7 Financial Decisions Made in Your 30s That May Haunt You in Your 50s

People often say “life is short” as a justification to do or buy something immediately rather than waiting. But the truth is, life is not short. Life is long. The average life expectancy for an American male is 76.2 years, and 81 years for a female. A thirty-year-old discussing a short life may actually be looking at another 50 long years.

This is good news! And, financially speaking, a long outlook on life is important, because the decisions we make early on have a significant impact on the remainder of our lives. Specifically, these decisions can make or break our retirement plans.

Here are seven important financial decisions 30-year-olds make that could come back to haunt them in their 50s:

A Smarter Approach to Non-Disclosure Agreements

The most valuable asset a business has is its secrets, whether that's an algorithm, an organization chart or a revolutionary widget. A non-disclosure agreement could be protecting you or some other entity, and as you're founding your business, it's important to know the difference. Here are a few things to keep in mind when you start making and signing NDAs.

4 Ways to Cultivate Greater Diversity in Your Business

When Frito-Lay's Hispanic employee affinity group provided input for a new guacamole-flavored chip, the result was a new $100 million product. And while creating a more diverse employee base probably won't add nine figures to your bottom line, it could put you more in tune with more potential customers.

"If everyone looks the same and thinks the same [in your business], you're probably missing out on some important opportunities," says Mason Donovan, Managing director of client solution sales for Personified in Chicago and co-author of The Inclusion Dividend: Why Investing in Diversity & Inclusion Pays Off(Bibliomotion, 2013).

Creating a more diverse workplace requires a combination of recruitment and policy initiatives. Here are four of his best practices.

Entrepreneur Definition: Be an Extraordinary Entrepreneur

Great entrepreneurs are extraordinary leaders. They invest primarily in people and not in ideas. By backing the people, they can get rapid growth and big returns they strive for.

The hard part is the leadership required to motivate all the players.... the Engineers, Investors, Vendors, Customers and many more

An extraordinary leader seems to handle opponents with ease. Once the opposition starts noticing the great leader, they will prevent him from growing, because he might take market share away from them.

Here are seven points on how to accelerate your leadership qualities to become a great entrepreneur.

How to Find the Perfect Co-Founder

A: This is a tough question, as there is no easy answer. Before I offer up suggestions, ask yourself if you really need a co-founder.

If you are seeking a technical co-founder, because you don't have those skills, you could consider teaching yourself how to code. It is not as insurmountable as most fear. Plus, it empowers you to engage with your technical team, as you hire and build.

That being said, if you do need a co-founder for another skill set, you don't have the time to learn to code or you are just looking for someone to help make decisions, here are a few things to consider:

Entrepreneurship for Artists and Other New Business-School Trends

For schools looking to attract the best aspiring entrepreneurs, offering Business Plan 101 doesn't cut it anymore. Even boasting about amazing competitions, demo days and pitch contests might hardly raise an eyebrow. Instead, many universities are thinking outside the box and expanding their offerings to support an array of students across various programs. We took a look at four innovative trends making headway in entrepreneurship:

3 Rules You Must Follow If You Want Your Company to Be Exceptional

If you want your company to be the best, there are three rules:
1. Be better.

2. Don't be cheap.

And 3. There are no other rules.

That's according to a recently released book co-authored by Deloitte director Michael Raynor and strategist Mumtaz Ahmed, The Three Rules: How Exceptional Companies Think (Portfolio/Penguin, 2013). Raynor, who earned his doctorate from the Harvard Business School, and Ahmed, along with a team of researchers, analyzed a database of 25,000 companies across hundreds of industries spanning 45 years to identify those companies that were statistically "exceptional."

How to Decide If Your Business Idea Is a Total Bust

Everything seems to be in place: you had a great idea for a product or service and know there's a large market for it based on research. Your prototype works and is ready for production. You have a business plan in hand after getting advice from industry experts. You've even talked to investors and reached out to retail buyers. And you feel ready for what comes next, because you've built a team to support you.

A Beginner's Guide to Starting and Marketing an App

Building a mobile app for the first time? You no doubt have many questions: Is it worthwhile? Does it make sense? How will people know about it?

Having helped build more than a hundred apps from categories ranging from social networking, utility, entertainment and lifestyle, I get asked a lot of questions by entrepreneurs and businesses on the entire process of building and marketing apps.

Here are the most common ones to help you first-timers build a successful app:

Your Employees Are Lying to You. Here's How to Stop Them

Every single day your employees must choose between doing something on-time and with precision or postponing that task and doing it "less than perfect" to make a deadline. If they choose the second path, the next natural step is trying to get away with it.

There is an old consulting saying: "A dead fish rots from the head down." That means you, as the business owner, set the tone for your organization. Your employees and your managers are looking to you for cues on how to behave.

6 Leadership Lessons From The Great Outdoors

For someone with no experience in retail, apparel or business, starting my own clothing company was a pretty bold move. I never intended to be an entrepreneur, but after years of working in the outdoors, I could never find workpants that fit properly and decided to create Red Ants Pants, which makes workpants for women. Looking back, I realize my outdoor experience with organizations like the Student Conservation Association and Outward Bound have influenced my entrepreneurial mindset.

Here are six key lessons from working with your hands that helped me start a successful business:

5 Signs You're Standing In Your Own Way to Success

While a lot of the entrepreneurs I've met and mentored in the past decade have been successful, I've probably met as many, if not more, unsuccessful entrepreneurs. Each of them seemed to make a lot of the same mistakes -- ones that could be easily remedied, but when left unaddressed, could mean the difference between success and failure.

