This is a collection of the best Elance freelancers I’ve had the pleasure to work with over the last few years.  This post is an addendum to my post entitled “Increase your personal productivity”.

 Order of Presentation

Anyone I list here is a highly recommended expert whom I would stake my reputation on.  They are all so professional that it was hard to decide how to rank them when writing this post.  So I took the coward’s way out: I ranked them from most recent project backwards in time.  The last on this list, Kristen of KKL, is just as highly recommended as the first and all of the others in between.

Take a look through my list of projects and, if you have anything like any of mine planned, then congratulations! – you just found the perfect pro for the job.

What do you say to a large Texan who walks up to you and tells you that “you can’t teach a pig to sing”?

On a recent trip to visit Profiles International in Waco, Texas I was introduced to a whole new vocabulary.  One that somehow manages to make very succinct business points in absolutely clear and yet entertaining language.

The following guide to some of the more common phrases in this unique lexicon will give you a useful heads-up should you ever be lucky enough to travel to meet the great people of Texas.

I have just started a book, ‘Getting More’, and it has really grabbed my attention.  So much so that I wanted to do a very quick pre-review (I think I just made that up) to share what I thought was really great advice in the first few minutes of the book (I say ‘first few minutes’ rather than ‘first few pages’ because I bought the audio version from Audible to listen on a long bus journey).

Diamond is a Wharton Professor and a Pulitzer Prize winning former journalist for the New York Times – so you expect he’ll be able to write!

I’ll get it finished over the next week or two and do a complete review then – but meantime I thought this extract was worth sharing.

Very early in the book Diamond outlines 12 principles that make his approach to negotiation more effective in the real world (and this is a man who persuaded 3,000 people in the jungles of Bolivia to stop growing illicit coca and to start growing bananas exported to Argentina).

He warns that they may seem deceptively simple – but when I read them they just resonated with me as useful for more than just negotiations. In the original each of these points has a full paragraph explaining the points – I hope my 1-2 line summarizing doesn’t hurt the meaning.  Here goes: