Sunday Blog Round-Up, Chapter 3

As Frankie says, RELAX! It’s Sunday! We’re highlight some of our favorite posts of the week, as we hope you are settling into a fine Sunday.
This week we’ve been winding down our more-than-a-month-long theme of How to Write a Proposal. We hope we covered the topics you are most concerned with, but feel free to let us know if you have other topics you think we should cover in the future.

Some time next week we shall kick off The Next Step, things to do after sending the proposal, working on proper follow-up, how to present your proposal, how to negotiate price, and more. So, today, we ask you: What topics do you want to learn about in creating a proposal?

And now, some other sparkling gems of the week:

• Here are 11 super sexy (aka nerdy) Infographics on commonly made grammar mistakes. This is a totally useful, totally simple thing for anyone writing proposals or, well, anything!
• Have you seen this guy who went a year without Internet? How long could you survive?
• We had a great interview this week Ivan Paramonau, software development expert, who teaches us about “What to say to clients when they say ‘It’s Expensive’.” 
  
• And we are polling hundreds of professional and part-time proposal penners to see what they think on various proposal topics. We started this week by analyzing the responses to “What do you think is the most important part of the proposal?” Next week, we will talk about the emotions you associate with proposal writing, so make sure you go here to weigh in.
• Would you get a tattoo of your company’s logo for a 15-percent raise? We’ve been debating this week where we’d put our bright orange Q’s. Is the skin the newest marketing canvas? Or just too much? What do you think?!
• And check out this great article by blogger The Comma Man about “Six Things Proposal Evaluators Love (Other than puppies)” — compliance matrix, exec summaries and v-shaped answers, oh my!
• A picture is worth a thousand words, right? So, our writer Todd says cut the word count and let photos do some of the talking in your next proposal!
• I’ll just include a fascinating quote from President Obama’s Vanity Fair interview that published earlier this week. What do you think? Evidently, to be like Barack, you need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day, says the author:
  

  “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” [Obama] said. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. It’s why shopping is so exhausting. “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.” The self-discipline he believes is required to do the job well comes at a high price. “You can’t wander around,” he said. “It’s much harder to be surprised. You don’t have those moments of serendipity. You don’t bump into a friend in a restaurant you haven’t seen in years. The loss of anonymity and the loss of surprise is an unnatural state. You adapt to it, but you don’t get used to it—at least I don’t.”

(Though, to be honest, we aren’t sure Derek Zoolander’s favorite song doesn’t exactly make sense. But what a fun, crazy video!)