural change, and the decisions turned out to be very successful." In print's heyday, 80 percent of the FT 's revenue came from print advertising. Now, more than half of it comes from content, and two-thirds of circulation comes from digital subscriptions.

Accelerate

Virulent antibodies undermine innovation at many large companies. Cautious governance processes make it easy for stifling bureaucracies in marketing, legal, IT, and other functions to find reasons to halt or slow approvals. Too often, companies simply get in the way of their own attempts to innovate. A surprising number of impressive innovations from companies were actually the fruit of their mavericks, who succeeded in bypassing their early-approval processes. Clearly, there's a balance to be maintained: bureaucracy must be held in check, yet the rush to market should not undermine the cross-functional collaboration, continuous learning cycles, and clear decision pathways that help enable innovation. Are managers with the right knowledge, skills, and experience making the crucial decisions in a timely manner, so that innovation continually moves through an organization in a way that creates and maintains competitive advantage, without exposing a company to unnecessary risk?

Companies also thrive by testing their promising ideas with customers early in the process, before internal forces impose modifications that blur the original value proposition. To end up with the innovation initially envisioned, it's necessary to knock down the barriers that stand between a great idea and the end user. Companies need a well-connected manager to take charge of a project and be responsible for the budget, time to market, and key specifications-a person who can say yes rather than no. In addition, the project team needs to be cross-functional in reality, not just on paper. This means locating its members in a single place and ensuring that they give the project a significant amount of their time (at least half) to support a culture that puts the innovation project's success above the success of each function.

Cross-functional collaboration can help ensure end-user involvement throughout the development process. At many companies, marketing's role is to champion the interests of end users as development teams evolve products and to help ensure that the final result is what everyone first envisioned. But this responsibility is honored more often in the breach than in the observance. Other companies, meanwhile, rationalize that consumers don't necessarily know what they want until it becomes available. This may be true, but customers can certainly say what they don't like. And the more quickly and frequently a project team gets-and uses-feedback, the more quickly it gets a great end result.

Scale

Some ideas, such as luxury goods and many smartphone apps, are destined for niche markets. Others, like social networks, work at global scale. Explicitly considering the appropriate magnitude and reach of a given idea is important to ensuring that the right resources and risks are involved in pursuing it. The seemingly safer option of scaling up over time can be a death sentence. Resources and capabilities must be marshaled to make sure a new product or service can be delivered quickly at the desired volume and quality. Manufacturing facilities, suppliers, distributors, and others must be prepared to execute a rapid and full rollout.

For example, when TomTom launched its first touch-screen navigational device, in 2004, the product flew off the shelves. By 2006, TomTom's line of portable navigation devices reached sales of about 5 million units a year, and by 2008, yearly volume had jumped to more than 12 million. "That's faster market penetration than mobile phones" had, says Harold Goddijn, TomTom's CEO and cofounder. While TomTom's initial accomplishment lay in combining a well-defined consumer problem with widely available technology components, rapid scaling was vital to the product's continuing success. "We doubled down on managing our cash, our operations, maintaining quality, all the parts of the iceberg no one sees," Goddijn adds. "We were hugely well organized."

Extend

In the space of only a few years, companies in nearly every sector have conceded that innovation requires external collaborators. Flows of talent and knowledge increasingly transcend company and geographic boundaries. Successful innovators achieve significant multiples for every dollar invested in innovation by accessing the skills and talents of others. In this way, they speed up innovation and uncover new ways to create value for their customers and ecosystem partners.

Smart collaboration with external partners, though, goes beyond merely sourcing new ideas and insights; it can involve sharing costs and finding faster routes to market. Famously, the components of Apple's first iPod were developed almost entirely outside the company; by efficiently managing these external partnerships, Apple was able to move from initial concept to marketable product in only nine months. NASA's Ames Research Center teams up not just with international partners-launching joint satellites with nations as diverse as Lithuania, Saudi Arabia, and Sweden-but also with emerging companies, such as SpaceX.

