No matter what your individual definition of success may be, finding it can often be a challenge. Whether its career success, monetary success or something in between, most people have a certain level of accomplishment that they want to reach in their lives. However, many fail to reach that magical level of success and have no idea why. The good news is, there are a few things that every person can do differently to change their current course of action and find the success that they deserve.

I get a lot of questions about how to get rich, and I always give the same answer.

Don’t spend too much. Mostly save. Always invest.

Seems simple enough, right? Yet so many people do the exact opposite -- invest poorly, spend way too much, save almost nothing, and remain willfully ignorant about their finances.

Inspiration can sprout from necessity.

Garred Lentz got sick of wrapping his sweatpants around his feet to keep warm each winter, so the student entrepreneur sewed his own fuzzy, over-the-foot version.

Then his inspiration turned into avocation. Lentz’s comfy Sakpants — they look like a cross between pajamas and Thai fishermen pants — became the foundation of a business plan last April when he received $3,000 from the University of Utah’s entrepreneurship institute.

Image: (Steve Griffin | The Salt Lake Tribune) University of Utah students Garred Lentz and Brayden Iwasaki wear their "Sakpants" which are like footie sweatpants for grownups and kids. They have received about 1,000 orders for their first run of the pants. They are photographed here in their makeshift warehouse at Brayden Iwasaki's house in Holladay, Utah Wednesday, December 10, 2014. 

Are you good at math? Like, really good at math? Do you also know Python and, oh yeah, have deep knowledge of a particular industry?

On the off chance that you possess this agglomeration of skills, you might have what it takes to be a data scientist. If so, these are good times. LinkedIn just voted "statistical analysis and data mining" the top skill that got people hired in 2014.

Glassdoor reports that the average salary for a data scientist is $118,709 versus $64,537 for a programmer. A McKinsey study predicts that by 2018, the U.S. could face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 "people with deep analytic skills" as well as 1.5 million "managers and analysts with the know-how to use the analysis of big data to make effective decisions."

Image: MASHABLE COMPOSITE 

What is Steve Jobs’s legacy? Here’s one measure: since his death in 2011 from pancreatic cancer, the former Apple CEO has won 141 patents. That’s more than most inventors win during their lifetimes.

Jobs was closely involved in the details of many Apple products, and some of his inventions are still working their way through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The large number of them reflect Apple’s intense efforts to patent every aspect of its products, no matter how small, something Jobs himself encouraged.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com/ 

Preventing disease is the Holy Grail of modern medicine. Many diseases plaguing society today are chronic and brought on by lifestyle choices; others have their roots in genetic or environmental factors. Either way, the ability of the healthcare community to prevent disease is heavily influenced by information. Gather the right data with enough warning time to impact the outcome, and most diseases can be minimized — or even eliminated.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

In venture capital and entrepreneurship, you learn from experience and from others.  During MGMT 804: Venture Capital and Entrepreneurial Management with lecturer Henry Han, I was able to sharpen my investing skills through extensive in class discussions, a term sheet negotiation simulation, and enriching readings.  Though the class is only a quarter long, I was able to dig deep into valuation, deal structuring, term sheet mechanics, due diligence frameworks, and fund arrangement.

Image: http://beacon.wharton.upenn.edu

Today’s creative inspiration is all in these three pictures with very few words involved.

I hope at least one of these creative inspiration memories resonates with you and leads you to new creative ideas today!

Image: http://brainzooming.com/creative-inspiration-three-pictures-and-very-few-words/23157/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+brainzooming%2FZWKr+%28Brainzooming%29

Here I am presenting opportunities to those engaged in research for electric and other advanced vehicles, to engage in research related to their own research, earning some money for their efforts, as well as helping their country. Note: Some of these are restricted to American citizens, or certain “Permanent Resident” or “protected” foreigners. Others require watchful tracking of what the foreigners do.

 

Usually, at any given time, I have about 10 to 20 tabs open on Chrome. I'm also juggling several tasks at once: answering emails as they come in, updating my organization's social media channels, writing an article, browsing the news — you get the picture.

I used to think this method of tackling everything at once made me more efficient, but I've started to notice that it actually takes longer to finish anything. I'll write a couple lines of a piece for The Muse, jump over Twitter and churn out a tweet, think of a message I need to send and finally jump back to my Word doc — only to have completely lost my train of thought.

Whew!

We’ve been dying to tell you all for a while that we had raised a new venture capital fund and of course given SEC filing requirements the story was somewhat already scooped by the always-in-the-know Dan Primack a few weeks ago.

