Writing

How To Apply For A Job

So you want a job. Any job or a specific job. You need money. Maybe you need more money. You have applied and reached the interview process…now what?

This How to apply for a job article will help you! Just follow my advice and you’ll be having a (new) job in no-time!

1. Apply for jobs you want. And if you’re not in the luxury situation of applying for a job you really want – PRETEND!

2. Bring along an updated CV, nicely printed out. If you’re looking for a creative job, bring a portfolio as well.

3. PREPARE. How do you sell yourself, your skills, your personality and your attitude.

4. PREPARE SOME MORE. Learn something about the company, the job, and make sure you have a few smart questions up your sleeve.

5. Dress well. Depending on the job a suit and tie might not be required. But don’t look like a slob.

6. Look the interviewer in the face and speak up. There’s nothing worse than floor-studying mumblers.

7. Talk slowly and clearly. Don’t rush. Don’t panic.

8. Don’t ask stupid questions. This is open for interpretation but asking if you’re paid overtime before you’re given an offer is kind of weird.

9. Please don’t sweat profusely.

10. Shower before. Don’t smell.

11. Buy a gum or brush your teeth. Death breath might lose you a job.

12. Don’t insult the interviewer or the work of the company by coming with “constructive” feedback. Sometimes it might be good to say you’ve thought about how to improve the work etc, but be VERY careful. There is a risk of stepping on some very sensitive toes.

13. Don’t think you’re God’s gift to mankind and that you’re doing the company a favor by asking for a job there. Keep your ego at home.

14. Don’t ask for a ridiculous salary.

If you follow all these rules you might just get yourself a job you like. Or maybe you find out you don’t want to work at all and start writing books instead. No matter what you choose.

Good luck!

Ps. You need it. Ds.

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Write What You Know?

One of my favorite books on writing (aptly named “On Writing“) is written by Stephen King and in that book he regurgitates and then chews on one of the most common rules for writing; write what you know.

First time I read it it made a helluva lot of sense. I mean, it does sound damn difficult to write about space when you have spent all of your life with your feet planted firmly on the ground. Yet, if you can’t write about what you like, doesn’t it take away the fun of it? The reason you write is because it’s fun, right? Then it doesn’t make sense to write about accounting or plumbing (because honestly that doesn’t sound very exciting for a plot).

So the learning from this is that you should write what you LIKE. Whatever it is. Maybe you want to write about Martian plumbers? Knock yourself out. Or maybe you write a story about an accountant and his battle with Microsoft Excel? And maybe that story will be fantastic. Because it’s all about how you tell it.

Let’s say you want to write about an obese man in his upper twenties who’s decided to do what it takes to reach his dream of becoming an astronaut. Chances are you don’t know jack about being an astronaut, you might not be in your twenties anymore, and you’ve always been quite skinny. Then you need to do research, you need to listen, you need to soak up information to be able to make the story as TRUE as possible.

Don’t be lazy with research. Today you don’t have to bog your head down in library books for hours on end. Today you have your friend Google and his father the Internet. You might not be able to feel the sea breeze in the Caribbean by image browsing, but you can get a LOT of information online. Use it to your advantage. You’re going to learn a lot of stuff you don’t need, but they say we’re only using about 10 percent of our brains so my guess is you have space.

For me it works best to mix write what you know with write what you like. I have to feel an interest in the story, the characters, the topic and I have to feel the confidence that I can tell the story in the right way and make justice to it. Otherwise both I and the reader lose.

When I wrote The Wake-Up Call I placed it in a setting I was very familiar with (the advertising world) and placed it in a city I love (New York), but I also went out of my comfort zone when writing about Mexico. I wrote about something I care about (the pace of the world, how to deal with a breakdown, how to face life when it finally catches up with you) and from the viewpoint of a character I’m interested in (the narrator, Jack Reynolds). I didn’t plot it, because I don’t like plotted novels so much, and because there’s a joy in being able to unearth the fossil (another one of King’s phrases) and discover the story as I wrote it. This leads to more editing and plenty more rewrites than a plotted novel, but is a lot more fun and leads to a more creative and original end result (I hope).

The Wake-Up Call is my first published novel, although I’ve been writing stories since I was a kid. It was quite an effort to pull off, because I couldn’t stop rewriting it, but after the tenth or so rewrite I decided this was it. It was time to hit the publish button.

This was in the beginning of September this year. Since then I sold a decent number of books and gotten a good review or three, but I’ve realized that to sell even more I should probably have chosen a stronger niche or genre. It seems like you really need to do your marketing research properly, even as an indie author/enthusiast.

