101 Motivational Business Quotes

  1. The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It’s as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer. – Nolan Bushnell
  2. My son is now an ‘entrepreneur’. That’s what you’re called when you don’t have a job. – Ted Turner
  3. Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy. – Norman Schwarzkopf
  4. The golden rule for every business man is this: “Put yourself in your customer’s place. – Orison Swett Marden
  5. I had to make my own living and my own opportunity! But I made it! Don’t sit down and wait for the opportunities to come. Get up and make them! – C.J. Walker
  6. The important thing is not being afraid to take a chance. Remember, the greatest failure is to not try. Once you find something you love to do, be the best at doing it. – Debbi Fields
  7. Life is too complicated not to be orderly. – Martha Stewart
  8. The winners in life think constantly in terms of I can, I will, and I am. Losers, on the other hand, concentrate their waking thoughts on what they should have or would have done, or what they can’t do. –Dennis Waitley
  9. Business opportunities are like buses, there’s always another one coming. – Richard Branson
  10. Leadership is doing what is right when no one is watching. – George Van Valkenburg
  11. There is no royal, flower-strewn path to success. And if there is, I have not found it. For if I have accomplished anything in life, it is because I have been willing to work hard. – C.J. Walker
  12. Business is more exciting than any game. – Lord Beaverbrook
  13. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. –Albert Einstein
  14. We are currently not planning on conquering the world. – Sergey Brin
  15. If it really was a no-brainer to make it on your own in business there’d be millions of no-brained, harebrained, and otherwise dubiously brained individuals quitting their day jobs and hanging out their own shingles. Nobody would be left to round out the workforce and execute the business plan. – Bill Rancic
  16. It takes more than capital to swing business. You’ve got to have the A. I. D. degree to get by — Advertising, Initiative, and Dynamics. –Ren Mulford Jr.
  17. For all of its faults, it gives most hardworking people a chance to improve themselves economically, even as the deck is stacked in favor of the privileged few. Here are the choices most of us face in such a system: Get bitter or get busy. – Bill O’ Reilly
  18. A man should never neglect his family for business. – Walt Disney
  19. The only limits are, as always, those of vision. – James Broughton
  20. To think is easy. To act is difficult. To act as one thinks is the most difficult. – Johann Wolfgang Von Goeth
  21. I like thinking big. If you’re going to be thinking anything, you might as well think big. – Donald Trump
  22. Nobody talks about entrepreneurship as survival, but that’s exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking. Running that first shop taught me business is not financial science; it’s about trading: buying and selling. – Anita Roddick
  23. To waken interest and kindle enthusiasm is the sure way to teach easily and successfully. – Tryon Edwards
  24. Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. – Bill Gates
  25. Success is often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable. – Coco Chanel
  26. The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time. – Henry Ford
  27. The good or ill of a man lies within his own will. – Epictetus
  28. I have known not a few men who, after reaching the summits of business success, found themselves miserable on attaining retirement age. They were so exclusively engrossed in their day to day affairs that they had no time for friend making. – B.C. Forbes
  29. The cynic says, “One man can’t do anything”. I say, “Only one man can do anything.” - John W. Gardner
  30. I feel that luck is preparation meeting opportunity. – Oprah Winfrey
  31. If there is such a thing as good leadership, it is to give a good example. – Ingvar Kamprad
  32. Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly and get on with improving your other innovations. – Steve Jobs
  33. You’ve got to say, I think that if I keep working at this and want it badly enough I can have it. It’s called perseverance. – Lee Iacocca
  34. The desire of knowledge, like the thirst for riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it. – Laurence Sterne
  35. Success in business requires training and discipline and hard work. But if you’re not frightened by these things, the opportunities are just as great today as they ever were. – David Rockefeller
  36. Well, you know, I was a human being before I became a businessman. – George Soros
  37. Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it. – Dwight Eisenhower
  38. If you did not look after today’s business then you might as well forget about tomorrow. – Isaac Mophatlane
  39. The great accomplishments of man have resulted from the transmission of ideas of enthusiasm. – Thomas J. Watson
  40. Yesterday’s home runs don’t win today’s games. – Babe Ruth
  41. Being able to touch so many people through my businesses and make money while doing it, is a huge blessing. – Magic Johnson
  42. Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness. – James Thurber
  43. The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same. – Carlos Castaneda
  44. The great leaders are like the best conductors – they reach beyond the notes to reach the magic in the players. – Blaine Lee
  45. To think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted. – George Kneller
  46. To the degree we’re not living our dreams; our comfort zone has more control of us than we have over ourselves. – Peter McWilliams
  47. The enemy of the truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived, and dishonest – but the myth-persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. – John F. Kennedy
  48. Long-range planning works best in the short term. – Doug Evelyn
  49. The NBA is never just a business. It’s always business. It’s always personal. All good businesses are personal. The best businesses are very personal. – Mark Cuban
  50. You can fool all the people all the time if the advertising is right and the budget is big enough. – Joseph E. Levine
  51. A business has to be involving, it has to be fun, and it has to exercise your creative instincts. – Richard Branson
