Advice is given to us so often, it’s easy for it to fall on deaf ears. Some of this so-called advice is given from friends, other from family; perhaps a colleague or a mentor. How do you decide what sticks? The top 8 things I’ve learned from those around me can be summed up in close to 500 words. So what will you take with you?

1. Do what you love

We grow up wanting to be doctors, actors, sports players; yet many end up working in cubicles 8 hours a day. Does that mean settling? I don’t think so… it’s easy to get somewhere and stuck in a rut. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pursue what you love – work or hobby. Find a way to keep a piece of what you enjoy doing in your everyday life and you will find yourself significantly happier.

Former Google engineer and Del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter has made angel investments in at least 45 companies, but he’s backed off from investing for now. He thinks angel investing has developed enough difficulties that he’s better off running a company than funding one.

Schachter doesn’t like the idea of start-ups taking money from “a pile of angels” instead of a venture capitalist who’s built a syndicate to fund a company. “No one is leading,” he says of the angels, “and so no one has responsibility when it’s time to raise money again.”

Last week the Center for American Progress and its Doing What Works project launched a new policy platform aimed at bolstering U.S. economic competitiveness by better coordinating federal efforts around trade, education, infrastructure, and innovation, among other areas. To accompany the new report, for seven days CAP will be hosting an online discussion on competitiveness, innovation, and economic issues with a diverse array of heavy-hitting industry, labor, and political leaders.

The report aptly notes “that amid short-term efforts to address the consequences of the Great Recession, too little attention was being paid to the equally important job of increasing America’s long-term competitiveness.” And it lays out a number of policy recommendations aimed at reforming federal agencies in order to bolster long-term economic planning. What the report does not explicitly state, but some of these online discussion participants broach, is the central role that innovation must play in sustaining this long-term competitiveness, and the need for public policy to recognize and internalize the benefits of innovation’s positive externalities.

The Obama administration’s enthusiasm for regional innovation clusters (or, RICs) as an organizing framework for sector-based economic growth and job creation is something that policy organizations (like Science Progress and the Brookings Institute) and regional columnists like me have followed closely over the past two years. In my articles I’ve described what clusters are and why they matter, what the administration is doing to catalyze clusters and in particular the unique role of Small Business Association Administrator Karen Mills in driving this approach. Given the new political realities of the mid-term election, I now offer some insight into cluster policy’s historic origins, and suggest that they may be a policy in which both parties can find common ground.

The Republican provenance of clusters in policy

Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter is the most widely recognized advocate for this strategy for regional competitiveness. And one of the earliest organizations formed to advocate for competitiveness—including a full embrace of clusters—is the Council on Competitiveness, a nonprofit policy group formed in 1986 by the chairman of then President Ronald Reagan’s Commission on Industrial Competitiveness, John A. Young; Porter was on the council’s board and still serves on its executive committee.  The council sponsors conferences, seminars, and other special events to help catalyze new ideas and solutions, and to circulate its findings in topics that speak to competitiveness in specific regions (e.g. Brazil) and in key sectors (e.g. energy).  The council’s Regional Initiatives reports serve to describe and prescribe cluster development process and strategies.

How you say something to an audience is more important, in some ways, than what you say.

That’s the unconventional thesis of Harvard Business School professor Amy Cuddy, whose ideas about “power posing” to build self-confidence and authority during presentations is going viral with the business media. We’ve discussed her research here in Lack Confidence? Strike These Power Poses and Leadership is About Connecting, Not Dominating.

“A lot of the judgments being made of you are based not on the words that are coming out of your mouth, but on the disposition you are projecting,” Cuddy says.

Since these pieces had a lot of traction with BNET readers, I thought you’d be interested in this MSNBC interview with Cuddy. She talks about expansive poses (arms wide apart) you can strike over a two-minute period before a presentation that stimulate higher levels of testosterone, the dominance hormone, and lower levels of cortisol, the hormone associated with stress. And she discusses poses, such as crossing your arms (see our friend in photo above) that make us look smaller, weaker.

When you start out as an entrepreneur at an early age, you find that one of the things that stands in the way of your entrepreneur success isn’t the world, but it’s you. Yes, you. As a young entrepreneur, you often split your focus between two ideas:

* You’re too young to know better.
* You’re too young, and that makes you cutting edge.

For those who are the younger generation (however you define that), it can be easy to think that because you are younger, people don’t expect as much of you. You don’t have to be a professional because you’re young and people will simply write that off as being a part of who you are.

It’s that time of the year — it’s the 3rd annual Small Business Book Awards by SmallBizTrends.com, where we celebrate and honor the new business book releases for 2010.

