As far as geeks are concerned, the things that they use have always been clear exmples of what they are passionate about. Even if it is the small things around them, like the things they use to hold their stationery or books, candy or even toilet rolls!

(Image Source: ThinkGeek)

Here is a brief list of 12 holders geeks won’t mind having on the desk or around the house. If you have a geeky holder of your own or even better, if you made one, share it with us in the comments!

Read Also: 30 Online Stores To Shop For Geeky Gifts

XBOX 360 Controller Desk-Mate. Get your own XBOX controller… stationery holder? If you like, there is a PS3 and GameCube version as well. [$22.73] (Image Source: GreenCub)

DOOM Floppy Disk Pen Holder. It’s what today’s generation known as the Save button but if you have it in physical form, hey, this is a nice use for it. [$7.22] (Image Source: GeekGear)

Tic Tac Toe Pencil Holder. If you have enough pencils and pens for a full game, hey… Tic Tac Toe in 3 D! [$19.55] (Image Source: 24dientes)

Dead Fred. Oh no! What happen to Fred? The Pen got him! It’s the perfect item to drop a hint to your colleagues that you are not in the mood to joke around. If this doesn’t work, use this one. [$7.99] (Image Source: ThinkGeek)

Lego Key Holder. For every geek who had Legos as their childhood playmate for years, why not make them a part of your everyday adulthood? Just don’t drop them on the floor. (Image Source: Felix Grauer)

Portal Bookends. Ffinally a reason to clean my dusty pile of books. [$29.99] (Image Source: ThinkGeek)

Stark Direwolf Bookends. Insta-buy for Games of Thrones’ diehard fans to prove your obsession. [$79.99] (Image Source: ThinkGeek)

Super Mario 3DS Holder. A 3D Mario holding my 3DS? That looks like my childhood dream comes true! Guess that’s why there’s only 1 left in store. [$34.50] (Image Source: Amazon)

Darth Vader Candy Bowl Holder. Join the force, we have mini Darth Vader to hold your candies! Just take my money, already. [$29.99] (Image Source: Amazon)

Stormtrooper Candy Bowl Holder. Holding candies is probably a better job than serving Darth Vader! Beware, the purchase force is strong with this one. [$32.99] (Image Source: Amazon)

Commode Dragon Tyrant Bath Tissue Holder. Badass holder for the King of the house. [$34.95] (Image Source: Design Toscano)

Gothic Knight Bath Tissue Holder. What’s better than having a royal knight serve you, m’lord, after a stressful day? [$45.00] (Image Source: Design Toscano)

So you’ve decided to finally apply the advice you keep hearing and reading about. You’re determined to build your own business. No more freelancing for you from now on! Good-bye hard-work, cranky clients and days of constant uncertainty about whether or not you’ll win that $3000 dollar project!

Welcome to that "12:00 o’clock going-to-the-office-never-have-to-answer-to-nobody" dream life! You’ll finally have the time and resources to do all the stuff you wish you’d done. Trips, vacations, freedom and prestige!

Well, you’ll first need to start your business. And guess what? You’ll very likely to end up closing it or selling its assets! And that’s a good thing. Let me explain.

Recommended Reading: Entrepreneurs: 5 Startup Mistakes to Avoid

Entrepreneurs Fail Constantly

That’s right. You could say it’s a never-ending, always-fashionable trend. Entrepreneurs, whether they’re dirt poor, millionaires or even billionaires, just keep on losing. Don’t believe the hype. That’s the real state of entrepreneurship. If you want to go into business for yourself, get ready for feeling failure and pressure about 90% of the time. But don’t worry. You’ll at least be in good company.

Did you know about Steve Jobs’s or Bill Gates failures? How about Walt Disney’s or Richard Branson’s? Did you know the average millionaire goes bankrupt at least 3.5 times or that 3 out of 4 start-ups funded by Venture Capital fail? If you were to generalize, by the 5th year, regardless of the industry, over half of all startups shut their doors.

That’s just facts.

But Why?

And the reasons why this is happening are even more ludicrous. According to StatisticBrain, the #1 reason all businesses fail is emotional pricing. That’s to say, entrepreneurs usually overprice their products or services and are too stubborn to adjust to the market. They fail and give up. It’s not the economic climate, the industry or management.