High-performing innovators work hard to develop the ecosystems that help deliver these benefits. Indeed, they strive to become partners of choice, increasing the likelihood that the best ideas and people will come their way. That requires a systematic approach. First, these companies find out which partners they are already working with; surprisingly few companies know this. Then they decide which networks-say, four or five of them-they ideally need to support their innovation strategies. This step helps them to narrow and focus their collaboration efforts and to manage the flow of possibilities from outside the company. Strong innovators also regularly review their networks, extending and pruning them as appropriate and using sophisticated incentives and contractual structures to motivate high-performing business partners. Becoming a true partner of choice is, among other things, about clarifying what a partnership can offer the junior member: brand, reach, or access, perhaps. It is also about behavior. Partners of choice are fair and transparent in their dealings.

Moreover, companies that make the most of external networks have a good idea of what's most useful at which stages of the innovation process. In general, they cast a relatively wide net in the early going. But as they come closer to commercializing a new product or service, they become narrower and more specific in their sourcing, since by then the new offering's design is relatively set.

Mobilize

How do leading companies stimulate, encourage, support, and reward innovative behavior and thinking among the right groups of people? The best companies find ways to embed innovation into the fibers of their culture, from the core to the periphery.

They start back where we began: with aspirations that forge tight connections among innovation, strategy, and performance. When a company sets financial targets for innovation and defines market spaces, minds become far more focused. As those aspirations come to life through individual projects across the company, innovation leaders clarify responsibilities using the appropriate incentives and rewards.

The Discovery Group, for example, is upending the medical and life-insurance industries in its native South Africa and also has operations in the United Kingdom, the United States, and China, among other locations. Innovation is a standard measure in the company's semiannual divisional scorecards-a process that helps mobilize the organization and affects roughly 1,000 of the company's business leaders. "They are all required to innovate every year," Discovery founder and CEO Adrian Gore says of the company's business leaders. "They have no choice."

Organizational changes may be necessary, not because structural silver bullets exist-we've looked hard for them and don't think they do-but rather to promote collaboration, learning, and experimentation. Companies must help people to share ideas and knowledge freely, perhaps by locating teams working on different types of innovation in the same place, reviewing the structure of project teams to make sure they always have new blood, ensuring that lessons learned from success and failure are captured and assimilated, and recognizing innovation efforts even when they fall short of success.

Internal collaboration and experimentation can take years to establish, particularly in large, mature companies with strong cultures and ways of working that, in other respects, may have served them well. Some companies set up "innovation garages" where small groups can work on important projects unconstrained by the normal working environment while building new ways of working that can be scaled up and absorbed into the larger organization. NASA, for example, has ten field centers. But the space agency relies on the Ames Research Center, in Silicon Valley, to maintain what its former director, Dr. Pete Worden, calls "the character of rebels" to function as "a laboratory that's part of a much larger organization."

Big companies do not easily reinvent themselves as leading innovators. Too many fixed routines and cultural factors can get in the way. For those that do make the attempt, innovation excellence is often built in a multiyear effort that touches most, if not all, parts of the organization. Our experience and research suggest that any company looking to make this journey will maximize its probability of success by closely studying and appropriately assimilating the leading practices of high-performing innovators. Taken together, these form an essential operating system for innovation within a company's organizational structure and culture.

Commentary - McKinsey Quarterly

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It's no secret: innovation is difficult for well-established companies. By and large, they are better executors than innovators, and most succeed less through game-changing creativity than by optimizing their existing businesses. Innovation and creativity Yet hard as it is for such organizations to innovate, large ones as diverse as Alcoa, the Discovery Group, and NASA's Ames Research Center are actually doing so.

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positive thinking (from success magazine

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positive thinking (from success magazine

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this can be helpful in thinking more clearly

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The "power of positive thinking" is a popular concept, and sometimes it can feel a little cliché. But the physical and mental benefits of positive thinking have been demonstrated by multiple scientific studies. Positive thinking can give you more confidence, improve your mood, and even reduce the likelihood of developing conditions such as hypertension, depression and other stress-related disorders.

All this sounds great, but what does the "power of positive thinking" really mean?