  52. The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity. – Peter F. Drucker
  53. No enterprise can exist for itself alone. It ministers to some great need, it performs some great service, not for itself, but for others.. or failing therein, it ceases to be profitable and ceases to exist. – Calvin Coolidge
  54. Live daringly, boldly, fearlessly. Taste the relish to be found in competition – in having put forth the best within you. – Henry J. Kaiser
  55. Winning is not a sometime thing; it’s an all time thing. You don’t win once in a while, you don’t do things right once in a while, you do them right all the time. Winning is habit. Unfortunately, so is losing. – Vince Lombardi
  56. In all realms of life it takes courage to stretch your limits, express your power, and fulfill your potential. It’s no different in the financial realm. – Suze Orman
  57. The expectations of life depend upon diligence; the mechanic that would perfect his work must first sharpen his tools. – Confucius
  58. The first one gets the oyster the second gets the shell. – Andrew Carnegie
  59. Hire character. Train skill. – Peter Schutz
  60. The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency. – Bill Gates
  61. Look well to this day. Yesterday is but a dream and tomorrow is only a vision. But today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope. Look well therefore to this day. – Francis Gray
  62. Surviving a failure gives you more self-confidence. Failures are great learning tools.. but they must be kept to a minimum. – Jeffrey Immelt
  63. Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve. Thoughts are things! And powerful things at that, when mixed with definiteness of purpose, and burning desire, can be translated into riches. – Napoleon Hill
  64. It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. – Charles Darwin
  65. Industry is the soul of business and the keystone of prosperity. –Charles Dickens
  66. I don’t pay good wages because I have a lot of money; I have a lot of money because I pay good wages. – Robert Bosch
  67. People are definitely a company’s greatest asset. It doesn’t make any difference whether the product is cars or cosmetics. A company is only as good as the people it keeps. – Mary Kay Ash
  68. In business, I’ve discovered that my purpose is to do my best to my utmost ability every day. That’s my standard. I learned early in my life that I had high standards. – Donald Trump
  69. In the business world, everyone is paid in two coins: cash and experience. Take the experience first; the cash will come later. –Harold Geneen
  70. To be successful, you have to have your heart in your business, and your business in your heart. – Thomas Watson, Sr.
  71. The absolute fundamental aim is to make money out of satisfying customers. – John Egan
  72. There are a lot of things that go into creating success. I don’t like to do just the things I like to do. I like to do things that cause the company to succeed. I don’t spend a lot of time doing my favorite activities. – Michael Dell
  73. I have found no greater satisfaction than achieving success through honest dealing and strict adherence to the view that, for you to gain, those you deal with should gain as well. – Alan Greenspan
  74. You must be the change you wish to see in the world. – Mahatma Gandhi
  75. Let’s be honest. There’s not a business anywhere that is without problems. Business is complicated and imperfect. Every business everywhere is staffed with imperfect human beings and exists by providing a product or service to other imperfect human beings. –Bob Parsons
  76. You need to be aware of what others are doing, applaud their efforts, acknowledge their successes, and encourage them in their pursuits. When we all help one another, everybody wins. – Jim Stovall
  77. The only way around is through. – Robert Frost
  78. You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong. – Warren Buffett
  79. The noblest search is the search for excellence – Lyndon B. Johnson
  80. The man who does not work for the love of work but only for money is not likely to neither make money nor find much fun in life. –Charles M. Schwab
  81. You must remain focused on your journey to greatness. – Les Brown
  82. Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing. – Theodore Roosevelt
  83. Where there is an open mind, there will always be a frontier. –Charles F. Kettering
  84. Whether you think you can or whether you think you can’t, you’re right! – Henry Ford
  85. You must either modify your dreams or magnify your skills. – Jim Rohn
  86. Who likes not his business, his business likes not him. – William Hazlitt
  87. The new source of power is not money in the hands of a few, but information in the hands of many. – John Naisbitt
  88. The man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed. – Henry Ford
  89. It’s through curiosity and looking at opportunities in new ways that we’ve always mapped our path at Dell. There’s always an opportunity to make a difference. – Michael Dell
  90. If you work just for money, you’ll never make it, but if you love what you’re doing and you always put the customer first, success will be yours. – Ray Kroc
  91. Winners take time to relish their work, knowing that scaling the mountain is what makes the view from the top so exhilarating. –Denis Waitley
  92. Management is nothing more than motivating other people. – Le Iacocca
  93. Motivation is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it. – Dwight D. Eisenhower
  94. The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The truly dangerous thing is asking the wrong question. –Peter Drucker
  95. Why did I want to win? Because I didn’t want to lose! – Max Schmelling
  96. To succeed in business, to reach the top, an individual must know all it is possible to know about that business. – J. Paul Getty
  97. To win without risk is to triumph without glory. – Pierre Corneille
  98. To succeed… You need to find something to hold on to, something to motivate you, something to inspire you. – Tony Dorsett
  99. Statistics suggest that when customers complain, business owners and managers ought to get excited about it. The complaining customer represents a huge opportunity for more business. – Zig Ziglar
  100. I wasn’t satisfied just to earn a good living. I was looking to make a statement. – Donald Trump
  101. Whether it’s Google or Apple or free software, we’ve got some fantastic competitors and it keeps us on our toes. – Bill Gates

