Boutique Review - Tu
Originally uploaded
by Karen Cheng

Karen Cheng, known as a beautiful, stylish and so full of joy for what life has to offer. Karen Cheng also has a BA Design / Advertising. She has worked as an art director, web designer and graphic designer, in Singapore and Australia.

What unique about Karen Cheng was her Facebook Group called “Doing The Karen Cheng” , contain the pose of woman dress-up and take their own picture in front of mirror.
It’s not so complicated photography with a photographer needed for the process, it is only you, digicam and a mirror as simple as that.

Soon this unique style of woman/man taking picture in front of mirror are becoming a new trend and recognize with the name “Doing The Karen Cheng”.

This is what i call, A Karen Cheng fun Virus, because it is spreading rapidly World Wide through internet, specially facebook.com and of course from Karen Cheng blog. Many people doing the same way of Karen Cheng, and they enjoy it as a self expression.

I think that what Karen Cheng by what she doing on “Doing The Karen Cheng”, are now successfully delivered her personal brand image as unique style, fun and confidence young fashion expert woman.

“Doing The Karen Cheng” now become inspiration for other woman (man too..) world wide wide to be stylist, fun and confidence just like Karen Cheng.

Congratulation Karen Cheng for the “Doing The Karen Cheng” fun virus.

Take a look what Karen Chen already invected my friends in a good way

Photo by Angeline Anthony (kutukutubuku.com) to the group “Doing The Karen Cheng”

Are you interested to Doing The Karen Cheng too? Here is the tips, rules and idea:

Tips:
Turn off the flash – or else you get bad glare!
If your pictures are blurry, hold the camera very still.
Still blurry? Then use the 2 second timer function on the camera to reduce the camera movement when you ‘click’.

Rules:
The picture has to be taken into a mirror.
You have to be dress up nicely (or at least, unusually).
You have to have clothes on.
You have to show your face.
You have to include your name and location ( and url if you’ve got one).

Ideas:
Dressing room mirrors. Elevators. Café mirrors. Big windows. Chrome objects and surfaces.

Steve Jobs to me is one of World Most Successful Personal Brand icon. When we talking about Steve Jobs, our mind are linked into  "Appel Computer" that made such a beautiful computer technology like iMac, iPod, and Pixar, the most successful animation studio in the world, that amaze us with their world’s first computer-animated feature film "Toy Story".

Jobs spoke about the story of his life to Standford’s 2005 graduating class that You and Me must listen and think about.

A Note from Jobs that deep to me on developing my Personal Brand are "Love what you do, and if you not yet found what thing you love to do, then find it" as Jobs said:

"Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convince that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers."

Below are the YouTube Video:

Here the Original Text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs:

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Try it yourself at www.typorganism.com/asciiomatic/

Yes, it’s about you… and Seth Godin Book… definetely a slightly famous opportunities.
Send your photo by email to lay98doubt[at]photos.flickr.com no more than may 31, 2008.

well… it’s still have time before the dateline, get your "Most You Photo" , and send it now!

Have a good day!

Read more info about this opportunities, feel free to visit seth godin blog

More subscriber registered on your blog article readers mean more opportunities to born blog evangelish, means more fan help you spread your words to the world.

Yodhia and I are the frequent reader of Nukman Luthfie blog, there i know about Yodhia, and we had meet once at Pesta Blogger 2007 at Blitz Megaplex Jakarta.

I remember July 24, 2007 when he announce though commenting on Nukman Luthfie blog about the launching of blog "Strategi + Manajemen" (Strategic Management Blog) to share his thoughts and knowledge with his blog reader about strategy and management.

1000 Blog Subscribers?… WOW!, that what i call a cool-achievement.

A notes from Yodhia habit on bloging, and how he is now reach 1000 subscribers:

• Yodhia are a focus blogger, he always write about strategic and management as his major expertise.
• Yodhia always put Awesomeness on each of his posting, on writing new posting, he always re-consider it again and again to make sure the post will be useful for his readers.

Now you can read his 3 Agenda of Awesomeness from "Strategi + Manajemen" blog by Yodhia special for the readers:

1. Make 5-10 minutes reading Strategi + Management Blog as the most productive and memorable time for daily readers.
2. Creating e-Book as Knowledge Gift for free, and freely to distribute it to others.
3. Create a printed Book to full-fill readers knowledge thirst in Strategic + Management.

