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He had a dream, and so do you. 31 inspirational quotes to help you remember the power of a vision.

Did you know that one of Martin Luther King Jr.'s advisers had recommended that he leave out the "I have a dream" phrase for his speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963? Luckily, King ignored that recommendation. That speech and quotes from many others have inspired us and given us the courage to act upon our own dreams. In honor of a great man, let us all hold our dreams up for the world to see and our hearts to embrace. Here are a few of King's pearls of wisdom to help remind you of the power of a vision.

"Faith is taking the first step even when you can't see the whole staircase."
"There comes a time when silence is betrayal."
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."
"Only in the darkness can you see the stars."
"If you can't fly then run, if you can't run then walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward."

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness: Only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: Only love can do that."

"Let no man pull you so low as to hate him."
"That old law about 'an eye for an eye' leaves everybody blind. The time is always right to do the right thing."
"There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must take it because his conscience tells him it is right."
"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."
"Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men."
"Intelligence plus character--that is the goal of true education."
"We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience."
"A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus."
"I have decided to stick to love ... Hate is too great a burden to bear."
"Everybody can be great ... because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love."
"A man who won't die for something is not fit to live."
"No one really knows why they are alive until they know what they'd die for."
"Forgiveness is not an occasional act; it is a constant attitude."
"Those who are not looking for happiness are the most likely to find it, because those who are searching forget that the surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others."
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
We must build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.
"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."
"We must accept finite disappointment but never lose infinite hope."
"I have a dream that one day little black boys and girls will be holding hands with little white boys and girls."
"We must live together as brothers or perish together as fools."
"Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge, which is power; religion gives man wisdom, which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals."
"People fail to get along because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don't know each other; they don't know each other because they have not communicated with each other."
"We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies."
"No person has the right to rain on your dreams."
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He had a dream, and so do you. 31 inspirational quotes to help you remember the power of a vision.

Did you know that one of Martin Luther King Jr.'s advisers had recommended that he leave out the "I have a dream" phrase for his speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963? Luckily, King ignored that recommendation. That speech and quotes from many others have inspired us and given us the courage to act upon our own dreams. In honor of a great man, let us all hold our dreams up for the world to see and our hearts to embrace. Here are a few of King's pearls of wisdom to help remind you of the power of a vision.

"Faith is taking the first step even when you can't see the whole staircase."
"There comes a time when silence is betrayal."
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."
"Only in the darkness can you see the stars."
"If you can't fly then run, if you can't run then walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward."

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness: Only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: Only love can do that."

"Let no man pull you so low as to hate him."
"That old law about 'an eye for an eye' leaves everybody blind. The time is always right to do the right thing."
"There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must take it because his conscience tells him it is right."
"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."
"Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men."
"Intelligence plus character--that is the goal of true education."
"We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience."
"A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus."
"I have decided to stick to love ... Hate is too great a burden to bear."
"Everybody can be great ... because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love."
"A man who won't die for something is not fit to live."
"No one really knows why they are alive until they know what they'd die for."
"Forgiveness is not an occasional act; it is a constant attitude."
"Those who are not looking for happiness are the most likely to find it, because those who are searching forget that the surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others."
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
We must build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.
"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."
"We must accept finite disappointment but never lose infinite hope."
"I have a dream that one day little black boys and girls will be holding hands with little white boys and girls."
"We must live together as brothers or perish together as fools."
"Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge, which is power; religion gives man wisdom, which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals."
"People fail to get along because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don't know each other; they don't know each other because they have not communicated with each other."
"We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies."
"No person has the right to rain on your dreams."
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Women tend to attribute their success to working hard--rather than taking smart risks.

Conventional wisdom in startup circles suggests one of the best ways to nurture great employees is to encourage them to take risks and fail. The problem is, not everyone is comfortable with this proposition--specifically, most women employees, suggests a new survey.

Consulting firm KPMG surveyed online 2,012 college-educated women ages 18 to 64 in the white-collar workforce in the U.S. last March. Only 43 percent of respondents were open to taking bigger risks associated with career advancement. Meanwhile, 69 percent of those surveyed were comfortable taking small risks. KPMG defines "bigger risks" as moving across the country for a job or switching careers; "smaller risks" included tasks like presenting to a board of investors or taking on a big assignment.

KPMG's Chief Diversity Officer Michele Meyer-Shipp says a number of economic and cultural factors help explain the findings. Not surprisingly, younger women tend to be bigger risk takers because they have fewer financial and familial obligations holding them back. Forty-five percent of respondents with less than five years' of experience were open to taking big risks versus 37 percent of women with 15 or more years of experience.

Another exception: Women of color are more willing to take bigger risks compared to white women (57 percent versus 38 percent).

"Women of color are a little more comfortable getting uncomfortable because that's how we have to navigate every single day of our lives," says Meyer-Shipp, who is African American. The same findings are evident in entrepreneurial activity: As Inc. has reported, minority women are starting businesses at a much faster rate than their white counterparts.

Women who hold back often tend to worry about how they're being perceived, the survey suggests. When asked about their biggest concerns at work, 41 percent of respondents cite looking like they don't know as much as they should. Twenty-nine percent of women cite not being confident enough. And when they do fail, 86 percent of women admit to being more cautious about their future steps.

It's worth noting that the survey has its limitations. The results may be different at fast-growing startups with a well-established risk-taking culture--or with female leadership.

Still, if you suspect you might have some women on your team who are holding back, women founders say intentional encouragement can go a long way.

Heidi Zak, founder of San Francisco-based lingerie company ThirdLove, says at least 80 percent of her 330-person company is made up of women. She makes a point of telling the story of how she created ThirdLove--and the numerous mistakes she made along the way--to new employees.

"We have a culture of trying to highlight moments like that and talk about them so that everyone realizes that it's OK to make mistakes," she says.

Zak also makes sure to identify those employees who they think have potential for internal promotions and start those conversations early to be able to coach them. "It just highlights that there are women in leadership roles who can help promote, within and externally, more women [up the ladder]," she says.

Jennifer Young, co-founder and chief marketing officer at Austin-based online RV marketplace Outdoorsy, says that as one of the few women on the executive team, it's her responsibility to seek out ways to help other women take career risks. She gives the example of a woman who joined the marketing team last year, but six months in, revealed she really wanted to be a product manager. It meant losing a person on her own team, but Young helped connect the employee with the product team and move her into a product manager role.

As a leader, it's your job to figure out how best to give your employees a voice--even your most introverted team members, says Galyn Bernard, co-founder of New York-based children's clothing startup Primary. She says in meetings she makes a point of directly asking for the opinion of women (and men) on her 40-person team who tend to be more shy.

Boosting the confidence of female employees does not need to take much effort, say the founders. Zak says she and other executives hold informal coffee chats with their employees to see how they're doing and where they want to go in their careers. Outdoorsy, which has 35 women in its 100-person company, created a Slack channel called "Ladies" to help foster community.

"I'm a very confident person," Zak says. "I think part of my confidence comes from being able to say 'I don't know everything, and I'm learning on the job, too.'"
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The 165-year-old clothing manufacturer shows off F.L.X., a platform that uses lasers to replicate vintage denim, in this 360-degree tour of their Eureka Lab.

It's no secret that the broken-in look on a pair of blue jeans rarely comes from actually wearing them. Walk into any clothing store and you'll have your pick of styles with fade patterns and maybe even a few fashionable rips.

For decades brands typically have achieved that sought-after look by treating the denim by hand, using large amounts of chemicals. But recently the Eureka Lab, Levi Strauss's innovation center in San Francisco, has developed a new method of making jeans that relies less on manual labor and more on some advanced technology.

The F.L.X. Project, a digital platform Levi's launched last year, entails photographing old jeans with an iPad, then using a laser to duplicate the imperfections on a freshly manufactured pair. Whereas creating wear patterns by hand takes 20 to 30 minutes per pair, the laser rig completes the task in about 90 seconds.

In its lab, Levi's has jeans dating back nearly a century that can serve as inspiration for new creations, providing virtually limitless customization options. The lab also can make near-clones of the original version, down to its wear patterns, fade lines, and tears.

"[It] nearly exactly replicates the vintage jean that inspired it," says Bart Sights, the lab's head of technical innovation.

Inc. visited the Eureka Lab to watch the new process in action. Check out the 360-degree video above to see how a tablet and a laser can create pants that look like they're from the 1930s in less than two minutes.

Your audience craves authenticity and a personal connection with your brand.

Whether you're a small-business owner competing with giants like Amazon or a young Latina running for office for the first time, you can use social media to your advantage. Through her effective use of social media, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez became the first 29-year-old Latina to beat a 10-term white male incumbent. This goes to show that, when used correctly, the power of social media is huge.

Here are some examples of how she used social media, and how you can implement similar strategies to build trust and win customers too.
1. She knew exactly who her audience was and what appealed to them.

As a minority Millennial herself, she knew young people wanted real solutions to real problems affecting their communities. They are disappointed by the politicians and how government policies are made, and hence don't see value in exercising their right to vote. They do, however, like to voice their opinions on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, the main platforms Ocasio-Cortez used to talk with her people, not at them.

What this means for your business:

Before you start developing a new product or service, talk to real people who might be having the problem you're trying to solve. This will require virtually or physically meeting people where they spend most of their time.
Take the time to really listen, and respond to their messages and comments on your social-media accounts.

2. She gave her people something to care about, and hope for, by using everyday language and analogies.

A powerful example of this is her comparison of the voting process to the dating process. In a short video that she posted on election day, she described how frustrating it is to keep dating until you find your soulmate. She then stated that voting is similar in the sense that you don't see immediate results. It takes time and numbers for the change to take place, but that doesn't mean one shouldn't exercise their right to vote.

How you can use simple yet powerful messaging:

Write marketing material at the 6th-grade level. If your kids can understand what you do, so can your prospects.
Limit jargon to internal communication, as your team understands exactly what it means, but your customers might not.
Use emotion to describe how your customers will feel after successfully implementing your solution.

3. She bridged the gap between politics and everyday people by taking them behind the scenes.

If you look at her Instagram feed, you'll see lots of photos and videos from the Capitol building, giving us a glimpse into her day-to-day activities. She even described her first few days at the Capitol as a high school orientation, complete with her "freshman yearbook" pictures. Through familiar concepts like high school orientation and the occasional use of emojis, her followers get to experience politics as if they were actually in her office. Politics doesn't always have to be a boring subject kept hidden from outsiders.

Ways you can take your people behind the scenes:

Encourage your employees to share their experiences on social media.
Make your hiring process more fun and human by sharing video clips of the new hire's team members and manager.
Post photos and videos of "boring" tasks like assembling new equipment or unfinished products.

4. Her online personality matched her offline personality, and she is not afraid of openly discussing what needs to be discussed.

Politicians are known for making promises before the election, but not following through with their commitments afterward. Ocasio-Cortez has maintained transparency by staying consistent with her message both online and offline, as well as before and after her election.

One of the radical ideas she proposed was abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, for violating human rights. She has continued advocating for minorities by showing up at rallies and other community events.

How you can maintain an authentic brand:

Clearly identify your core values and live by them, no matter where you are.
Do what you say you will do; do not make promises you can't deliver on.

You too can build trust with your target audience by identifying their needs, proposing simple solutions, sharing exclusive content, and living your core values.
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Employees aren't being properly supported, and employers are leaving valuable dollars on the table.

America's population in 1900 was 76 million. A century later, it had risen to 281 million. It's safe to say that 19 years later, the number has definitely risen even more.

Besides the population growing and evolving, there's another area of society rapidly growing and evolving and that's the workplace. The popularity of remote work, along with various other trends, has been discussed and brought to the forefront.

However, despite all of the discussions about improving the workplace, there's a crisis that is going unnoticed. That crisis is employee caregivers.

In a recent study titled "The Caring Company," two Harvard Business School researchers, Joseph B. Fuller and Manjari Raman, discovered that employers underestimate the struggle (and burden) that employees face in balancing their professional and caregiving roles.