10 Timeless Persuasive Writing Techniques

  1. writing
REPETITION – Talk to anyone well versed in learning psychology, and they’ll tell you repetition is crucial. It’s also critical in persuasive writing, since a person can’t agree with you if they don’t truly get what you’re saying.
REASONS WHY - Remember the power of the word “because”. Psychological studies have shown that people are more likely to comply with a request if you simply give them a reason why… even if that reason makes no sense.
CONSISTENCY - It’s been called the “hobgoblin of little minds,” but consistency in our thoughts and actions is a valued social trait. We don’t want to appear inconsistent, since, whether fair or not, that characteristic is associated with instability and flightiness, while consistency is associated with integrity and rational behavior.
SOCIAL PROOF - Looking for guidance from others as to what to do and what to accept is one of the most powerful psychological forces in our lives. It can determine whether we deliver aid to a person in need, and it can determine whether we muster the courage to kill ourselves.
COMPARISONS - Metaphors, similes and analogies are the persuasive writer’s best friends. When you can relate your scenario to something that the reader already accepts as true, you’re well on your way to convincing someone to see things your way.
AGITATE & SOLVE - This is a persuasion theme that works as an overall approach to making your case. First, you identify the problem and qualify your audience. Then you agitate the reader’s pain before offering your solution as the answer that will make it all better.
PROGNOSTICATE - Another persuasion theme involves providing your readers with a glimpse into the future. If you can convincingly present an extrapolation of current events into likely future outcomes, you may as well have a license to print money.
GO TRIBAL - Despite our attempts to be sophisticated, evolved beings, we humans are exclusionary by nature. Give someone a chance to be a part of a group that they want to be in—whether that be wealthy, or hip, or green, or even contrarian—and they’ll hop on board whatever train you’re driving.
ADDRESS OBJECTIONS - If you present your case and someone is left thinking “yeah, but…”, well, you’ve lost. This is why direct marketers use long copy—it’s not that they want you to read it all, it’s that they want you to read enough until you buy.
STORYTELLING - Storytelling is really a catch-all technique—you can and should use it in combination with any and all of the previous nine strategies. But the reason why storytelling works so well lies at the heart of what persuasion really is.

Read the whole article…

Decide If Social Media Is Right for Your Business

Decide if Social Media Is Right for Your BusinessSocial media is often a big help when you’re developing your brand. It allows businesses to connect to customers on a more personal level. But that doesn’t mean it’s right for every small business.

Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, believes that 9 million small businesses in the U.S. use Facebook.

Twitter and Facebook are useful in different ways. Twitter is known to be better for customer engagement, while Facebook helps funnel traffic to your site. Both sites help you better your search engine optimization (SEO).

Take three steps before launching Twitter and Facebook campaigns and decide which social media platform is right for your small business.

1. Is social media right for your company?

Remember the old question, “If everyone was jumping off a bridge would you do it too?”

The buzz makes everybody feel that social media helps their business. It’s likely that’s true, but it’s vital that you decide if social media is necessary for your business to succeed right now.

Though millions of small businesses have jumped on the social media train, your target audience might not be caught up in it. If you feel that’s the case, it makes sense to hold off. Or, perhaps you aren’t ready to make the most of social media’s benefits, so wait until your company is ready.

2. Timing is everything

Having a strong presence in social media takes a lot of time and a lot of resources. If you can’t dedicate the manpower to keeping up a quality profile, it might hurt your brand in the long run.

Look at your team and decide if your business can handle the workload. If it can, then be fully prepared to implement it. Like any good marketing campaign, your social media portfolio has to have a clear identity, and reach your target audience.