You can define positive thinking as positive imagery, positive self-talk or general optimism, but these are all still general, ambiguous concepts. If you want to be effective in thinking and being more positive, you'll need concrete examples to help you through the process.
Related: 10 Clever Tricks to Trigger Positive Emotions
Here are seven:

How you start the morning sets the tone for the rest of the day. Have you ever woken up late, panicked, and then felt like nothing good happened the rest of the day? This is likely because you started out the day with a negative emotion and a pessimistic view that carried into every other event you experienced. Instead of letting this dominate you, start your day with positive affirmations. Talk to yourself in the mirror, even if you feel silly, with statements like, "Today will be a good day" or "I'm going to be awesome today." You'll be amazed how much your day improves.

Almost invariably, you're going to encounter obstacles throughout the day-there's no such thing as a perfect day. When you encounter such a challenge, focus on the benefits, no matter how slight or unimportant they seem. For example, if you get stuck in traffic, think about how you now have time to listen to the rest of your favorite podcast. If the store is out of the food you want to prepare, think about the thrill of trying something new.

3. Find humor in bad situations.

Allow yourself to experience humor in even the darkest or most trying situations. Remind yourself that this situation will probably make for a good story later and try to crack a joke about it. Say you're laid off; imagine the most absurd way you could spend your last day, or the most ridiculous job you could pursue next-like kangaroo handler or bubblegum sculptor.

Related: 5 Ways to Stay Positive When You're Having a Bad Day

4. Turn failures into lessons.

You aren't perfect. You're going to make mistakes and experience failure in multiple contexts, at multiple jobs and with multiple people. Instead of focusing on how you failed, think about what you're going to do next time- turn your failure into a lesson. Conceptualize this in concrete rules. For example, you could come up with three new rules for managing projects as a result.

5. Transform negative self-talk into positive self-talk.

Negative self-talk can creep up easily and is often hard to notice. You might think I'm so bad at this or I shouldn't have tried that. But these thoughts turn into internalized feelings and might cement your conceptions of yourself. When you catch yourself doing this, stop and replace those negative messages with positive ones. For example, I'm so bad at this becomes Once I get more practice, I'll be way better at this. I shouldn't have tried becomes That didn't work out as planned-maybe next time.

I'm talking about the present-not today, not this hour, only this exact moment. You might be getting chewed out by your boss, but what in this exact moment is happening that's so bad? Forget the comment he made five minutes ago. Forget what he might say five minutes from now. Focus on this one, individual moment. In most situations, you'll find it's not as bad as you imagine it to be. Most sources of negativity stem from a memory of a recent event or the exaggerated imagination of a potential future event. Stay in the present moment.

7. Find positive friends, mentors and co-workers.

When you surround yourself with positive people, you'll hear positive outlooks, positive stories and positive affirmations. Their positive words will sink in and affect your own line of thinking, which then affects your words and similarly contributes to the group. Finding positive people to fill up your life can be difficult, but you need to eliminate the negativity in your life before it consumes you. Do what you can to improve the positivity of others, and let their positivity affect you the same way.

Almost anybody in any situation can apply these lessons to their own lives and increase their positive attitude. As you might imagine, positive thinking offers compounding returns, so the more often you practice it, the greater benefits you'll realize.

Related: What Happy, Successful, Optimistic People Know About Life

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7 Practical Tips to Achieve a Positive Mindset

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The "power of positive thinking" is a popular concept, and sometimes it can feel a little cliché. But the physical and mental benefits of positive thinking have been demonstrated by multiple scientific studies. Positive thinking can give you more confidence, improve your mood, and even reduce the likelihood of developing conditions such as hypertension, depression and other stress-related disorders.

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Definition of innovation: The process of translating an idea or invention into a good or service that creates value or for which customers will pay. To be called an innovation, an idea must be replicable at an economical cost ...

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entrepreneur

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Image credit: Kerkez | Getty Images

7 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Motivation is a daily struggle for entrepreneurs, so I've put together these motivation-boosting tips from 10 of today's successful entrepreneurs.

1. Fear of failure.

In an article that he wrote for Bloomberg, Mark Cuban stated that he uses the fear of failure for self-motivation.