This year the Awards are bigger and better than ever. Here is what’s new this year:

* There’s a special site specifically for you to vote on your favorite books through December 15, 2010.
* This year the voting is completely transparent. You can sort the book entries by number of votes, and see exactly where each book stands in the running at any moment.
* The books are searchable by 6 topics. That way, the site can be an ongoing resource for those looking for relevant reading.

Vern Burkhardt (VB): You say, “Innovate or die…” It’s that serious a matter for companies, large and small?

Robert F. Brands: Absolutely. Ask yourself, “Where are you on the product lifecycle extending from innovation to introduction, growth, maturity, and decline?” I invite you to attach to this interview the chart from my book which portrays this lifecycle.

No matter where you are on the product lifecycle with your most significant product or service, or your company as a whole, it is imperative to continuously think about the next new product or service to be offered. You need to identify them early so they can be developed, grow in sales and revenues, and be ready to replace your current lead products or services as they mature in the marketplace.

So the thing with the Internet is that there is so much information it is hard to know what websites to actually keep an eye on or what ones to subscribe to, to get that nugget of information or advice or business idea. We have talked about a number of sites here before including Techcrunch, VentureBeat, Siliconrepublic and Springwise.

Here is another extremely helpful website: Innovation America. This site is literally chock-full of information on a range of subjects, including innovation, economic development, venture news and more. It is produced by Richard A. Bendis, who is the Founder, President and CEO of Innovation America (IA), a global innovation intermediary focused on accelerating the growth of the entrepreneurial innovation economy Internationally and in America. Part of this is the first email I look at in the morning, innovationDAILY (ID) a Daily Electronic Newsletter, reporting on the Daily Pulse of Global Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Angel/Seed and Venture Capital and Innovation Based Economic Development.(IBED). ID has over 125,000 unique visitors in over 185 countries with readership growing all the time.

I would like to thank Ryan McConnell of the Ryan Academy for Entrepreneurship in Ireland for the above endorsement....................Rich Bendis

I have just returned from a brief last minute visit to Algiers where I spoke at a conference focused on the Maghreb countries: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Mauritania. The objectives of the Maghreb Entrepreneurship Conference, a follow-on to President Obama’s Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship held in April 2010 in Washington, DC was to discuss strategies to promote job creation through entrepreneurship.

Hosted by the U.S. Department of State and the U.S.-Algeria Business Council, the conference brought together business talent and public officials from participating countries, including entrepreneurs of the North African Diaspora. The U.S. delegation to the conference was led by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Economic, Energy and Business Affairs, Jose W. Fernandez, who was eager to continue the work to encourage entrepreneurship and create partnerships with the Muslim world.

A fascinating new report titled 'Creative Clusters and Innovation' has just been published by NESTA (the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts), written by a team of researchers based at the Birmingham and Cardiff Business Schools.

At over 6% of the economy, and growing at twice the rate of other sectors, the UK's creative industries are proportionately the largest of any in the world. Creative firms also tend to be found in clusters, and by locating close to talent pools and clients, and by networking and sharing information, they can become more innovative and competitive.

Until the 'Creative Clusters and Innovation' project, no-one had examined systematically where these clusters are located in Britain, or the role that they play in local and regional processes of innovation.

Techcrunch have a story up this morning: To date, US online holiday spending up 12% to $16.8bn, in fact revenues of ecommerce companies have grown consistently through two recessions since 1999 (source Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near).  A recession is obviously never good news for anyone, but these stats are a timely reminder that if a startup has picked its market well it shouldn’t worry too much about recession.

The quintessential venture backed startup is in early at the beginning of a new market opportunity (either a genuinely new market or a re-segmentation of an existing market) and raises money to grow as fast as possible to lock down a leadership position – a process that will likely take five years or more from the date of company formation.  If they have picked their market well, during that time it will go from tiny – usually sub $10m, to substantial – usually $100m+, and sometimes way bigger than that.  In other words for the company to be successful its market will need to be growing at near exponential rates over five years or more.  If a recession hits during that period (which is pretty likely) then market growth might slow, but it should still be significant – as ecommerce companies are seeing now.

It may be hard to believe in these gloomy days, but this is a time of incredible opportunity for our nation's kids. The future looks very bright for people who have a strong grasp of science, technology, engineering and math (often referred to as STEM). So it's nothing short of tragic to see just how many of our kids aren't getting the math and science skills they'll need to seize the opportunities that lie ahead.

That's why we at Change the Equation (CTEq) launched a ground-breaking contest among some of the world's most innovative companies to prove just how cool jobs in STEM fields can be. Our STEM is Cool! contest challenged these companies to produce brief videos featuring an employee or group of employees who use STEM in exciting or unexpected ways. (Vote for your favorite video here).

When I was young, I was fascinated by life, in all its straight-forward manifestations: the gulls and horseshoe crabs on the beach near my home, the perfect little spiders and the even-more-perfect webs they wove, the predictably unpredictable array of multicolored warblers spangling the trees, the challenging, chattering squirrels.