The informal care economy is massive. A 2015 AARP report estimated that over the previous 12 months, more than 43 million adult Americans had administered unpaid care to an adult who needed support or to a child with special needs. To further expound on this, it was also discovered that six out of 10 family caregivers held a job while providing unpaid caregiving support.
Why Caregiving Must Be Addressed in the Workplace

The Census Bureau projects that for every 100 working-age Americans, aged 18 to 64, there will be 72 people outside that range in 2030, up from 59 in 2010. People may be living longer, but that doesn't guarantee a high quality of life to coincide with it. As these individuals get older, the burden falls on the employees who are going to work each and every day.

If companies want to retain top-end talent and high performance, then dedicating more attention to this issue is a must.

Also discovered in the study was that 73 percent of U.S. workers possessed some sort of caregiving role. Further exploration of these workers found that 32 percent left a job due to the difficulty of juggling their professional life with their caregiving life.

Eighty percent stated that caregiving duties prevented them from optimal performance at the workplace and 28 percent said that caregiving had hurt their careers.

To start generating some positive momentum toward this issue, here are three steps to begin with:
1. Assess your current workplace.

It's hard to alleviate an issue if you don't fully understand it. Yet many companies are attempting to do this. Some 52 percent of employers surveyed in this study don't track data on their employees' caregiving responsibilities.

If you don't track and collect data, you won't be able to get an accurate pulse of your workplace. Therefore, the first step in this process is to simply start gathering data and feedback from your employees. Sending online questions (that can be anonymous) is a simple and cost-effective way to get the ball rolling in the right direction.
2. Offer subsidies and more paid time off.

Besides underestimating the severity of the situation, employers are also not providing the key benefits that employees are looking for. In the study, employers discovered that paid time off was the most important. However, only 55 percent of eligible employees utilized the benefit, and only 59 percent of the employers surveyed offered this benefit.

To help this situation, offer more paid time off and also communicate this more clearly through various company channels.
3. Offer targeted education and training.

As someone who has personally dealt with caregiving over an extended period of time, it can be stressful, conjure up many difficult emotions to process, and lead to unintentionally neglecting personal well-being.

Simply put, caregiving can lead to you also becoming sick. And it's with that notion in mind that educating individuals in this arena is pivotal. Being a caregiver is a unique and discomforting situation to be in.

Providing access to stress experts and other individuals targeted specifically to help employees navigate the difficult terrains of caregiving is a high-yielding action that will provide immediate dividends to everyone involved.

Going above and beyond by taking care of employees who are caregivers will be one of the key ways to stand out from other businesses in the imminent future.
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Judges say Congress never intended to protect job candidates, only employees.

Dale Kleber was 58 when he applied for a legal position at CareFusion Corp, a unit of medical device maker Becton Dickinson and Co. The company opted not to even interview him, and hired a person with fewer qualifications--who happened to be 29.

Kleber sued under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (ADEA), which protects employees over the age of 40. The 7th Circuit rejected his claim saying that the "plain language" of ADEA showed that Congress meant for it to cover only current employees, not candidates.

When we talk about age discrimination, it often gets lumped together with race and gender discrimination, but they come from two different laws. Race and gender are protected under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and age discrimination is not. As such, Employment Attorney Kate Bischoff says, you don't end up with same results with age discrimination that you would with race claims.

The ruling runs counter to conventional wisdom and current practice, and it certainly doesn't make sense for your business to engage in such discrimination when hiring. Employment Attorney Jon Hyman said,

We should be encouraging hiring policies that reult in diverse workplaces. Not carving out protected classes from claims. For example, this decision would permit an employer to advertise for "digital natives," which could have the impact of disparately effecting our older workers.

As Hyman says, this could lead toward advertising that blatantly discriminates against older workers. (In the above lawsuit, the job posting asked for candidates with "no more than" seven years of experience.) Even if Congress meant to limit ADEA to current employers, it seems like an organization that actively sought to hire only young people would create a hostile work environment for any existing over 40s in the company.

As this is a Circuit court ruling and not a Supreme Court ruling it doesn't apply across all 50 states, and you would be foolish to think that you could win hiring age discrimination case in the other circuits. ADEA does clearly cover your current employees, though, so regardless of this ruling, you must not discriminate against your current employees, even in the 7th circuit.

Regardless, instead of waiting for another court to disagree and the Supreme Court to pick up the cases, Congress needs to act. They can clarify what they meant and amend ADEA to clearly cover job applicants.
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Part X-Men, part Harry Potter, Pioneer is an online tournament for ambitious outsiders everywhere.

The problem of inequality is really two problems. First, there's the lopsided distribution of wealth: Whether you look at income or assets, the rich, at least in America, are comparatively richer than they've been in decades while the middle and working classes are losing ground.

Then there's inequality of opportunity. Access to the engines of wealth creation is itself distributed unequally, producing socioeconomic mobility that's lower in the U.S. than in other developed nations, and getting worse.

There's no more powerful engine of wealth creation than the technology industry, but its record of widening the circle of opportunity is mixed at best. The people who get venture capital funding for their startups or high-paying engineering jobs tend to be disproportionately male, white (or Asian) graduates of elite universities.

If you're living paycheck to paycheck, you're unlikely to quit your job to start a company, even if it's a billion-dollar idea. To quote from a recent paper by Lynnise E. Pantin, director of Boston College Law School's Entrepreneurship and Innovation Clinic, "Entrepreneurship is a compelling solution to wealth inequality, but wealth inequality can be an impediment to success in entrepreneurship."

Maybe the problem is that, when it comes to identifying entrepreneurial talent, Silicon Valley doesn't act like Silicon Valley at all. It relies on old-boy networks, coffee meetings, demo days. "In reality, the venture market pretty much operates like a business from the 18th century," says Daniel Gross, a veteran of Apple and Y Combinator. "No one has really tried to bring the scale of the internet to this problem of finding extraordinarily productive, ambitious outsiders and supporting them."

That's exactly what Gross is seeking to do with his new company, Pioneer.