The list of bankruptcy reasons goes on, with increasing audacity and disregard for common sense:

• Living too high for the business
• Nonpayment of taxes
• No knowledge of pricing
• Lack of planning
• No knowledge of financing
• No experience in record-keeping

Why These Numbers Are Good News!

These high failure rates and stupendous reasons for failure are actually really encouraging for any budding entrepreneur. What they mean is:

• Competition is really low.
• You’re bound to succeed if you keep at it.

These reasons paint the picture of failure as being the most common element in business today. That’s normal. Because of this, the only winners in business are the ones who:

• Apply common sense (no emotional pricing, paying your taxes, planning and adapting, etc.)
• Continue practicing business after failure

That’s the big secret you don’t hear in the interviews: being an entrepreneur isn’t really so hard. Just keep at it and apply common sense. You only need one win and bam: you’re a hero. Even billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban admitted this in his book:

"It doesn’t matter how many times you fail. You only have to be right once and then everyone can tell you that you are an overnight success."

Your Business Will Fail

I can predict with great certainty that your first business will be a disaster. I’m happy to be the first to let you in on this secret. Wisdom comes from practice, so it really doesn’t matter how much you’ve read or been taught, how many PhDs you have or how much encouragement you get from family and friends.

You won’t have that common sense. You’ll reach too far. You’ll overexpand, overprice and treat clients and employees wrong. I know I’ve said it’s easy, but most of us aren’t born with that much needed common sense.

You’ll fail miserably. Almost nobody makes a million dollars with their first business. Almost nobody makes that first jump. Not even superheroes. Neo from The Matrix Series can fly and dodge bullets but even him didn’t make that first jump in the movie.

Here’s Neo looking smug and confident.

Here’s Neo doing/failing his first jump

The sooner you are OK with failing, the sooner you’ll be successful.

And don’t think for a second that just because you’ve failed, you won’t be able to get investors or hire people again. That’s because real investors and smart people aren’t surprised by failure. They already know these hard facts of the business world.

Charles Holloway, director of Stanford University’s Center for Entrepreneurial Studies summed it up beautifully:

“How well a failed entrepreneur has managed his company, and how well he worked with his previous investors, makes a difference in his ability to persuade U.S. venture capitalists to back his future start-ups.”

What All This Means For You

So the conclusion is you should start your first business as soon as possible, so that you’ll be able to fail as soon as possible. The sooner you fail, the better. You want to have a startup mind. One awesome idea to apply comes from Start-Up Nation, a book covering the impressive financial success of Israel:

If an entrepreneur has a business idea, he should start it that week.

Stop preparing. Stop building features for your clients who aren’t even there yet. Just stick a Beta Version next to the brand’s name and go to market. Good enough is good enough. If given the choice, take speed over quality. Nothing worse than an uncertain, perfectionist Captain fighting the storm.

What To Do When Failure Comes Knocking

After your business fails, here’s what you need to do:

Find comfort in the facts and figures given in this article. Re-read them. Internalize them. You are not special. You didn’t make the first jump. You’re normal and that’s OK.

Evaluate asssets. Every business, no matter how bad, has some sort of assets. Cars, equipment, office space or maybe intellectual property, employees or client base. Even if the business is making no money, you still had to have some clients or maybe you’ve worked and had ongoing relationships with different companies. Those are still valuable assets. Maybe you have an nice commercial lease worked out. That’s a plus in any buyer’s eyes.

If you have a brand name, that’s awesome. Brands carry a lot of value for investors. I’ve seen business saved just because they had mass appeal thanks to their brands. Open up a spreadsheet and list all your assets. If you aren’t happy with what you have, add another column. Call it "Experience" and in the corresponding cell write "Invaluable". You’ll feel better and it’s absolutely true.

Sell the assets individually or collectively as a business. Another scenario would be to give it away and keep a certain percentage if you think the business still has potential. If you have trouble finding a willing buyer or person to take over, consider these routes:

• Contacting the competition
• Contacting business partners
• Asking your accountant or lawyer. They’re usually well connected.
• Being honest and asking your employees.
• Being honest and asking your employees if they know somebody.
• Ads, forums, blogs, newspapers
• Universities. Find a young, hungry wannabe entrepreneur. Give it away for free and keep a percentage.
• Try gatherings or conferences from your industry. Don’t be shy.

