Make dedicated time for practice. - Josh Kaufman

Finance is the art and science of watching the money flowing into and out of a business, then deciding how to allocate it and determining whether or not what you’re doing is producing the results you want.

As a social force, Reciprocation is one of the primary psychological tendencies that underlie human cooperation. The “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” instinct is powerful and forms the foundation of friendships and alliances. Historically, gift giving was how the powerful remained in Power: in throwing lavish parties or generously awarding titles and land, leaders increased their influence by amassing a store of favors that could be called in during times of need.

Fitbit is a company that knows the value of Shadow Testing. Founded by Eric Friedman and James Park in September 2008, Fitbit makes a small clip-on exercise and sleep data-gathering device. The Fitbit device tracks your activity levels throughout the day and night, then automatically uploads your data to the Web, where it analyzes your health, fitness, and sleep patterns. It’s a neat concept, but creating new hardware is time-consuming, expensive, and fraught with risk, so here’s what Friedman and Park did. The same day they announced the Fitbit idea to the world, they started allowing customers to preorder a Fitbit on their Web site, based on little more than a description of what the device would do and a few renderings of what the product would look like. The billing system collected names, addresses, and verified credit card numbers, but no charges were actually processed until the product was ready to ship, which gave the company an out in case their plans fell through. Orders started rolling in, and one month later, investors had the confidence to pony up $2 million dollars to make the Fitbit a reality. A year later, the first real Fitbit was shipped to customers. That’s the power of Shadow Testing.