Each month, it runs a massive online tournament for people pursuing all sorts of projects--startups, nonprofits, scientific investigations, novels, whatever. Participants vote on each other's projects, awarding credit for status updates that reflect evidence of progress. At the end of the month, a panel of all-star subject-matter experts review the highest scoring projects and pick anywhere from a handful to a dozen or so winners. Judges include venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison, mathematician Stephen Wolfram, and economist Tyler Cowen.

The second cohort of "Pioneers," announced last week, included a 24-year-old from Ghana who is building a Thumbtack-like booking platform for vetted local service vendors; a pair of 22-year-olds from India working on a digital driving assistant; and a 23-year-old Malaysian journalist who writes about the early lives of geniuses. Gross calls the winners "a collection of X-Men--these weird, powerful people who don't really fit in where they are." (He's fond of talking about Pioneer in pop culture terms. He also name-checks the wizard tournament in Harry Potter and says his biggest influence might be Ender's Game, the sci-fi novel about teenagers who train to fight aliens via a video game.)

Each winner gets $1,000 plus a plane ticket to San Francisco, where they'll have the chance to meet each other and network with mentors. Those who are starting companies will also be eligible for an investment from Pioneer, which is backed by Stripe and Andreessen.

At first blush, Gross looks more like the stereotypical face of Silicon Valley than someone trying to change it. He grew up in Israel, a country that consistently produces more than its share of successful startups, put his mandatory military service on hold after he got accepted into Y Combinator, and sold the resulting startup, Cue, to Apple in 2013 for a reported $40 million-plus.

But Gross didn't hail from Israel's entrepreneurial class. He grew up in an ultra-religious community just outside Jerusalem's Old City. Although his father was a computer science professor, his parents refused to allow the internet in the house. Had he not been accepted in Y Combinator, Gross thinks there's a decent chance "I'd still be stuck in Israel. Maybe an Orthodox Jew--married, with 12 kids."

That sense of random fortune is something he has encountered over and over in Silicon Valley, and it strikes him as curious in an industry that thinks of itself as both a meritocracy and a crucible for scalable, repeatable solutions. "I don't think we need to leave things up to chance," he says. "We used to, in an era before the internet, but now we can reach billions of people. Now we can remove luck from the equation and make it so if you have the talent and ambition, you can succeed."

Those Pioneers who start companies will also, through their success, pay it forward. Under the terms of the contest, accepting the award money requires granting Pioneer the right to invest up to $100,000 alongside other investors in any funding event, with Pioneer's investment capped at 20 percent of the round. Scaling opportunity in a global way, says Gross, requires "a lot of money moving through the system, and the way we do that is by capturing some of the value we create." (Y Combinator also takes a stake in companies that pass through its accelerator program.)

"If this system works, it stands to fix a massive problem in society, which is this Pareto distribution of wealth and income," Gross says. "If we have a systematic way of identifying promising young talent early on in life and we can give them money to support their goals, we've basically managed to fix this massive problem we have today. Which is, increasingly, the wealth is accumulating to the 1 percent of the 1 percent." Fixing one of the world's biggest problems with a video game--now that would be magic worthy of Harry Potter.

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Token-funded blockchain project Tron is not only hiring while others cut staff, it’s recruiting an entourage for its founder.

Among the 10 open positions that Tron Group, the company behind the namesake cryptocurrency, posted on Wednesday, two were for aides to the 28-year-old CEO, Justin Sun. These hires would supplement the personal assistant he already has.

One of the jobs Tron is looking to fill is a senior executive assistant to the CEO, who would work with Sun’s personal assistant, mentoring the latter and making sure his scheduling is done properly.

a Other duties for the senior executive assistant include organizing the CEO’s home and dealing with “maintenance issues” there; “packing/unpacking”; running personal errands; and developing extensive knowledge of the Bay Area’s restaurants and “well-known social and recreational spots.”

A college diploma is not required, but a “24/7 mindset” is, according to the job postings on LinkedIn and JobVite.

Another job, personal financial accountant for the CEO, requires keeping track of Sun’s personal spending, keeping his finances in order, and ensuring “that transactions are executed in order to optimize the HNWE’s [high net-worth executive] tax position.”

The candidate must speak and write in Mandarin fluently. (Sun is from China, and relocated Tron’s headquarters to the U.S.) For this job, a bachelor’s degree is required. Neither job posting indicated what the salary would be.

Cliff Edwards, a spokesman for Tron, told CoinDesk these were “routine hires.”

“Virtually every CEO under the sun, and certainly everyone I’ve worked with, has had an executive assistant,” he said by email.

“Whether the CEO has an accountant is the CEO’s business alone,” Edwards added. When later asked if that meant the accountant would be paid by Sun himself rather than Tron, he replied:

“Since Tron is self-funded by Justin, the two are essentially one and the same, although the duties obviously would be in the service of Tron activities.”

Neil Dundon, a professional recruiter specializing in the crypto space, told CoinDesk that hiring multiple assistants for a corporate leader is a normal practice for large enterprises, but unusual for crypto startups.

“Having a personal financial accountant does seem like a luxury,” he said. “It certainly seems like overkill in the crypto industry with it being so new.”
Flush in a bear market

While these hires might sound like cushy perks for a young startup founder, they are especially notable in light of recent retrenchment by other projects and firms in a prolonged crypto bear market.

Token projects Nebulas and BlockEx, ethereum studio ConsenSys and mining giant Bitmain are among those that have made significant staff reductions.

“We are keeping the business growing because we are executing,” said Edwards. “Companies that are not executing, or that have poorly formed business plans, are retrenching and/or laying off staff.”

Further, Tron may have reason to feel flush these days. Its native token has nearly doubled in value since the beginning of December, from $0.015 to $0.027 Thursday morning, according to CoinMarketCap. The token’s market capitalization totals about $1.8 billion, ranking ninth among all cryptocurrencies.

And to be sure, Tron is also looking to fill technical and business positions, not just handlers for Sun.

Other job openings posted Wednesday include two translators from Mandarin to English “for daily communication with the China team,” three blockchain engineers of different levels, a technical recruiter, an engineering manager and a business development manager to build a developer community.