"No matter what business you're in, you're always at risk -- particularly in technology, where it changes so rapidly you've got to put in the effort to keep up," writes the Shark Tank panel member. "There's always the opportunity for some 18-year-old to come out of nowhere and crush you-that motivates the hell out of me."

"Every one of my companies, whether something I started or something I invested in, is a scoreboard. How am I doing? A lot of investors or advisers play it as a numbers game."

"If they invest in 20 companies, as long as one success covers 19 losses, they did OK. I look at every loss as a huge failure. I had an investment go bad recently. I lost $1.5 million on it. It pisses me off to no end."

Failed at something? Ask these Mark Cuban questions.

"You can also use it as motivation. What did I do wrong? Who did I trust that I shouldn't trust? What can I learn from this situation so I can avoid it next time?"
Related: 5 Habits of Successful People
2. Do what you're passionate for.

This is the key. However, as Chalmers Brown, co-founder and CTO of Due writes, "We want to not only make a lot of money but enjoy what we do as well. We are willing to take on the risk of unstable pay in exchange for following our dreams."

"Unfortunately, your dream job may not always be the best decision financially. Sometimes your hobbies are best kept as projects in your spare time for fun (which is great!). If you do want to try to turn your passion into a full-time job, these tips can help you get started the right way."

Brown gives the tips below:

Improve something that you're already doing.

Figuring out where market.

Sharing your passion with others.

Stay happy and motivated by assigning tasks that you're not a fan of to someone else.

Related: 12 Millionaire Habits to Start Making Serious Money Soon and Build Wealth in a Hurry
3. Keep affirmations where you can see them.

"It's so easy as an entrepreneur to get sucked into feeling exhausted or frustrated, and often the blame is yours alone," writes Murray Newlands, founder of online invoicing company Sighted. "But a negative mindset sucks up mental bandwidth and energy that you need to stay focused and successful.

"It is crucial to maintain an optimistic attitude in the face of setbacks. Whenever you see a quote or a picture that helps you stay positive, place it front and center so you can remember what this journey is all about."
Related: Why Affirmations Have Failed You and 4 Steps to Change That
4. Leverage the power of rejection.

"On June 26, 2008, our friend Michael Seibel introduced us to seven prominent investors in Silicon Valley. We were attempting to raise $150,000 at a $1.5M valuation. That means for $150,000 you could have bought 10 percent of Airbnb."

"Below you will see five rejections. The other two did not reply," writes Airbnb Co-Founder Brian Chesky on Medium. "The investors that rejected us were smart people, and I am sure we didn't look very impressive at the time."

Today Airbnb is valued at just under $30 billion.
Related: Airbnb Pilot Connects Refugees and Evacuees With Housing
5. Surround yourself with highly successful and motivated people.

"No one does it alone," said Mark Zuckerberg during a Q&A in 2016. "When you look at most big things that get done in the world, they're not done by one person, so you're going to need to build a team."

When building your All-Star team, seek out people who excel in the areas where you're not strong or have less experience. "You're going to need people that have complementary skills," Zuckerberg emphasized. "No matter how talented you are, there are just going to be things that you don't bring to the table."
Related: 20 Weird Things You Didn't Know About Mark Zuckerberg
6. Never feel sorry yourself.

"All of my best successes came on the heels of a failure, so I've learned to look at each belly flop as the beginning of something good," said Barbara Corcoran, founder of The Corcoran Group and Shark on Shark Tank.

"If you just hang in there, you'll find that something is right around the corner. It's that belief that keeps me motivated. I've learned not to feel sorry for myself, ever. Just five minutes of feeling sorry for yourself takes your power away and makes you unable to see the next opportunity."
Related: Shark Tank's Barbara Corcoran: 'All the Best Things Happened to Me on the Heels of Rejection'
7. Look for inspiration.

Inspiration is a driving force that you can use to motivate you. Lyft Co-Founder Jordan Zimmerman said that, "Right now, my daughter is a huge inspiration. Thinking about the future of our cities, the world and what environment she's going to grow up in."

"Also, the driver and passenger stories we hear every day. In a past team meeting, we had a mother come in and tell the story herself. She is a Lyft driver living in New York and her daughter is in Los Angeles.