Here are five signs you're getting in your own way to success and how to move over and let yourself be the best you can be:

Twitter Files for IPO; To Go Public

Twitter has filed to go public, though potential investors will have to wait a bit to get a sense of its financials. In a tweet, Twitter confirmed that it has filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

"We've confidentially submitted an S-1 to the SEC for a planned IPO," Twitter said in its official feed. "This Tweet does not constitute an offer of any securities for sale."

Why Everyone Will Have to Become an Entrepreneur (INFOGRAPHIC)

It used to be that entrepreneurs were the renegade cowboys out in Silicon Valley. Nowadays, you have to be an entrepreneur just to get and hold a job.

Consultants and freelancers are cheaper than full-time staffers with benefits, software developers overseas cost a fraction of what they cost in the U.S. and, by 2030, robots will be able to perform most manual labor, according to an infographic (below) from San Francisco-based startup organization Funders and Founders. Even employees who are employed in large corporations are encouraged to be “intrapreneurs,” meaning that they are in many cases given company time to come up with disruptive ways of thinking about corporate organization and practices.

Making Your Knowledge Workers More Productive

With scarcely any help from management, knowledge workers can increase their productivity by 20%. When we interviewed 45 such people across 39 companies in 8 industries in the United States and Europe, we found that by identifying low-value tasks to either drop completely, delegate to someone else or outsource, the average worker gained back roughly one day a week they could use for more important tasks. (We detail this process in our HBR article, "Make Time for the Work That Matters.")

10 Business Plan Benefits You Might Be Forgetting

Too many people don't bother to write a business plan because they think it's too hard or unnecessary unless you’re looking for funding. That's a shame. These myths keep a lot of people from the benefits of planning.

If you're still skeptical, here are 10 benefits to business planning you shouldn't be overlooking:

A Secret to Creative Problem Solving

Ever find yourself going over and over a problem in your business, only to hit a dead end or draw a blank?

Find an innovative solution with one simple technique: re-describe the problem.

"The whole idea behind creative problem solving is the assumption that you know something that will help solve this problem, but you're not thinking of it right now," explains Art Markman, cognitive psychologist and author of "Smart Thinking." Put another way, your memory hasn't found the right cue to retrieve the information you need.

How to Improve Your Critical Thinking Skills and Make Better Business Decisions

As an entrepreneur, you make decisions every day that affect the success of your products, the loyalty of your employees, and the overall health of your business. To make the best decisions possible, you need to think critically and quickly to pick out any flaws in your processes that might harm your business.

When you think through a problem, your thought process is naturally colored by biases, such as your point of view and your assumptions about the situation.

How Can I Set My Business Apart From the Competition?

In many ways the elements that go into differentiating a bakery are the same as any other business. While it may seem obvious, most businesses are not even doing a good job at the three basics. If you can make sure to keep these areas in good shape, you will by default stand head and shoulders above the rest.

What Every Entrepreneur Should Know About Valuations

Getting your first term sheet from a venture-capital firm is among the most exhilarating moments that you'll experience as an entrepreneur. It probably sits up there with the college acceptance letter in the pantheon of milestones.

Getting a call from an entrepreneur who has just received a term sheet is one of the highlights of my day. The excitement is palpable. But unlike the college acceptance letter, a venture term sheet can quickly be followed by the dread of trying to understand the gobbledy-gook that you've been presented with. To manage that inevitable angst, you'll quickly need to wrap your head around what matters a lot, what matters less and what doesn't really matter in a term sheet.

3 Reasons Why You Are Failing at Problem Solving

The line between success and failure is often thin. An important thing you can do to put yourself on the right side of that line is to maximize the quality of your knowledge, and use strong methods to solve problems.

Early Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers realized that the difficulty with their computer programs was that they had no real expertise in the areas in which they were solving problems, and so they had to rely on very general strategies, or weak methods of problem solving.

4 Ways You Are Driving Your Employees Crazy

You spend a great deal of time recruiting and training the best people possible. But are you driving them crazy without realizing it? It’s possible, says human resources consultant Roberta Matuson, founder of Matuson Consulting and author of Talent Magnetism: How to Build a Workplace that Attracts and Keeps the Best(Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2013). Just like few people will tell you if you have bad breath, employees aren’t generally eager to point out the error of these management ways, she says. So, check yourself for these bad behaviors.

5 Ways Mobile Messaging Can Boost Retail Sales

For retailers everywhere, the rules of engagement have changed. As smartphones, tablets and other mobile device proliferate, shopping has evolved from a discrete activity into a continuous and always-on process. Today, buying a product can happen at any time and anywhere, and it’s never more than an arm’s length away.

To make the most of this new reality, retailers must take a more active role in the customer journey and guide shoppers through each step of the process. The most effective way to do this is by creating a multi-channel messaging strategy, one that addresses specific customers needs, provides valuable content and nudges shoppers toward purchase.

Let’s examine five ways that leading retailers use mobile messaging to boost their sales:

Management Lessons From a Public Company Gone Private

My executive team and I recently led a management buyout of IgnitionOne, our marketing technology firm from Dentsu, the Japan-based, global holding company. While this type of ownership can offer both scale and resources, at the end of the day, we knew as an independent force we'd be able to better attract and retain talent, innovate product offering and more aggressively grow the business.