According to Edwards, Tron’s current staff in the U.S. is about 90 people, and the startup is planning to hire five to ten more in the first quarter of 2019.
Past controversies

Tron raised $70 million during an ICO in 2017, though it later returned some of those funds to Chinese investors after China banned token sales.

This past summer, Tron bought BitTorrent with the hope of boosting adoption of its blockchain with the file sharing service’s huge base of 100 million active users. The acquisition was controversial, prompting an employee exodus from BitTorrent. The file-sharing system’s creator, Bram Cohen, recently disavowed any connection with Tron or Sun.

Tron recently announced launching BitTorrent’s own token BTT, which can be used to incentivize users to share their bandwidth more actively for faster file exchanges. The job descriptions posted Thursday don’t mention BitTorrent or BTT.

Tron has also been criticized for its marketing tactics. According to CoinDesk’s Crypto-Economics Explorer, social media activity around the native TRON token is 33% that of market bellwether bitcoin, compared to just 7.5% of developer activity.

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Libby Crow shed her shadow and built an empire. Now she shares her shine.

In 2012, Libby Crow received a phone call from a woman selling renters insurance. Little did she know that the seemingly mundane conversation with a stranger would save her life.

Crow was 25 years old. She had just dumped her boyfriend, quit her elementary school teaching job to become an entrepreneur, and moved to Denver, Colo., for a fresh start. Renters insurance seemed like a reasonable precaution — but she didn’t plan on living long enough to need it.

As she listened to the woman explain policy options, Crow repressed the pain of her father’s recent death, the loneliness of being a digital business owner, and the dark thoughts that had recently emerged in the vacuum of leaving her old life behind. Crow had already penned a goodbye letter to her mother, complete with banking account numbers and passwords. She was on the verge of giving up hope.

Despite this, Crow remained calm and polite on the phone. That wasn’t hard for her: an honors student, prom queen, and star athlete, she was a natural performer. As the conversation came to a close, the stranger on the line said something that would change the course of her life.

Today, Crow runs a thriving global coaching business. She lives in sunny Venice Beach, Calif., with her husband, fellow entrepreneur Scott Oldford, and their long-haired dachshund, Cooper. The woman who had once lost the will to live can now be described as a human sparkler: one encounter with her will light you up.

At just 31, she’s mentored thousands through her online courses, group coaching programs, one-on-one consulting sessions, workshops, and retreats, teaching them how to effectively build and run online businesses.

The present-day Crow is a far cry from the small-town Wyoming girl who started her career as an overworked, underpaid teacher, numbing the grief that would eventually threaten her life and grasping at a dream that then seemed impossible.
Living from taquito to taquito.

“Where I grew up, you’re expected to go to college, get married, take a vacation once a year, and pay off your debt until you’re 60,” says Crow.

A dutiful daughter and emotional rock for others, Crow followed the script. After graduating from college, she promptly took a local teaching job making $2,200 a month to start paying off her $60,000 of student loans. While she did her best to make it work financially, she ate her fair share of 32-cent packs of ramen noodles and $2 taquitos to stay afloat.

All the while, a greater longing stirred inside her. “Even though I loved teaching, my gut told me I was supposed to be doing something else,” shares Crow. Grateful to be employed, she resigned herself to simply scraping by.

Then, Crow’s father died of alcoholism.

“My dad’s death shook my whole world. I started to wonder — if that’s how fast your life can be taken, what’s it all really for?” The tragedy led her to explore another path in life.

Life outside the box.

Crow says she is empowered by others’ breakthroughs, so it’s fitting that a girlfriend’s success inspired her to make a change. “I was on Facebook one day and saw a friend’s transformation story. She changed her lifestyle, started a business, and was glowing,” says Crow.

“At the time, I was feeling pretty unhealthy and wanted to shift my energy and habits. I reached out to this friend, and she became my wellness coach.”

The experience opened up Crow to the world of transformation and what was possible for her own life. She dove fully into entrepreneurship herself and over a short time matched her teaching salary and developed a lucrative side hustle.

Still, Crow avoided processing her father’s death by working around the clock. She would come home from her day job at school and stay up late into the night learning coaching skills. “I’d watch videos by business coaches like Brendon Burchard or Jeff Walker until 3 a.m. to escape from grieving,” admits Crow. “But it also gave me direction. I saw what they did with their online businesses and knew I could do it too.”

By working around the clock, Crow avoided processing the pain of her father’s death.
Image Credit: Libby Crow

Crow decided to quit teaching and invest all her time in building her own consulting business. It was risky, but she believed in herself. She needed to — because no one else would.

“A lot of people told me I shouldn’t go for it, that I needed a secure job with health insurance, or that I’d be back teaching by the following year,” remembers Crow.

Instead of heeding her critics’ advice, she took the leap. “I started to succeed externally, but with time and space away from the nine-to-five, all these feelings came up. I finally had to face them.” For Libby Crow, processing the grief of her father’s death would prove to be a reckoning.
An atheist’s prayer answered.

Months later, the feelings she kept shoving down had spiraled into a state of unmanageable depression. Crow sat huddled on the floor of her new home, with a broken heater in the dead of Colorado winter, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling boxes she was too overwhelmed to unpack.

A broken heater, floor-to-ceiling boxes, and an uncertain future left Crow overwhelmed
Image Credit: Libby Crow

She was afraid of the future and of how much energy and grit it was going to take to succeed. She felt alone and was exhausted from running from the grief of her father’s death.

“I remember just feeling like I was done: done having it together for everyone else; done having to push so hard to make a living. I thought maybe not being here would be easier.”

Crow had never been the praying type, but that night she made an exception. “I wasn’t spiritual at all at the time, but I asked ‘God’ to give me a sign that I shouldn’t die. I needed something, and I didn’t know what to do.”

The next day, Crow was driving down a mountain in Colorado when she received the phone call from the woman selling renters insurance. “Oddly enough, it was near one of the cliffs in the big canyon where I was considering ending it all.

“I wanted to hang up, but she was really nice. So, we had a whole conversation about the benefits of insurance,” says Crow. “The whole time I’m thinking, ‘This doesn’t really matter.’”