"The daughter was going through a rough living situation with a roommate and had to leave and move into a new place. The mother called a Lyft for her daughter, had a quick conversation with the driver and the driver took care of her daughter in this tough situation."

"These stories inspire us to think how we can make things more efficient and create a platform for two people to have a really positive interaction?"
Related: Lyft Co-Founder John Zimmer: 'You Should Never Veer Off the Path of Your Own Values'
8. Don't obsess over your vision.

Yes. Think about your vision. But don't spend too much time over it or it will bog you down. Elon Musk, for example, only spends around 30 minutes a week on his vision of SpaceX colonizing Mars. Besides those 30 minutes, Musk spends a majority of his time focused on the milestones that are the most immediate and critical.
Related: SpaceX Pushes Back Mars Mission Timeline
9. Be grateful.

"Most of the time when people ask me about motivation, 80 percent of the time I attribute it to gratitude. If you want real fuel to win, be grateful," writes Gary Vaynerchuk.

"Gratitude is what has gotten me through my toughest moments in business. Whenever I have lost a deal to a competitor, or an incredible employee, or millions of dollars in revenue, I default to gratitude. It's impossible not to stay motivated or get too down when you're feeling grateful."
Related: Gary Vaynerchuk Says the Key to Lasting Success Is Practice. Period.
10. Forget about motivation.

"So many people wait to feel 'motivated' before they do anything. Here's a newsflash: happy productive people do not wait for motivation, they just get on with it,'' said Marie Forleo. I suggest that you watch the entire video where Marie shares her tips for motivation. It's spot-on.

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10 Success-Boosting Motivation Tips From Millionaire Entrepreneurs

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7 min read Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Motivation is a daily struggle for entrepreneurs, so I've put together these motivation-boosting tips from 10 of today's successful entrepreneurs. In an article that he wrote for Bloomberg , Mark Cuban stated that he uses the fear of failure for self-motivation.

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8 steps to successful experimenting by Bitesized Bio

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8 steps to successful experimenting by Bitesized Bio

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8 tips on experimenting

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One of the critical skills required for any scientist is the ability to consistently design and carry out successful experiments. There are of course many variables that can cause an experiment to fail, but there are some basic steps that, if taken routinely, can increase your chances of success every time. After many failed, and successful, experiment attempts, here is my recipe for experimental success:

1. Define your objective. Why are you doing the experiment and what are the expected results? A good experiment will tell you something, even if you get negative data. Make sure to include all necessary controls!

2. Find the best method to get the job done. With so many protocols out there, it can be overwhelming to try and narrow it down to just one. After taking into account the cost of the reagents, whether someone you know has done it before, and how widely the technique has been used, in the end, you just have to pick one and go with it!

3. Write out the protocol. This step will help you identify all the reagents you will need for your experiment, and help you gauge the time that you will need to carry out the procedure. Additionally, it is much easier to follow a protocol that you have written yourself, rather than one that was written by someone else.

4. Obtain all necessary reagents in advance, and make sure they are all in good condition. You don't want to be in the middle of your experiment when you suddenly run out of reagent X. As in cooking, freshness is the key. Don't take your chances with old or expired reagents.

5. Prepare a timeline. Try to realistically estimate how long each procedure will take, and if you're not sure, double the time that you think it will take. Don't try to cram too much into one day - you are more likely to make errors when you are rushing.

6. Do the experiment. Prepare everything you can in advance, and start EARLY. Make sure you have booked the necessary equipment ahead of time, and avoid interruptions. The protocol you wrote out in Step 3 should make this step a lot easier! If multiple people are involved in the experiment, make sure everyone knows their role ahead of time.

7. Record everything. Write down any deviations from the protocol, and any difficulties you experienced carrying out the experiment. This will help you make better sense of the data and troubleshoot the experiment if necessary.

8. Analyze the results. Hopefully the experiment turned out as you expected, and the data have lead you to the next step of the project. If not, it's not the end of the world! Go back to your notes and find out where the experiment could have faltered. Talk to people who have experience with the technique to help you troubleshoot, and don't be afraid to ask around for advice! If things always worked the first time, they wouldn't call it "research".