The Last Step

Now you’ve sold it or gave it away and kept an interest, sit down. Relax. Detach. Open the spreadsheet. Write the top 3 mistakes you’ve done while owning the business. Write the corresponding 3 lessons you’ve learned. Once you’ve done this, it’s time to restart.

Restart as soon as possible. You’re now closer than ever to being a successful entrepreneur.

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As a web developer, we have always been searching for a tool to increase our workflow and productivity. And today’s post is dedicated for web developers who frequently work with HTML and CSS, as we are going to take a look at a tool that allows us to write these two essential web languages (much) faster – Emmet.

Recommended Reading: Working With Code Snippets In Sublime Text

Emmet is the extending development of ZenCoding, which is written purely with JavaScript. While in this demonstration I’m going to use Sublime Text, Emmet is also available for many code editors including TextMate, Coda, Eclipse, Notepad++, and Adobe DreamWeaver.

Installing Emmet

Head over to this page to find and download Emmet for your code editor. If you are using Sublime Text, like I am, Emmet can be installed easily through Package Control.

Once installed, you may need to restart Sublime Text.

Writing HTML with Emmet

Most current editors probably have a similar built-in functionality. For example, in Sublime Text we simply write <ul> and hit the Tab key, it will automatically expand into a complete unordered list with the <li> element.

We can also write the following div.class to assign HTML class in the element.

Emmet, in this case, extends this functionality further, allowing us to write complex HTML structures in a more simplified way with abbreviations or aliases, similar to the one in CSS. So, if you are familiar with CSS syntax already, you should get used to it quickly.

In addition, Emmet documentation provides a massive list of abbreviations and aliases and the uses, which could be very intimidating for the first-timer. But, here are some of the basic things that I think you should know – at least.

Child Element

As we mentioned, Emmet uses syntax similar to CSS. In CSS we have a direct child selector which is represented with the > sign. In Emmet, we use this operator to add child elements as well. For example:

Sibling Element

Sibling refers to the element in the same nesting level. In CSS, we can select sibling element with the plus + sign. Similarly we can use it to add sibling elements with Emmet.

Assigning ID or Class

We can select an element with its id attribute using the # sign in CSS. With Emmet, we use # to assign ID attribute to element, and as we have shown you before we can also assign an HTML class in the element, the same way we select the element class. For example:

When we do not specify the element, as you can see above, Emmet will use <div> as the default. If we want to be more specific, we can declare the element type before the class or the ID name, like so.

Specifically for the HTML class, we can assign multiple classes in one element in this way.

Assigning Attribute

In CSS, we use square bracket to select attribute. The same way can also be applied with Emmet for assigning attribute to the generated element.

Multiplication

Emmet also allows us to add HTML element in specific numbers using the asterisk (*) sign, which can be a time saver. In this example, we add an <h3> and four <h4> under a <section> element.

Basic HTML Document

We can build basic structure in an HTML document in a snap with Emmet. Given the example of basic HTML5 structure, we can do it this way.

Lorem Ipsum

Lastly, this is one of my favorites in Emmet. Sublime Text comes with a shortcut to generate the lorem ipsum dummy text. We simply write lorem and hit Tab, and it will expand to around 5 to 7 lines of lorem ipsum.

Emmet, in this case, works slightly different. With Emmet, we can specify how many words to generate. Say, we want only 3 words, we can write lorem3:

Specify how long you want your lorem ipsum text to be.

Using Emmet in CSS

We can also write CSS with Emmet. Similar to HTML, it extends the aliases into a complete CSS property as well as its value. Let me show you one example: say we want to add a padding with the value of 10px, we simply write p:10 and hit the Tab key, and it will automatically expand it topadding: 10px, as follows.

Or, if we want to hide elements, we can do either with visibility or display property. With Emmet, we can write these CSS properties this way.

However, despite the advantages, when it comes to CSS, I still prefer using the auto-complete feature from my code editor as it is simply more convenient for me. Plus, memorizing these CSS aliases is a bit harder than for HTML, although, you can refer to the cheatsheet of Emmet aliases for CSS as well as HTML here.

Conclusion

Emmet is really a brilliant tool, and I think it is an essential tool for web developers. The only downside perhaps is the learning curve required for first-timers, but once you pick it up, it can significantly boost your productivity. You can write HTML and CSS faster than ever before.

So, have you tried this tool? Share your thought in the comment section below.