Then, out of nowhere, the stranger said, “This is going to sound odd, but I need to tell you about something. There’s this place in Denver that I think you might want to go to. It’s like a church, but don't get freaked out. It’s kind of like where you’d go if you were a yogi.”

Crow listened, skeptical. Then something clicked. “Maybe this is the sign I prayed for,” she thought. “But then the atheist part of me was like, ‘Nah.’”

Nonetheless, Crow decided to give it a chance. “I looked up the place and dragged myself in there. I remember thinking, ‘Libby, you know you’ve hit rock bottom when you’re listening to the renters insurance lady for critical life advice.’”

That day was a turning point for Crow. It was when she finally let herself start to process the grief of her father’s death. It was also the day she recommitted to her journey of personal growth and full responsibility for creating the life she wanted. “The experience led me on my spiritual path. A path of self-love and self-care that inspired my company at the time.” Through Crow’s personal reckoning and new direction, her consulting business began to boom.
From personal healer to business mentor.

Crow let her inner transformation inform her business and what she created for her audience. She returned to her roots as a teacher, pivoting her business model from a healing one to a teaching one. “My first business model focused on helping other women overcome personal challenges that were holding them back,” she explains. “After years of leading clients in transformation and creating multiple successful businesses, I pivoted toward teaching new entrepreneurs how to build their own businesses online.”

Since then, she’s built a fleet of programs to teach skills ranging from social media management to list building and structuring your online business so it runs itself. She now focuses on helping service-based entrepreneurs build successful, six-figure businesses.

Crow and her husband co-founded a personal development company for entrepreneurs called The Daily Shift. “Scott and I both teach business strategy in our own companies, but we came together to help entrepreneurs grow and evolve themselves through our mindset programs,” she explains.

Crow found a life-changing partner in fellow entrepreneur Scott Oldford.
Image Credit: Libby Crow

She has also forayed into philanthropy. She recently made a substantial donation to Virgin Unite, a nonprofit that unites people and entrepreneurial ideas to create opportunities for a better world.

People often ask Crow how she keeps up with running her business and all of her other pursuits. “You need the right people in your life,” she answers. “You need the right friends and mentors, and you need to be dedicated to your own growth.”

Having a partner like Oldford has been life-changing, she says. “We have a thing where it’s not one plus one equals two. With us, one plus one equals infinity.”

“When you meet the right person, everything that you want to do becomes possible. With Scott by my side, I feel I can do anything,” explains Crow. “He sees me when I don't see me. He believes in me when I don't believe in myself.”

As she looks back on her journey, Crow has a few words for her younger self. “I would tell her that it’s okay to soften and to trust yourself. You don’t have to push and put pressure on yourself,” says Crow. “And any time you have an intuitive moment of deep knowing, follow that.”

One of Crow’s greatest achievements has been helping to support her mom.
Image Credit: Libby Crow

Reflecting on all that she has accomplished, Crow beams when she thinks of one achievement in particular. “My big dream was to be able to support my mom. I have helped her leave her job, move to California, and live right by the beach. Besides giving back philanthropically, that’s been my biggest success. I would do it all again 50 times just to be able to provide that for her.”
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The online certification is designed to kickstart lucrative careers in project management.

Lean Six Sigma. Minitab. To the unenlightened, those words sound like they could be the names of trendy new diet pills or obscure Marvel villains. In reality, they're two essential components of effective project management, the professional practice of guiding a task from creation to conclusion. The former is a methodology that emphasizes reductions in waste and defect variability in order to maximize customer value, whereas the latter is a statistics software package that can detect trends and find solutions to problems.

Sound like a bunch of corporate mumbo jumbo? It won't for long if you enroll in the Comprehensive Six Sigma Certification Collection, an affordable online education that's designed to kickstart lucrative careers in project management. Complete all 10 classes, and you'll be set to ace various levels (or "belts" of highly regarded Six Sigma certification.

Here's what's included:
Minitab Basics: Top 10 Graphical Tools for Beginners

This class takes a practical approach to teaching Minitab by showing you how to apply ten entry-level Minitab tools to real-life situations. With 47 lectures, one and a half hours of content, and more than 70 ready-to-use Minitab resources, it'll turn you into a Minitab maestro in no time.
Six Sigma White Belt: Learn Six Sigma & Grow Your Potential

Start your Six Sigma journey here with this two-hour White Belt certification prep. It covers all the tools, tricks, and techniques you need to develop an end-to-end view of your business process and discover how Six Sigma can play a role.
Six Sigma Green Belt: Become a Kano Analysis Specialist

Relied upon heavily by Six Sigma Green Belts and Black Belts, Kano Analysis is a tool that makes it easier to understand and prioritize your customers' requirements. This 37-lecture class on the subject will show you how to systematically hone your customer experience using the Kano Evaluation Table, Kano Evaluation Table, and other helpful models.
Six Sigma Green Belt Masterclass: Expertise on Minitab

This intermediate- to advanced-level Six Sigma class covers all things Green Belt, including root-cause analysis techniques, graphical analysis approaches using Minitab, and more. By the time you've finished all 16 hours of content, you'll have mastered more than 100 Lean Six Sigma Green Belt tools and techniques.
The Ultimate Six Sigma Yellow Belt with Minitab Proficiency

Hands-on experience with more than 40 Lean and Six Sigma tools and techniques is at your fingertips in the form of this Yellow Belt prep course. Across 187 lectures and six hours of content, you'll learn how to put together a Yellow Belt project storyboard, analyze Yellow Belt project data, and much more.
Six Sigma Black Belt: Become a QFD Specialist

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a tool that transforms customer requirements into technical or engineering specifications, allowing you to better understand and meet said requirements. Given that it's somewhat complicated, QFD is only used by project managers who are Six Sigma Black Belt-certified, which is what you'll be set up to be upon completion of this half-hour class.
The Voice of Customer (VOC) Techniques

Find out which Voice of Customer (VOC) technique(s) best encapsulate your customers' needs and wants by enrolling in this half-hour class on all things VOC. Included are primers on both traditional and new VOC techniques, which you'll explore in-depth by examining their various pros and cons.
Minitab Basics: Hypothesis Testing for Beginners

You'll discover how to perform a variety of statistical tests using Minitab by enrolling in this 72-lecture class on the matter. It features downloadable, ready-to-use Minitab procedures and resources, plus lots of Minitab exercises involving raw, ready-to-crunch data.
Minitab Basics: Top 7 Control Charts for Beginners

This 68-lecture course will hone your Minitab skills by showing you how to create a number of control charts using the statistical platform.
Lean Six Sigma Introduction Specialist

Want to learn even more about Lean Six Sigma and where it came from? This 66-lecture course covers virtually every component of the methodology, from its individual roles to its foundations, giving you the knowledge that will one day allow you to successfully onboard someone to such a program.
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Thinking about sitting down with your boss and asking for a raise? While you put together your case for more compensation, it’s important to take into account not just what you can bring to the table, but the best time to have the conversation.