We raised $280 million. Our last fund was $200 million but as you may already know since we raised that fund we added new partners Greg Bettinelli and Kara Nortman and Venture Partner Hamet Watt – all of whom are busy looking at new deals for the firm in addition to Yves Sisteron (the founder), Steven Dietz (also part of founding team) and myself.

Image: http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/ 

Triple-negative breast cancer is as bad as it sounds. The cells that form these tumors lack three proteins that would make the cancer respond to powerful, customized treatments. Instead, doctors are left with treating these patients with traditional chemotherapy drugs that only show long-term effectiveness in 20 percent of women with triple-negative breast cancer. Now, researchers at The Johns Hopkins University have discovered a way that breast cancer cells are able to resist the effects of chemotherapy — and they have found a way to reverse that process.

Good Start Genetics said today that it has exclusively licensed a preimplantation genetic screening test from Johns Hopkins University.

The test, dubbed FAST-SeqS for Fast Aneuploidy Screening Test-Sequencing System, screens embryos for chromosomal aneuploidies prior to implantation in an in vitro fertilization setting.

TechConnect is pleased to host 2015 TechConnect World, June 14-18 in Washington DC. The event, co-located with the 2015 National Innovation Summit the 2014 National Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Conference, delivers the world’s largest showcase and accelerator for industry-vetted emerging-technologies ready for commercialization.

Image: http://nationalinnovationsummit.com/ 

KITTERY, Maine (AP) -- Even on land, the Ghost looks futuristic and fast.

The angular vessel looks like a waterborne stealth fighter. It rides atop underwater torpedo-shaped tubes powered by a pair of 2,000-horsepower gas turbine engines. Gyroscopes keep the ride smooth.

Sadly, Ghost is all revved up with no place to go. The brainchild of a wealthy inventor and entrepreneur, Ghost might never be a familiar household name like Humvee, Apache and Abrams -- even if it works as advertised -- because its creator built a warship the military isn't convinced it needs.

Image: In this photo taken Monday Dec. 15, 2014 the newly designed warship vessel named Ghost sits in an old warehouse on the grounds of the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine. New Hampshire businessman Greg Sancoff put up some of his own money to build the warship, now he just needs to find a buyer. (AP Photo/Jim Cole) (Jim Cole/AP)

A coalition of geneticists and computer programmers calling itself the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health is developing protocols for exchanging DNA information across the Internet. The researchers hope their work could be as important to medical science as HTTP, the protocol created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, was to the Web.

One of the group’s first demonstration projects is a simple search engine that combs through the DNA letters of thousands of human genomes stored at nine locations, including Google’s server farms and the University of Leicester, in the U.K.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com

PURCHASE, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--MasterCard today announced the MasterCard Masters of Code™ competition. The intense, 10-city hackathon series will traverse the globe – from Sydney to Silicon Valley – to find the master artisans of our day: developers.

Sponsored and hosted by MasterCard and organized by AngelHack, the Masters of Code competition features regional weekend-long events that will bring together the world’s top developers, designers and entrepreneurs to take on the APIs supplied by MasterCard.

As fast as they fell in love with them, cities have begun to dump hackathons.

The rapid-fire coding events generated big buzz over the past few years from municipalities looking for new ways to modernize their technology infrastructure. When it became clear that the events did not produce the overnight results many hoped for, even CityLab wondered, "Are Civic Hackathons Stupid?" At the time, a former chief technical officer of Seattleclaimed that they were actually "becoming counterproductive" tools for municipalities.

Image: Wikimedia's annual development community meet-up — the Wikimedia Hackathon — was held in Amsterdam, Netherlands in 2013. // Flickr user Sebastiaan ter Burg

As driverless cars edge slowly toward commercial reality, some people are wondering how cities might change as a result. Will traffic lights disappear? Will parking garages become obsolete? Will carpooling become the norm?

Singapore is keen to find out. The city-state will open one of its neighborhoods to driverless cars in 2015, with the idea that such vehicles could operate as a kind of jitney service, picking up passengers and taking them to trains or other modes of public transportation.

Image: This electric car, retrofitted to drive itself, is being tested in Singapore.

South Florida companies attracted millions in venture capital in 2014 from investors near and far — from Boca Raton's New World Angels investor group to corporate investment from Silicon Valley giants. By now, you've probably heard of the Dania Beach augmented reality startup Magic Leap, which scored $542 million from Google and other investors in October.