If you forge ahead, prepare the information you want to share each week. Figure out what time of the day your posts and tweets have the most impact by reaching your core customers.

3. Set goals and guidelines

In 2011, companies saw a 63 percent increase in marketing effectiveness. But businesses of all sizes are trying to establish a strong ROI when it comes to social media.

Setting goals for the next few weeks, months and years helps you decide if your valuable time is worth the effort and if you’re using social media successfully. It’s also important to set ground rules of who in your company will handle your social media sites.

Decide on what content is and isn’t appropriate to post. Learn how to handle customer interaction and what steps to take if something goes wrong. Then spend some time educating your staff before the first day of having a visible social media profile.

Once you have created a place for your business in the social media realm, look around your direct and indirect competitors’ pages. It helps you understand what the best practices are to engage customers.

Also research the different ways social media platforms are reaching out to help small businesses advertise. See if those steps are right for your brand as well.

In the end, social media is another tool for your company’s toolbox. It will only be effective if you can take the time to learn how to use it properly.

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9 Ways to Get Pinterest Followers

While Lady Gaga might be able to pick up several million followers in a matter of months, mere mortals like us will probably not have such good luck.

But don’t let that frustrate you. Follow these 9 tips for encouraging people to follow you and who knows…maybe in a six month you’ll have several thousand followers.

  1. Re-pin what your customer’s are pinning – To attract the attention of particular followers, create a board in your account labeled “coolest re-pins” or something like that…and then start re-pinning the content that they are sharing on their accounts. This is a great way to make your account less about business…and more about the relationship…showing them you are actually taking the time to interact. A company using this strategy well is Whole Foods.
  2. Follow pinners/boards who/that fall in your target market – Basically, look for people who share the same interests as you do…and might be interested in what you do for a living. For example, if you are a photographer, then you would follow boards that are tagged “photography” or “weddings.” If you are a tech geek, follow people who enjoy science.
  3. Comment on pins – When you see a pin that you like, leave a comment with the pinner. Do this frequently and you will start to gain their attention. Don’t forget that you need to add value when you comment. “Great stuff!” doesn’t cut it.
  4. Create a pin that goes viral – Sharing pins is obviously the main way you would promote your brand. But content on Pinterest has the chance of going viral. If you share a pin that someone likes, they may “re-pin” it…in other words, they share it with their audience. The more people who re-pin an image, the longer it will stay on the popular page…getting more re-pins and follows.
  5. Use the 1/19 content sharing rule ­– Like my rule for Twittering promotional content, you should share 19 pins that are notpromoting you for every pin that is promotional. For instance, you may only want to share your very best blog posts on Pinterest. Or it could be an infographic or guest post you wrote for a big blog.
  6. Encourage people to share your content on Pinterest – You can grab Pinterest share buttons from their site and embed on your own. However, you may want to wait to do this until adoption of Pinterest grows and you’ve established it as a place where you are going to spend resources to maintain. I would recommend that you don’t overload your website with share options…people tend to get confused when there are so many options.
  7. Encourage people to follow you – You can also embed a Pinterest “Follow” icon for your website/blog.
  8. Tag popular pinners – You can get the attention of other pinners by including a “@mention” tag like Twitter in your caption. This will send a message to that user who may then pick up on what you are pinning and re-pin.
  9. Use hashtags – Like the other social media sites, hashtags work on Pinterest to help you gain attention across multiple platforms and build up a following during a marketing campaign. It also works in gaining followers in much the same way that it does on Instagram. On Instagram, if you include hash tags on your photos, you will appear in those popular searches.

My final tip is to use Pinterest as an individual rather than a company. This is probably why Martha Stewart has double the followers than Martha Stewart Living. You are more likely to get followed since people won’t have the suspicion that you are trying to sell something if your profile was a company.

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The Albert Einstein Guide to Social Media

By: AMBER NASLUND

Albert Einstein knew an awful lot. And if you pay attention to his work and his most famous statements about it, you might just think he was talking about us, the social media crew.

We might not be looking for a unified theory for all things quantum in our day jobs, or pondering the discrepancies between particle theory and relativity, but here are a few things Einstein has managed to summarize for us just the same. Funny how some concepts apply pretty universally…

A perfection of means, and confusion of aims, seems to be our main problem.
It all starts with the goals and objectives, but look around you, and you’re sure to see the folks that still think the Facebook Page is the holy grail of social media success. Know what you’re aiming for before you choose any one path to get there.