Here are four factors that could help you get a raise.

1. Whether your boss has a cup of coffee.

But maybe not an iced coffee. More than wanting your boss to be alert and in a good mood, a recent study found that when a person holds a hot cup of coffee, they are more disposed to think well of the person they are speaking to.

In an interview, study co-author Professor Lawrence Williams explained, “There’s a pretty close association between physical warmth and interpersonal psychological warmth, such that incidentally holding something that’s warm or cold to the touch can influence how you feel about other people. It can also influence the type of choices you make, as far as other people are concerned.”

2. Whether there is money available.

To start, figure out when your company’s fiscal year begins and ends. That is when the higher-ups will have a sense of the budgets they are working with, so make a plan to ask for that meeting most likely in January at the start of the fiscal, or June and July, when many businesses wrap things up for the year.

3. After you've accomplished something big.

There are also going to be points during the year that may not line up with the start or end of the fiscal year that are good times to ask. In a LinkedIn post, Liz Ryan, the founder and CEO of consulting HR firm Human Workplace, said that there are a few instances where you’re well positioned to have a good outcome.

Ryan suggests asking for a meeting 90 days before an annual review, at the beginning of a big new project, when you’ve taken on a new responsibility, when you’re given another colleague’s responsibilities and workload -- often this can occur after someone leaves -- or when you’re supervisor compliments and acknowledges your work.

4. A day later in the week.

As for the best day to ask, if your inclination is not to ask first thing on Monday when you’re just escaping out from the Sunday Scaries, go with your gut. In an interview with Forbes, psychologist and founder of CompassPoint Consulting Suzanne Roff-Wexler recommended asking later in the week. “My intuitive preference when to ask for a raise would be on a Friday mid-morning. The person I would ask would probably be looking forward to a weekend.”s
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Shari Leidich wants to help consumers make better dietary choices with Know Brainer.

Shari Leidich wasn't coy when naming the main competition of her startup, Know Brainer: the famed Dave Asprey and his Bulletproof brand, which created the current buttered coffee trend.

After she lost control of her first company, Two Moms in a Raw (renamed Soul Sprout), to her investors in March 2016, the 50-year-old entrepreneur worked with food scientists to launch Know Brainer in July of that year. The coffee creamer and instant beverage company was founded on the principles of the keto diet, which favors foods high in fat in lieu of carbs and sugar. Interest in the keto diet and foods that adhere to it have been rapidly growing over the past few years.

"We took complicated foods with Two Moms and made it convenient. Butter coffee is inconvenient and costly and inaccessible. Dave Asprey's brand is that way," Leidich said. "We combined [coconut oil and butter] and put them in a little packet for on-the-go convenience. All you do is squeeze it into your morning cup of coffee or tea and then ‘stir me up buttercup.’" (Bulletproof also offers instant packets.)

Know Brainer's products can now be found in 2,000 stores, including Kroger, Albertsons, Whole Foods and Walmart locations. Leidich said the brand has a strong Amazon presence, with ecommerce sales accounting for 40 percent of Know Brainer's business. According to the company, the brand has seen 2,300 percent growth in less than one year. It also partnered with Nestlé’s Innovation Group to roll out creamers with collagen.

The tone of Know Brainer's brand isn't to maximize productivity, Leidich said, but for its customers to make better diet decisions.

"We like to say we are a breakfast alternative," she said. "We want to find all those people who are skipping breakfast, finding that sugary muffin by 11 a.m. and then having that crash by 1. What we want to do is fill you up with Know Brainer so that we get you through your whole morning."

Leidich said she became interested in natural foods and their potential to heal the body after she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2004. She founded Two Moms in the Raw two years later. Her story has become an essential part of both her companies, one that she said has resonated with consumers.

"We have a reason for doing business. It's not like, 'oh I'm going to go make a lot of money,'" she said. "I'm healing myself. I want the rest of the world to know about it."
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In this climate of conscious consumption, organizations are under increasing pressure to ensure what they say and do actually align

“Your reputation is what you're perceived to be, your character is what you actually are,” goes the quote from legendary basketball coach John Wooden.

Reputation has always been a valued asset, but in this climate of conscious consumption, organizations are under increasing pressure to ensure what they say and do actually align. Indeed, does it really matter what you say your business stands for if your customers think something entirely different?

Practice what you preach

It is a familiar story to find organizations espousing certain values through purpose-driven communications, while failing to embrace these values within their own day-to-day business decisions.

State Street hit global headlines with its Fearless Girl statue facing down the Bull in Wall Street. The PR stunt became a symbol of female empowerment and gender equality. Later the firm had to cough up $5 million in settlement fees amidst allegations it systematically paid female executives less than males. Face-palm.

If you are a business leader, chances are you receive regular sales reports, but what about a regular sentiment update? Maybe you keep tabs on how often you are mentioned in the press and on social media, but are you able to derive real meaning from this and harness the value of the information back into the business?

What brand stands for

Jeff Bezos once said, “Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room”. In this case “the room” is an increasingly fractured media landscape, a globalized business world and a social media echo chamber polarising fans and haters. Capturing accurate intelligence on reputation and the key themes that drive it include stakeholders, customers, competitors, industry and regulatory bodies across territories and languages.