What do I mean by that? Well, you could argue that there’s no point in writing books that nobody wants to read. Or maybe there is? Maybe you just have to get that story out of you, because YOU believe in it and YOU feel the need to tell it?

To be honest with you, I don’t know. Everybody wants to sell or at least for people to read what they’ve written and there’s few things as sad as unappreciated writers who spent years on a book that very few ever read. An extreme example would be John Kennedy Toole and his Pulitzer prize winning book A Confederacy of Dunces. Toole got the prize posthumously because he committed suicide after the book he’d worked on and believed in so strongly failed to get published.

But today in the era of self-publishing and DYI-marketing getting published is not the problem, it’s getting people to like what you write and to SELL (we don’t like that word do we? – me I think there’s a reason it rhymes with HELL).

The general feeling I have about most self-published authors is that they write either science-fiction, thrillers, crime, or romance and that these genres are very popular. Because even if you write for a small niche, the competition will be less tough and the readership more devoted to the topic and by default more interested in what you have to say.

This is what I’ve slowly come to realize. It might be that I’m off, but it’s a strong feeling.

I decided to write a book I would like to read myself (which I think goes for most writers, otherwise it would be weird) and since I’m not so much into science-fiction, romance, thrillers, and crime – I guess I’ll have to call it contemporary, commercial or general fiction (the categories among e-book sellers like Amazon, Smashwords and Kobo vary greatly).

And now here comes the crunch. Who does this appeal to? Everyone who’s into fiction? No. The problem is that the definition is so broad and the competition so fierce that it’s very hard to reach your ideal reader. Who would like The Wake-Up Call? I hope a lot of people. But how do I reach out to them and compete with established publishers and authors?

People would say social media (twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, Google Plus, etc), but the problem there is to reach the right person and to win their attention with your story.

I’ve come to learn it’s not easy. But you can’t give up either. You wrote the damn thing and you want people to read it.

Just take John Locke for example. He claims he spent $25 000 on marketing and didn’t get very much out of it. Then he started blogging and twittering and not long thereafter he was in the Kindle Million Club.

So social media might work for you after all.

I’m trying a little bit of everything myself. We’ll see how it goes and I promise to keep you posted on this very blog (and on twitter or Goodreads of course!)

If you want to help me out why not check out my book THE WAKE-UP CALL on Amazon, Nook, iTunes, Smashwords

I know this was long and if you managed to get this far I just want to say…Thanks for listening.

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How to increase your productivity

(Well you could probably do something more productive than reading this very long post so…)

Yeah, this is another installment in my humble advice series. I call it humble because I believe someone’s about to comment “who the fuck are you to give people advice about this and that, you don’t know jack shit!” but maybe that’s just some small spark of internet forum fear (people seem to find it easier to be rude on the internet than face to face, gee, I wonder why?).

Anyway, back to the subject which is productivity and if you read the kind of pointless first paragraph you might think I’ve already wasted my own and YOUR precious time so how can I REALLY give advice about productivity, but if you read on a little bit further I will tell you how.

I’m might as well just come out and say it: I’m a major procrastinator, maybe not so much anymore, but I used to horrible. I used to find one million things to do instead of doing what I actually HAD to do. Talk about not knowing your priorities.

If I was working in my home office I would rather clean the house OCD-style (I’m no clean freak to tell you the truth) and in the end almost alingning the pens with a ruler until I actually started working. Everything else came first all the time. And with the event of multi-tab browsers, multi-tasking computers, I went in over my head and my brain whirred through different tasks, starting many, finishing few.

I’m now typing this blog post on my iPad. It’s going fairly well and I’m about halfway through it. If I was on my Macbook Pro I would probably slide my fingers on that clever Mac trackpad thingy and open up Twitter, another tab, Outlook or something to detract attention from what I was doing and make me lose concentration completely. This is very dangerous behaviour. Maybe I would check my book-selling stats, start reading an article in the New York Times or check out a new gadget I want to buy on Amazon. I would always find a way to escape what I was currently doing.

Why did I do this? I don’t have ADHD or any other disorder that I’m aware of. I used to play chess on world junior level for chrissakes! If you can’t concentrate during a chess game and stick to doing one thing at at time, you’re pretty much screwed or at least lost (on the chess board).

