You finish work at 6 pm, go to bed at 12 midnight.
Within these six hours, how do you spend them?
Watching TV? In fact, the activities you do between 6 am and 12 midnight,
the importance of it is beyond your imagination. Too many people believe that,
your career is determined by the 8 hours of hard work and effort you put at work,
and your future and career progression depend on the boss and the company.
But the reality is that for most people, this thing, you are on your own…..
“Cultivation”, it’s forever dependent by yourself. If you found yourself not progressing in life, you cannot blame and put the responsibility on your company for not grooming you.


1. What you do every night is important
My major in college was marketing, but I expect to become a designer. So I practiced day and night,
picking up some freelance work to improve my design skills. It took me a long time.
When I became a boss, I no longer need to involve myself in design work,
So I went back to the Marketing field. Every day, when my children are sleeping, I began learning to gain more knowledge, this again took me a long time, But I begin to realize my returns.
If I rely on my working hours to gain skills, then I will never have become a creative director and a product manager, or like today, teaching MBA students on Marketing. What I rely on, is myself giving myself “lessons”. And the most successful people I knew, walked the same path as I am. I have a friend who is a History graduate, but he is interested in technical sales,
In the day, he does telemarketing, at night he learns how to code,
Finally, he became the vice president of sales in a startup company. Now, he’s a CTO. I have another friend, he received a degree in political science. But he’s very interested in entrepreneurship. he learnt a lot of knowledge on how to start up a company, eventually, he founded a company and sold it, Now he has reaped the rewards.
For them, what they do between 6 pm till 12 midnight,
is what determined their future.  Clearly, we need to balance life and work.
If you have a wife and children, every night, you have to stay with them.
Even if you are single, you also need a reasonable allocation of time to go to the gym, to meet with friends, or be alone to meditate and so on.  Of course, watching movies, playing games is good.
But there are things you do not need to do.
For example, watching the new season of a Netflix drama,
14 hours per week watching television (This is the average amount of time watching television).
The time spent playing the game Candy Crush.
Or spending time stalking your high school alumni on Facebook, it does not seem to be good.
So what should you do?


2. Read more, anything will do!
My college mentor was born in Alabama,
A poor African family. He was admitted to West Point Military Academy, and he became the first person in the family to go college. Before going to Havard for his MBA, he’s a trained officer.
When I met him, he has already developed his career in the city of Colorado Springs.
I asked him, what’s his biggest success? He replied, because he kept the habit of reading,
and he never stopped. He believed that if you want to get what you want in life,
knowledge is the key. He often asked his interviewees what book are they reading now,
the excellent ones can give an answer immediately. Reading can give you a good headstart,
this is often what your peers cannot obtain. Compared to others, you are more likely to know other industries strategies and tactics, and that may be helpful to your company. You can transfer your knowledge within the organization, create new possibilities for your company.
Moreover, your conversation topics will become more interesting.
Anthony Robbins said: “If you spend one hour a day to learn about a topic,
a year later, in this regard, the knowledge you gain will be more than 99.999% of the world’s people.”
Even if you have 30 minutes every night, each week you can easily read a book. You may not be an expert, but I promise, you’ll know more than what your peers know.

3. Do some projects
You can apply the knowledge learnt to real work scenario, this is only an ideal state. If your company did not give you this opportunity, create opportunities for yourself.
You can do some volunteer projects. They can bring you fame.
Working with a team, you’ll understand how things work. In the practical application of the industry,
and how it ultimately affect actual customers. You’ll learn how to perform the task and meet deadlines,
and get feedbacks on what you are doing, and benefit from it.  When you are not strong enough, these experience may not have any value to you. But you are still a novice. These experiences are far more valuable than the miserable pay you are getting. If you can really convince others of your pockets of fruits of labour, Then go try it. But do not let these private jobs affect your work.

4. Actively build your connections
In your career path, a strong network of connections will make everything accelerate.
If you have not set up your own personal connections, you’ll need to divide a portion of your time to do this.
A strong network of relationships, can enable you:

• contact smart friends, and learn their opinions
• get information and knowledge that are difficult to obtain
• help the company look for more potential partners
• or income generating opportunities

Go get to know your work colleague or boss…..
If you are an entrepreneur, your network connections will be your early customers, your staffs are a source of capital rather than go home, or going to a bar, you should find some inner circles.
There are many small groups which are highly relevant to your career.
You should try to integrate into these circles. Every week, you can drink coffee together with new friends,
go drinking or have breakfast. You can also look into everyone’s career developments on LinkedIn.
And establish a network with mentors in those professional industries.
They may be your next job employer, who knows? Your connections will be your most powerful asset in the workplace. Since you have time to watch “The Voice of China”, you have time to build a social network.


5. The CHANGE of your LIFE starts TONIGHT
6 pm to 12 am, you go home, though physically and mentally tired,
you are free to do anything and do not have to take orders from others.
During this time, you can switch off like switching off your computer at your workplace, switch off your brain. But you can also do something, make you smarter, stronger, have a wider network of people.
From the start tonight, take an hour a day to do these things, I guarantee that after a year, your career, and life will change.