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex… It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.
We’re hell bent on creating convoluted indexes and formulas to calculate and measure the fuzzy stuff like influence, affinity, or loyalty. As if somehow putting an algebraic formula to it will make it legitimate. Are there simpler ways we can be approaching these seemingly complex problems from a more human level? Is it ever enough to just say “this feels like the right thing to do”, even if we don’t have a spreadsheet upon which to demonstrate the results?

Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.
You can count a zillion fans and followers but what are you going to do with them when you have them? Are they moving you toward something, or are they just there? And things like having genuine intent or an authentic mindset (not one on a mission statement somewhere) are much harder to quantify and put on a report, but they matter a great deal. They’re part of the untouchable essence of outstanding companies. It’s like porn. You know it when you see it, but it’s awfully hard to define.

Information is not knowledge. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
Case studies, case studies, case studies. Oh, how we want to read about what everyone else has done in hopes that it will be the safety net for us not having to do our own planning and strategizing. There are, however, no shortcuts. Precedent isn’t proof, and someone else’s story isn’t likely to be in the right context. There’s a fine line between not wanting to reinvent the wheel, and not wanting to do the thinking for yourself and be accountable for your decisions.

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
Loosely translated: majority isn’t truth. Just because “everyone” is doing it doesn’t mean it’s great. Conversely, just because you’re being the perpetual contrarian doesn’t mean you’re any smarter than the rest, you’re just joining the complaint flock. It takes courage and thought to go against the grain, illustrate a new approach, own it, and take actual risks in execution, not just on paper.

Everyone should be respected as an individual, but no one idolized.
We don’t need a bunch of internet famous people and a confluence of empty personal brands. We need people that do good work and make a difference to the people in their universe, whether on a business or personal level.

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.
We need more clarity, accountability, and translation of social media into terms that everyone can relate to. Enough with the buzzwords and lingo already. “Joining the conversation” doesn’t explain anything.

Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.
Teaching and guiding adoption of social media can be an arduous task. But forcing too many rules without context and understanding is a recipe for resistance and resentment. And dragging people unwillingly into the social web before they’re truly culturally equipped will undoubtedly end in failure. Understanding new concepts and ideas takes time, patience, and the willingness of some to make small strides instead of huge leaps.

People love chopping wood. In this activity one immediately sees results.
We all wish that you could just throw up a blog and instantly see a lift in your sales numbers, but it doesn’t work that way. Cultivating a social media community takes more time than many businesses would like. They’re so anxious to know whether they’ve made a good or bad investment, so they demand results and guarantees before they start. But much like the business relationships you’ve built the old fashioned way, creating trust and loyalty is an investment, not a transaction.

Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.
In a world where content is everywhere, it’s not enough to just have a bunch of eyeballs see what you do. Value is a wonderful aim, if you understand that value is defined differently for everyone. Your definition of value doesn’t matter when it comes to offering it to someone else. You have to figure out how your customers, prospects, and community define it, and deliver that to them, relentlessly.

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
Social media is, in many ways, a solution to some of the problems we’ve created ourselves. The divide we’ve created between the company and the customer is one of our own design, and social media is helping to shorten that distance again. As a result, we cannot try and cram social media into the same mindset we’ve used for sales, marketing, and customer service for the last several decades, or we’ll just end up right back where we started, and end up blaming social media itself for not living up to our expectations.

The road to perdition has ever been accompanied by lip service to an ideal.
Authenticity. Trust. Transparency. Community. They’re a bunch of buzzwords – and empty ones at that – unless they’re backed up at a root level, and driven by concrete intent and execution. A poster on a wall or a vision statement drafted in a boardroom doesn’t mean jack unless you’re empowering and allowing the actions that help people deliver on those promises. Period.

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
We collected impressions for ads as if having a million people see a billboard without any notion of what they did with that information was actually effective. We build call centers to automate customer service. We talked in “key messages” and soundbites, and we buried our mistakes under PR gloss-overs. Customers are now pushing back on those ideas and demanding better from businesses. Yet, we’re approaching Facebook as an eyeball collection tool, or Twitter as a press release distribution service, or throwing interns to manage our customer support forums, and we’re wondering why we’re having trouble seeing value in these tools?

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.
We’re talking about new approaches to business problems, here. We’re talking culture shift. Adjustments to our approach, the courage to evaluate our weaknesses, and the willingness to invest in things that aren’t the same as we’ve always done. All that means that mistakes are inevitable. And rather than lynching and publicly vilifying those that fall short, let’s learn from each other, from ourselves, and start allowing social media a legitimate place in business process innovation.

Not bad for a guy with crazy hair who never tied his shoes, but who managed to single-handedly and drastically change our understanding of the universe around us. I’m thinking we can help businesses do the same for the online world we’re creating here. You?

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