Maybe the abundance of choice got me? When you’re on the web or just at a computer the possibilties are endless. The world is your oyster (too poetic maybe?) and there’s too many temptations to fight boredom. I think this will be a big problem for future generations. The need to have too much going on at the same time will put both the attention span and the boredom threshold on a minimum. You have Skype conversations, a few poker tables, a word document, an e-mail you started to compose and perhaps also something else, just a click away. It’s too easy to lose your concentration! Or maybe they will all be multi-tasking masterminds because the human race always evolves and adapts to the circumstances that they themselves create. We made technology and technology has changed us and will keep changing us.

But I’m off topic. Well, I’m still writing this blog, I haven’t even switched app once and I’m happy about that. Why I didn’t? Let me tell you.

1. I’ve made a promise to myself to do the most out of myself. I’ve made that promise to myself many times, but now I’m sticking to it. I hope.

2. I have a rule to always finish the task I’m about to start unless something non-boredom-related intervenes. Like someone calling you or telling you to do this instead

3. If something takes less than two minutes, just do it straight away. This is from David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” and it’s the real gem in that book (the rest is not bad but overly long).

4. Find peace and quiet and know where you work best. This is very personal. When I’m at my desk at work I get disturbed all the time. People sit down next to you when you’re in the middle of something and expects you to open the e-mail that they JUST sent. It doesn’t have to be urgent. I think this is inconsiderate. Why not just ask if I’m busy first? Or maybe they’re assuming I’m on Facebook or streaming a tennis match? Hard to tell. They need to practice patience skills though or I’m going to ask for a door.

What I can do to battle these ASAP-people is to book a conference room and close the door, put on the headphones and look very, very busy. I’ll also prefer to bring the laptop or the iPad to a restaurant or coffee shop. These places are crowded but if you’re disturbed it’s staff 90% of the time. Not co-workers with problems or questions.

5. If you can, I would greatly urge you to get an iPad. It’s excellent because it’s kind of distraction-free because there’s only one window/one app on your screen and it takes at least two clicks to get to another one.

6. Write things down. There’s a million of these productivity apps out there. Not all of them are good, but find a simple one you like and start writing stuff down (I like Things, but as I said there are countless good ones) Do you need to buy lightbulbs? Call the sales dude? Pick up the kids from soccer practice? Be specific and write it down. One place. Sync it between all your gadgets and devices and you’re set.

7. Organize your e-mail into folders like asap, ongoing, cc, etc. Put all the stuff you want done today in the asap. This is a must if you spend 70% of your workday in your Outlook. This sounds bloody depressive when I think of it, but I think it rings true for many office jobs these days.

8. If you lead a team or just work in one invest in a project management tool. I’ve tried many of them like Basecamp, ApolloHQ, Teamproject, but the one that fit my needs best was MyIntervals. It doesn’t looks so hot but does the trick and more.

9. FOCUS! Don’t try to learn scuba-diving, unicycling and horse-riding over the same period of time. Prioritize what you want and need to do the most and just DO IT. Nike got it right from the get-go. Just Do It. I just to waste time on a trillion hobbies but I’ve cut down. Priority 1: Family 2: My health (including exercise) 3: My Career 4: The rest.

10. Don’t stay the extra hour. Maybe if you’re young and you want to show your skills, but as soon as you know who you are, your colleagues will know too. You don’t show skills by working overtime.

11. Avoid meetings. Some of them you have to go to, but then set a goal for them, what do you want to achieve out of the meeting. Because they always seem to drag on and waste your precious time.

12. Turn off the wifi or unplug the internet cable. If you need to write this will minimize the number of distractions the internet provides!

I know this was long so thanks for listening!

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Death and Other Disasters

Lenah and I watched a movie called Love and Other Disasters yesterday. The movie features Brittany Murphy, a talented actress who died in 2009 from an overdose of prescription medications (she was 31). Afterwards we ended up talking about death and how tragic it is when a young life is taken. I came to think of some of my favorite musicians and how they died at a young age; singer/songwriter Jeff Buckley who died at 26, Jimi Hendrix who died at 28, and Elliott Smith who took his own life at 34.

These artists left a huge void and a big fan base behind and it leads you to thinking how amazing it is that one person can mean so much to so many. Just look at Steve Jobs and how the world reacted to his death. You wouldn’t think a billionaire entrepreneur could get that kind of a following but with Steve Jobs the impossible was always possible and it’s nice to see him get a proper goodbye.

I guess this is what we all hope for in our lives, to be able to make an impact, a difference and for people to remember us for what good things we did and what good people we were. This is really something worth fighting for.

Imagine if everyone set that as their life goal or vision? “To make a difference.” I think the world would be a much better place then.