Great Works Yodhia, and Success for The Blog "Strategi + Manajemen"

What About You? Have Your Blog Share Awesomeness Yet?

photo credit: portalhr.com

"This morning, someone new from my facebook contact propose me about a product he have. And I am sure all of the audience here can guess what is my answer.

Yes… the answer is "NO".

" Think about this.
First, I don’t event needed the product
Second, He hardly express a hard-selling technique with me, although he is just connect with me yesterday.
Third, I don’t know anything about him. "

" Well, I’m sure it will be a bit differ if he start it with a more polite ways. Getting more closer with me (offline or online ways), tell me more about the product with a very well maintained explaination."

Well.. I guess My Boss decision for saying "NO" was best answer for this case. The Person that offering HK a product, it just get a introduction (skin-layer) and not yet trying to influence HK event far away from engaging with HK heart.

To explain this case, I create this "Direct Connecting to Heart Marketing" model to be a guide for building a good connectivity in term of personal branding development.

The most easiest ways on creating connection with other people/ other company is by "Reach" them, you can use a phone, email, or blogwalking on their blog by commenting on others blog article.

But "Reach" is only the skin-layer of connection. It’s what I call an ordinary Introduction. It will gain nothing if we don’t follow it up with Inner-layer "Influencing" which is mean, more frequently interactivity with them. Let them know more about You, share interest topics each others, make your own red-line that bind both of you more closer.

And then you will realize that, You and them are ready to "Engage" Deeper-Layer, create more great opportunities, because you are their close-friend now, both of you are in one big family connected by heart and emotion.

So what happend when you sell/ offering something to them?

Well… it is not guarantee 100% they will buy your product/ service/ others offering. But be sure it will create a good consideration for them to accept your offering.

In personal brand we need to build this good connectivity, with other person or company.

We are now moving from just a personal brand building to personal brand engagement, in an effort to increase our good connectivity loyalty.

Actually it’s was a book title by Paul Arden (a Creative Genius), a great book to read To have the most of yourself,
thanks to My Best Friend Riawan.

Remember, if you think that you can reach it… so go for it, never have a doubt in your heart!

‘The Brand YU Life’ is about creatively branding your life and re-thinking who you are though personal branding. It is a paradigm shift and a tool to help you create, define, and manage who you are, to eliminate the separation between you and your personal brand. We live in an instant, ‘me too’ world, full of unoriginal but talented people with no clear understanding of who they are or what they were born to do.

My message on personal branding is a universal one that transcends gender, race, age, religion, and politics. I take the time old concept of branding, turn it 180 degrees to change your mindset from a consumer to a producer’s vantage point.  My purpose is to challenge you to develop your mission statement and understand your personal brand value.

Corporations, athletes, and entertainers build awareness and differentiate themselves everyday by developing strong brands. Many people dream of going into business for themselves without realizing that they are already in business. The business of selling themselves - and that with every assignment, every project, and every job that they undertake, they are developing their resume and establishing their brand.

Personal branding is about positioning and packaging your skills and abilities so that they are digestible by your target customer. ‘The Brand YU Life’ goes beyond a Google ranking to assisting a person to understand their message to the world by turning potential, talents, skills, and ability into value. My ultimate goal is to inspire people to live a life of significance.

Hajj is also a managing partner of Broken Chains Design Group (BCDG), a graphical design firm.  His clientele includes Skechers Footwear, George C. Fraser, Lear Corporation, various universities and churches with his work being featured in GQ, Men’s Health, Details, and Slam magazines.  Hajj, a collegiate basketball player turned adjunct lecturer at his alma mater, MTU, wrote the personal brand management curriculum which he teaches.  He has a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Michigan Technological University and a MBA from Lawrence Technological University. He was recognized as a George C. Fraser- Frasernet Top Achiever and was honored in Who’s Who in Black Detroit.  He serves on the Board of Directors of the International Detroit Black Expo (IDBE) and the Lear Entrepreneurial Center (LEC) Advisory Board. He resides in Michigan with his lovely wife Kasandra.  You can learn more about Hajj at www.hajjflemings.com/blog.