By: Kalyana Sundaram, Business Development Executive

The modern smartphone is a remarkable device. A single device that fits in your pocket can do all the tasks that once required cameras, camcorders, GPS devices, watches, alarm clocks, calculators, and even TVs.    
But the next change might be the most radical of all—it could eliminate the need to carry cash and credit cards.  
The growing importance of the smartphone as the go-to computing device for every digital activity is having a profound effect everywhere you look, but it’s only the biggest story among many exciting developments in the world of payments:   

• Apple Pay was first out of the gate, but now mobile wallets are everywhere you look—Android Pay, Google Pay, Chase Pay and even Walmart Pay are making smartphones a real alternative to carrying credit cards. And the potential for mobile wallets to limit a merchant’s fraud liability could help them really take off in acceptance for small businesses.   
• As consumers move more purchasing online, gateway vendors that can act as a front-end processor for online businesses are seeing explosive growth.   PayPal-owned Braintree grew 111% YoY in the number of cards on file in Q4 2015, while Stripe and Klarna now have multi-billion dollar valuations.
• Mobile Point-Of-Sale (mPOS) startups like Square and ShopKeep have pioneered a whole new payments niche—accepting payments via tablets and smartphones.   Coupling their transactions capabilities with new apps can revolutionize a small business’ inventory management, marketing, loyalty and even payroll.   
• Mobile Peer-to-Peer payments in the U.S. are forecast to grow from $5.6 billion in 2014 to nearly $175 billion by 2019 as consumers increasingly skip the hassle of writing a check or going to an ATM.   But smartphone vendors like Apple could cripple the dominant player of 2016 (Venmo) if they make a serious push to own the space.   

If your job or your company is involved in payment processing in any way, you know how complex this industry is. And you know that you simply can’t understand where the next big digital opportunities are unless you know the key players and roles in each step of the payments “supply chain:”   

• Acquirers
• Processors
• Issuers
• Card Networks
• Independent sales organizations and merchant service providers
• Gateways
• Hardware and software providers

Fortunately, managing analyst John Heggestuen and research analyst Evan Bakker of BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, have compiled a detailed report that breaks down everything you need to know—whether you’re a payments industry veteran or a newcomer who is still getting a basic knowledge of this complex world.

Among the big picture insights you’ll get from this new report, titled The Payments Ecosystem Report: Everything You Need to Know About The Next Era of Payment Processing:

• The 5 key events of 2015 that have set up 2016 as a watershed year for the entire payments ecosystem. 
• The basics of traditional card processing from the start of the process through to the very end.    
• Why new players and innovations like prepaid cards, store cards, and PIN debit transactions are gaining market share and creating new opportunities.   
• The effects—good and bad—of the transition to new mobile payment methods.   New players and old have surprising threats and opportunities in areas as varied as carrier billing, remittances, wearables, and more.   

This exclusive report takes you inside these big issues to explore:

• The critical steps in credit card transactions and how they are changing.
• The six major types of organizations involved in the payments ecosystem.
• The significant differences for industry players who operate closed-loop networks and offer prepaid cards.
• The challenges and opportunities facing hardware and software providers for the payments sector.   
• The 8 reasons why mobile wallets are growing so fast and how they will disrupt all aspects of the mobile ecosystem.    
• The exciting possibilities ahead in fast-growing payments subsectors like remittances, connected devices and mobile P2P payments.   
• And much more.

A startup called Verifly is making insurance on-demand, and per-flight, available to drone users today with a new mobile app and service that’s been in the works since late 2014. The service launches just in time to support a burgeoning consumer and commercial market for unmanned aerial vehicle use in the U.S.
Over half a million drones that weigh more than half a pound have been registered with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration since December 2015, when it made registration mandatory. And while the regulations are evolving, the FAA also set new rules for small UAVs in June that industry insiders are saying will bring even more drones into domestic airspace.


Verifly co-founder and CEO Jay Bregman said that he and co-founder and CTO Eugene Hertz wanted to design something simple, easy to use and tailored to the particular type of risk associated with flying a drone.

Consumer drones have hit power lines in Southern California, crashed into the stands at major sporting events including the U.S. Open in 2015, and most famously onto the White House lawn.

The Verifly app draws a quarter mile circle around users, analyzes information from the startup’s proprietary geospatial and weather databases, and shows the user their estimated risk. It then sets a price for the drone pilot on a policy they can buy on-the-spot. If they agree to the price, users pay with a credit card to get $1 million in third-party liability coverage with $10,000 of invasion-of-privacy coverage.

Previously Bregman founded ride hailing startup Hailo, the Uber challengers now majority-owned by Daimler, and merged with MyTaxi and Hertz was CIO of the e-commerce startup Quidisi. While Verifly is a licensed producer, its policies are underwritten by Global Aerospace Insurance, which has been providing aviation insurance policies well before consumer UAVs hit the market.

Verifly has had to get approvals to operate state-by-state, since insurance is regulated by state-level government, not the FAA or any other White House office, where drones are concerned.

​By Lora Kolodny