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My Humble Writing Advice

1. Write. You need to do something a LOT to get good at it. That goes for everything, including writing.

2. Read. The best and only way to really study the craft. Don’t only read one type of books or one genre. Read a bit of everything. Study, reflect, analyze. To stay reading a lot always bring books with you. Keep books on your phone (if you have a smartphone), get a e-book reader like a Kindle.

3. Listen. How do people talk? What are they talking about? What dialect or slang are they using? This is necessary to write good dialogue, but also to be a decent human being in general.

4. Write something you like. To write a book or a short story really well you need it to be about something you LIKE to write about. Some say that you should write what you KNOW but chances are you’re a plumber who wants to write about Martians. Do that then. Don’t worry that you haven’t met any REAL martians.

5. Research. This especially important if you write about something that you don’t know a lot about. Getting the facts wrong can be very annoying to the attentive reader. It’s also fun to learn stuff. At least it should be!

6. Get a space where you can concentrate properly. Writing should be distraction-free. It might even make sense to turn off your Internet connection. I write best in crowded places where I don’t know anyone, like a random café or restaurant. For you it might be a cabin in the wood or in your writer’s room. Make sure not be disturbed though, otherwise you won’t get many focused words on the paper.

7. Save often to avoid computer crashes and data loss. Use version numbers like 1.2 or 2.0 or the date so you can revert back to previous versions if you’ve change your mind about certain scenes or chapters.

8. Don’t be afraid to delete sentences or paragraphs you like. Be hard on yourself. Can you live without that pun? Can the reader? Most often they can.

9. Rewrite and rewrite again. You need to polish a pretty rough stone into a sparkling diamond. It takes time, so have patience and be self-critical (if you’re in two minds about something, it might make sense to wait for feedback from your test reader group).

10. Get a core group of alpha and beta readers. They should be able to criticize your writing in a constructive way and help you get the most out of it.

That’s pretty much it. If I think of something more I’ll update this. Good luck!

I’d like to end with a quote from one of my writing style icons, Elmore Leonard:

If it sounds like writing, I’ll rewrite it.

If you’ve managed to get this far you might as well check out my novel THE WAKE-UP CALL at Amazon or the official website. Thanks!

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How many times can you edit a book?

Photo: One of Jeremy Mayer’s typewriter robots

Well the number is, as you may have guessed, infinite. But it shouldn’t take that many times for you to get tired of the story or the characters and die to start another project.

It’s like cutting down trees in a dense forest. You’re killing your darlings, your favorite paragraphs, maybe even characters, to get the thing more coherent, to flow better. What I find tough is seeing the whole when your editing a part, a chapter, a couple of paragraphs.

Maybe this is easier when you got a lot of time to write, but getting paid (well) to write full-time is a dream, an oasis that everyone who loves to write is aiming for, but few manage to reach. The daytime job is there and hopefully not too bad. You know what they say, “never quit your day job”? Well, don’t, at least not until you know you can.

It’s kind of nice to hear about other authors struggling with this as well, at least when they do it themselves. If you’re lucky you can afford a professional editor, but a good and cheap idea is to print out the book for your friends and loved ones, let them read it, give feedback (not always easy being honest).

I bought a copy of Writers Forum and while I’m happy to see other people struggling to finish books, finding ways to get published or self-published, writing about their research methods, etcetera, I’m at the same time a bit put off by it. You want the whole writing a book thing to be sacred, a thing few people will manage, but when you read these magazines you realize it’s not. It’s work. It’s fun and sometimes very rewarding, but it’s still work.

So you need to work hard, put in the extra hours, sometimes wake up extra early or go to bed extra late, just to get another hour of writing. In the end it’s worth it, even if you don’t get rich.

In the end I managed to release my novel The Wake-Up Call. Publishing it didn’t feel nearly as good as I thought it would. It was scary and I felt really left out, like suddenly anyone in the world could take a stab out me. But now, a month later, I’m getting used to the thought and have already started on my second writing project ready to meet any kind of criticism, constructive or destructive.

You can easily say I’ll feel a bit more relaxed with the process this time around.

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The Wake-Up Call Philosophy


Oh, crap, I’m in a preaching mode…

The Wake-Up Call philosophy is about re-evaluation, about looking at yourself and asking yourself where you are in your life and where you would want to be.

It’s good to have a regular wake-up call. It’s nice to smell the coffee. It’s educating to read the writing on the wall. To pinch yourself once in a while. Hard.

