That is the enticing invitation that I received this morning from the people at Hubspot. You can download it as a PDF or listen to the interviews. A lot of redundancy but some very good tips. You will recognise many of the 60 contributors as they contain most of the really successful bloggers.

Physics and marketing don’t seem to have much in common, but Dan Cobley, the marketing director of Google, is passionate about both. He brings these unlikely bedfellows together using Newton’s second law, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the scientific method and the second law of thermodynamics to explain the fundamental theories of branding.

I recently went to an Inspired Entrepreneur evening organised by the best selling author Nick Williams. Screw Work – Let’s Play author John Williams was speaking about how we can choose to see work as play if we follow what we are good at and enjoy. I caught up with him afterwards and asked him about portfolio careers.

Meet Milo…the virtual human that reacts to a person’s emotions, body movements and voice. (Please watch the video.)

Designed to be used with Microsoft’s Xbox 360 Kinect – its a new revolution in story telling says its creator Peter Molyneux.  ”His mind is in the cloud. As millions of people use it Milo will get smarter”.

And therein lies the rub. Are you doing something today that Milo could do tomorrow? If there isn’t something special about what you do and the way you do it, Milo will be doing it for you and most importantly, your customers very soon.

Interesting way to promote your business and also to get material for a new book. With what you hear from us continually about the future of work and jobs you will understand that we are interested to see if Scott Gerber has a new take on the notion of a ‘real job’.

As we always say it is always good to expose yourself to a new experience – even if it involves getting up at 6am – I am an owl not a lark. Interesting challenge in that you are given every daily newspaper 30 minutes before going live and you have to work out just what might be grabbing for the presenter and for the audience. Not too much heavy stuff and some popular and even whimsical stories. The serious one was easy for me as it was this daft research study, headlined in the Daily Mail and in many of the other papers too which states that the over 60’s are getting so unfit and obese that they cannot even tie up their own shoelaces. Well – discovered that this as a US study so that immediately raised questions for me  but more seriously the data goes against all the other research data that Mike Scally and I collected for our Rainbow Years book last year and to which we continue to add to on our blog for the 50+’s. The present crop of baby boomers are not only the fittest and healthiest examples of this age group ever to live on this planet but recent research makes it clear that today the average 50 year old is fitter and healthier than the average 25 year old.

I was sharing the slot with a delightful lady called Maxine Barnett, a PR consultant, who fortunately for me watches the X Factor – which I have never seen and which the presenter was really turned on by. Thanks Maxine. We sorted out before hand which stories each of us would focus on and then tried to link the stories so that it became more of a duo presentation. Whilst the music was playing I discovered that Maxine really wants to explore a portfolio career – like so many people I meet these days. This usually follows my answer to the question, “And what do you do?” No surprise there then! I almost always say ‘ I have a portfolio career’ and then list the items in my current portfolio.

I also had a telephone conversation the other evening with one of the portfolio workers that I had interviewed a year ago and who, at that time, had 4 jobs. She was quite distressed as she had lost 3 of those – all because of the recession. But, however awful this is, she still has one job which takes up 2 days a week. As we say in the book, in this day and age, there are some real pluses to not having all of your career options in one basket. She is not unemployed and has another 3 days a week at least to begin to find new jobs that will satisfy a wider range of skills and tap into the full panoply of her passions.

I’m always up for that so was delighted to receive an invitation to review the morning papers on the Radio Leeds breakfast show with Graham Liver (that’s him in the middle) from 8-9am this coming Saturday. I’ve always fancied the “I’ve got news for you” hat so although not national this will do for a start. Told I have to be light hearted as its breakfast but not on the serious items! So – if you are in Yorkshire do listen in if you have absolutely nothing better to do. The serious part about this post is that you should always accept invitations to experience things not in your normal zone. As Katie and I always say, “You never know”….. although in this case I think I probably do!

We talk a great deal in the book about how to market yourself and I was reminded this morning of an excellent posting from Seth earlier this year on his blog which succinctly summarised the new approach to marketing.

Read and absorb.

“First, ten

This, in two words, is the secret of the new marketing.

Find ten people. Ten people who trust you/respect you/need you/listen to you…

Those ten people need what you have to sell, or want it. And if they love it, you win. If they love it, they’ll each find you ten more people (or a hundred or a thousand or, perhaps, just three). Repeat.

If they don’t love it, you need a new product. Start over.

Your idea spreads. Your business grows. Not as fast as you want, but faster than you could ever imagine.

This approach changes the posture and timing of everything you do.

You can no longer market to the anonymous masses. They’re not anonymous and they’re not masses. You can only market to people who are willing participants. Like this group of ten.

The timing means that the idea of a ‘launch’ and press releases and the big unveiling is nuts. Instead, plan on the gradual build that turns into a tidal wave. Organize for it and spend money appropriately. The fact is, the curve of money spent (big hump, then it tails off) is precisely backwards to what you actually need.

Three years from now, this advice will be so common as to be boring. Today, it’s almost certainly the opposite of what you’re doing.”