Navigating this effectively can be challenging, but not impossible. Deciding what to listen to is key; understanding what information is important to your strategy and which platforms, publications, journalists or influencers will impact your reputation, for example. Good media monitoring tools will give you access to this data in real time.

Once you are monitoring what’s being said, understanding how to feed this data into strategy via a measurement methodology is the next step. A proper framework will lasso even the most nebulous brand attributes into quantifiable metrics, giving you the hard numbers to create key performance indicators and manage improvement across the business.



Don't fall into the trap of confusing what is easily measured with what is important. Establish the factors affecting your brand and then build your methodology around them. In the communications arena Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE) is often used to measure PR performance. It’s simple to calculate but tells you nothing about the impact or favourability of the media you have earned and provides no insight into your reputation.

In-depth insights into reputation provide a significant competitive edge. Clearly, the greater the understanding of sentiment around a business/product/industry at scale, the better placed you are to shape it.

Having the scope to spot potential threats to your reputation gives you more time to tackle them, and capitalize on opportunities to reinforce and develop it ahead of your competitors. This advanced knowledge could be the difference between a minor issue and a major PR disaster; between your character and your reputation.
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'China's growth slowdown could be faster than expected especially if trade tensions continue, and this can trigger abrupt sell-offs in financial and commodity markets as was the case in 2015–16'

The International Monetary Fund revised its World Economic Outlook (WEO) forecast for the second time within a span of six months. It now projects that the global economy will grow at 3.5 per cent in 2019 and 3.6 per cent in 2020.

In the October WEO, IMF revised its projects and said the global economy will grow at a pace of 3.7 per cent in 2019 and 2020 citing negative effects of tariff increases enacted in the US and China earlier in the year along with carryover of softer momentum in the second half of 2018 and other global events such as Germany introducing new automobile fuel emission standards, Italy’s concerns about sovereign and financial risks, etc.

Outlook for Asia

Coming to emerging and developing Asia, IMF noted that growth will dip from 6.5 per cent in 2018 to 6.3 per cent in 2019 and 6.4 per cent in 2020.

“Despite fiscal stimulus that offsets some of the impact of higher US tariffs, China’s economy will slow due to the combined influence of needed financial regulatory tightening and trade tensions with the United States,” IMF said in a statement.

For India, the economy is poised to pick up in 2019 thanks to lower oil prices and a slower pace of monetary tightening as inflation has started to ease.

Concerns Related US-China Trade War

In 2018, the Chinese economy slowed down because of financial regulatory tightening. The move was intended to check shadow banking activity and off-budget local government investment, however, also resulted in widening the trade dispute with the US. By the end of the year, the situation further downgraded.

“The authorities have responded to the slowdown by limiting their financial regulatory tightening, injecting liquidity through cuts in bank reserve requirements, and applying fiscal stimulus, by resuming public investment. Nevertheless, the activity may fall short of expectations, especially if trade tensions fail to ease,” IMF’s statement pointed out.

While on the other side, on 1st of December US-China announced a 90-day truce on tariff increase, which the international trade body welcomed and said could lead to ‘de-escalating trade friction’.

Having said that, the truce period ends on 1st March and the final outcome of trade war is still anticipated until then global trade, investment, and output will continue to remain under threat from policy uncertainty and other ongoing trade tensions.

“China’s growth slowdown could be faster than expected especially if trade tensions continue, and this can trigger abrupt sell-offs in financial and commodity markets as was the case in 2015–16, ” Gita Gopinath, Economic Counsellor and Director of Research of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) wrote in her blog.

Additionally, failure to resolve this issue will further lead to tariff barriers resulting in higher costs of imported intermediate and capital goods and higher final goods prices for consumers.
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The extreme exhaustion tends to sneak up on us-we don't realize it until it's too late

Our jobs push us to our limits. Sometimes, even our friends and family. The world around us has become so fast and competitive that it’s difficult to stop. Mobile phones have only amplified the busyness, keeping us connected almost every second. While trying to finish work, we keep reminding ourselves that this is just a temporary phase and that the tiredness will disappear once the long-awaited vacation starts. But time goes on, we find ourselves tired, sick, irritable, and nothing, absolutely nothing, makes us happy. Worst of all, we live in denial that any of it is at all happening to us.

This is burnout, and it sneaks up on us. Research shows almost half of all professionals between the ages of 25 and 33 are stuck in some form of a burnout. The problem is, burnout isn't a medical diagnosis. Overwhelming scientific data suggests that many people who experience symptoms of job burnout don’t believe their jobs are the main cause.

Knowing it

The best way to prevent burnout is to find ways to relax and take out time for yourself every now and then. And addressing it before it affects you.

A study by researchers at the University of Missouri (MU)-Columbia in the US says your eyes may provide a window into your mental workload. It was published in the International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction.

“If your vitals are bad, then something is wrong with your body and doctors will work to figure out what's wrong with you,” says Jung Hyup Kim, an assistant professor of industrial and manufacturing systems engineering in the MU College of Engineering, in the press release. “What about your mental health? Many people multitask, but currently there is no measurement for someone's mental well-being. However, we found that the size of a pupil could be the key to measuring someone's mental state while they multitask.”

Stress experiences

To find a way to measure stress levels in employees while they are multitasking, Kim and Xiaonan Yang, an MU graduate student, compared data from a workload metric developed by NASA for its astronauts with their observations of pupillary response from participants in a lab study.

Kim and Yang used a simulated oil and gas refinery plant control room, and through motion-capture and eye-tracking technology, they watched the participants react to unexpected changes, such as alarms, while simultaneously watching the performance of gauges on two monitors. During the scenario’s simple tasks, the participants’ eye searching behaviors were more predictable. Yet, as the tasks became more complex and unexpected changes occurred, their eye behaviors became more erratic.

The duo discovered a negative relationship between the fractal dimension of pupil dilation and a person’s workload, showing the researchers that pupil dilation could be used to indicate the mental workload of a person in a multitasking environment.

“It would be great if people could work perfectly every time,” Kim says. “But when you're tired, you often make a mistake. So, if we can monitor a worker's mental well-being, then we can hopefully prevent future mistakes from happening.”
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