Got any tips of your own that you'd like to share?

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8 Steps to More Successful Experiments - Bitesize Bio

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One of the critical skills required for any scientist is the ability to consistently design and carry out successful experiments. There are of course many variables that can cause an experiment to fail, but there are some basic steps that, if taken routinely, can increase your chances of success every time.

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by explorable

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How to Conduct Science Experiments - A Guide

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A guide on how to conduct science experiments. How is research done? What do I need to do to have a valid study?

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by entrepreneur

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4 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Sometimes I feel like a priest. When I tell people I am not only an inventor but also help other innovators, just about every person has a "confession:" They have an idea, one they have been nursing for years and want to get it off their chest. They want feedback and professional insight. And every confession session ends with some version of the same question: "What's your gut feeling about my idea? Will it make me rich?"

To be a success and an economic opportunity, it's more important your idea meet certain criteria than that it be groundbreaking. Even a moderately innovative idea can become a huge success if it has all the right "ingredients." But keep in mind, some ideas could go either way depending on the execution and the choices you make in developing your idea into a real product.

So what separates the wheat from the chaff? Below are the 10 "ingredients" I look for when deciding whether an invention has the right recipe for success.

1. Bring passion to the invention. Your idea should arise from your personal experience and passion. So don't invest in developing an invention you aren't excited about. Stick to the needs of the customer you know best: You. Passion is the fuel for entrepreneurial action.
Related: Inventing Made Easy: Go Straight to the (Crowd)Source
2. Have higher-value density. Winning products deliver more bangs for the buck. It's not just about price: Something can be successful if it's more expensive by delivering more value per dollar. The added value can be tangible (improved functionality) or intangible (brand).

3. Address a gap in the market. Entering a crowded field forces you to take market share from established competitors. Entering a gap in the market assures you others will have to take market share from you.

4. Have high ROI potential. Since invention is inherently risky, save your efforts for items with high-reward potential. Avoid low-return inventions, especially since the effort and the investment is about the same in most cases. If it is a low-cost item, you will need to be able to sell large volumes. On the flipside, bigger ticket items work much better in low-volume niche situations.
Related: College Entrepreneurs Invent a Way to Keep Beer Cold
5. Keep it simple. Another way to reduce your risk is to stick to simple items, as they are easier to execute and cost less to develop. (They can pay exactly the same amount if the dollar value is the same as a more complicated product, since royalty rates aren't necessarily any different.) Ideas that are easy to explain are also typically easier to sell.

6. Follow a clear path to market. If an idea won't sell through traditional channels, such as existing retailers, it may require much more effort to develop distribution. Try to steer clear from complex distribution networks and focus on utilizing existing ones.

7. Exploit attractive markets. Growing markets are easier to be successful in than shrinking markets. Also, some industries are much more receptive and hungry than others for innovation.

8. Have a clearly defined customer. It should be easy to identify the type of person who would likely buy the product. Ensure the product is tailored to these consumers' needs and preferences. By taking the time to understand your specific customer, it will be much easier to implement your marketing efforts (and see a return on them).

9. Make sure it is within your personal limits (both technically and financially). Walk before you run. Don't stretch yourself financially so much that you'll break the bank if the product fails. One way to cover your bases financially is to get other people to share the risk.
Related: Why Licensing is the Best Way to Get Your Product on Store Shelves
Also, learn the ropes with simple ideas: There will still be tons to learn without tackling something with massive barriers to entry.

10. Avoid "gotchas." Some products have hidden challenges you may not be aware of. For example, if you want to sell a power-product innovation, you may not know that if you want to sell to major retailers you will have to plan for the time and cost of safety testing. To avoid these unknown pitfalls, make sure you research and ask others.

Related: 3 Things You Need to Know About Launching a Product Business

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The 10 Must-Have Ingredients for a Successful Invention

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4 min read Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Sometimes I feel like a priest. When I tell people I am not only an inventor but also help other innovators, just about every person has a "confession:" They have an idea, one they have been nursing for years and want to get it off their chest.