But I hated “biology,” the academic study that supposedly concerned itself with these things. Not only did biology seem to have been mis-named, pre-occupied as it was with “thanatology”—the study of dead things (notably, via dissections)—but, worse yet, it abounded in brute memorization. Names, names, and more names: of phyla, classes, orders, families, genera and species, of bones and muscles, organs, and tissue types, of subcellular anatomy, and the stages of the Krebs cycle. Especially despicable, I still recall, was the obligation to memorize all of those damned digestive enzymes, where they were produced, and what they digested: ptyalin—saliva, starch; pepsin—stomach, proteins … ad infinitum and ad disgustum.

In the last few years, leadership programs have sprung up in remarkable numbers at colleges and universities across the country. Institutions as diverse as Creighton University, Arizona State University, and Highland Community College, in Illinois, now offer leadership training and opportunities to their students. Some universities and colleges, like Gonzaga and the City University of Seattle, have developed degree programs in leadership, and many more such programs are being planned. It seems that every university Web page and presidential message now highlights leadership opportunities for students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

The idea is that leadership—like scientific disciplines, for example—consists of a set of skills, methodologies, and ideas that can be taught. The difference is that unlike, say, biology, leadership should inform all aspects of life. Leadership programs teach important life skills, such as introspection, cultural sensitivity, moral acuity, people skills, and decision-making acumen.

Three years ago, in December of ’07, the number of jobs in in this country peaked just shy of 138 million. Then the economy fell apart.

By December of ’09, 8 million jobs had disappeared.

For the past year, the economy has been adding jobs — very, very slowly. So slowly, in fact, that the unemployment rate is still near 10 percent.

In all, the economy has added a million jobs in the past year, according to the government employment figures out this morning.

The global financial crisis of the late 2000s precipitated an economic downturn of such magnitude and reach that many now refer to the period as the “Great Recession.” According to the International Monetary Fund, global economic output, which had grown at an annual rate of 3.2 percent from 1993 to 2007, actually shrank by 2 percent from 2008 to 2009. A precarious economic recovery is now underway.

Aggregate views of the global economy, however, mask the distinct experiences of its real hubs—major metropolitan areas. Metro areas, which are economically integrated collections of cities, suburbs, and often surrounding rural areas, are centers of high-value economic activity in their respective nations and worldwide. And because metros form the fundamental bases for national and international economies, understanding their relative positioning before,during, and after the Great Recession provides important evidence on emerging shifts in the location of global economic resilience and future growth.

Silicon Valley is a special place, a place where dreams come true. What makes Silicon Valley different? Why is it so entrepreneurial? Why do start-ups sprout like weeds here? Innovation is the lifeblood of economies and of nations. GDP growth is often the result. Many other cities and countries have tried to copy Silicon Valley and yet no one has really been able to duplicate its success. This is an insider’s answer to these enduring questions.

At this point, entrepreneurialism has become ingrained in the local culture. My daughter, who is in elementary school, does not have an annual science fair. Her school has an Invention Convention. The children are not only expected to invent something that makes their lives easier or better, they are expected to write a simple business plan as part of their projects. This is 2nd grade in Silicon Valley! Recently, I attended one of the more popular professional events held in Silicon Valley – Tech Titans of Tomorrow. The title may be a misnomer as these teenagers are more apt to be referred to as Today’s Teen Titans. This annual event invites teenage entrepreneurs to talk about their organizations and their products, and concludes with a session where the teenagers pitch their products to investors for funding. At this year’s event, one 17-year-old raised money to start an investment fund that is targeted at providing funding to teenagers to turn their product ideas into a reality. Another teenager received a grant to install centralized energy monitors into local schools so administrators could see which rooms and equipment were creating their huge energy bills; the result is a $5,000 per year savings on their electric bills for each school. Yet, another had started his first company at age 11 and had started three companies by the time he entered college – a lawn service, an company making accessories for handheld PDAs, and an IT services firms helping what he termed “old people like my parents and grandparents” with their computers and mobile devices. Yet another teenager was proud that he had one of the top iPhone applications.

In 1981, a score of well-to-do twentysomethings congregated in Estes Park, Colorado for a new-age pow-wow on how to use their inherited wealth toward social good. They called themselves the Doughnuts. The gathering was organized by Joshua Mailman, son of famed New York philanthropist and investor Joseph L. Mailman. "We were part of the generation of people interested in meditation, Buddhism, Shamanism, rainbow gatherings, and Burning Man," he tells Fast Company. "It was a mystical, non-western way of looking at the world."

Today, Mailman has moved beyond the Doughnuts to become a veteran angel investor and philanthropist through three organizations he founded: the Threshold Foundation, the Social Venture Network, and Serious Change.