I think life should be under constant evaluation, with out over-analyzing everything. Re-evaluate yourself using your gut and your heart and not your mind. This is the best way to get the good answers on where and who you are  in your life right now.

Stopping and thinking things over and being able to question decisions and actions without judging yourself too hard is incredibly important to achieving some kind of happiness.

And then we get into the never-ending question about what happiness really is and then you think you’re stuck right? Wrong. There’s no general term of what being happy is. Only you can know what happiness means to you and the only way to figure it out is to stop and ask yourself those questions:

Am I where I want to be?
Do I live the life I want to have?
Am I doing the things I dreamt of doing?

And if you’re saying NO to any one of the questions above you need to ask yourself why and you need to ask yourself how you can say YES.

Then you do what it takes. NO excuses. Just do it. Do it.

Come on.

Do it.

Ps. If you think any of this make any sense, why not check out my novel The Wake-Up Call at Amazon or Smashwords? Ds.

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Some business and life advice

Time to get a teensy bit philosophical again…here are some thoughts around business and life and how we can grow in both. Blablabla.

Focus

Life doesn’t give you oceans of time. Become something today. It takes one minute to change your mind. One minute. Your new life can start now – all you need is a little spark called determination.

Meetings

Every meeting should have a purpose. Decision/learning. It should be evaluated(!) afterwards. Was it wasting everybody’s time?

Can you be nice and still successful in business/life?

I sure hope so. I’m a nice guy. I still want to think I’m pretty successful and want to be even more so. Bulldozing shouldn’t be a good way to success. It should be punished.

Be a Giraffe

Hold your head high, observe yourself, the competition, the world and sniff out new opportunities. Eat leaves. (That might be a stretch).

Action

Stop being negative, stop talking about what’s bad – DO something about it.
Why I chose the keyword ACTION? It’s because life and business and work is all about doing and reacting, and there’s already too much talking – which means there’s plenty of bullshitting. Especially in sales, business, and meetings.

Honesty

Be honest. Be clear. Both when you communicate to employees, colleagues, customers and partners. Don’t promise something there isn’t. Never disappoint – Impress! Under promise and Over deliver.

You are responsible

You might complain. You might say your boss is an asshole/moron/piece of shit. But in the vast majority of the cases, YOU can change things around. YOU can ask the questions. YOU can drive the change. YOU can take charge. It will likely work and if it doesn’t – at least you tried. If you don’t try – don’t complain. You are in charge of your destiny.

You are the product/brand

You might be employed, but you are employed for YOUR skills. See yourself as a service partner, a consultant selling your skills. Aim to be the best and you’ll always have rewarding work. You are an asset. Talent is everything.

And that’s why HR is working also with asset management.

Interns

Every company wants people to work for free, that’s obvious. But many companies treat their interns like idiots and make them pour the coffee and compile boring and unnecessary reports instead of doing actual work. If you accept interns on the right basis, if you interview them and treat them like employees and actually spend some REAL time on them – they can do a lot more for your business than bring you coffee. They can be the motor of innovation and new thinking. And if you take time to coach them and give them real assignments they can prove to great talent for hiring after the internship or later.

Excellence

Make your customers smile. This is how good your product or idea should be. Smile.

Always improve, always progress. Look at yourself as objectively as possible. Don’t beat yourself down too hard, but don’t be too nice either.

The client always wants more. The competition is growing, the offering gets better and better and the service provider needs to listen to customers and step up.

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Writing and Reading

Writing and reading. Yin and Yang. Talking and listening. Taking in and giving out.

Sometimes we forgot that this circle of communication is important to stay a circle and not an 180 degree monologue. The importance of course being to listen, to read, to take in what others give you.

If you love to write, you should also love to read. How else would you grow, find inspiration, and learn from others?

I can be quite a talker I must admit. My brain is on constant tap, ready to spew out something. I’ve been said to suffer from everything between brain-diarrhea to narcissism.

But I’ve tried to work on that. I’ve really tried to become a better listener and less of a talker (the last one is a bit of a struggle though). I’m not sure I’m there yet and I think my dear Lenah would agree that sometimes my brain goes either on overdrive (a bit hyper and with a lot of bad jokes) or underdrive where there’s something going on behind the scenes (I’m usually not aware of what’s happening myself) and I’m slow like a snail stapled to a sticky seat.

Working on yourself, on your weaknesses, on improving the person you are, is I think a defining trait and skill in a personality and will help you become better in whatever your undertake.

The reason I chose the headline Writing and Reading is because I think that if you want to be a good writer, you need to read a LOT, you need to listen a LOT (dialogue writing skills), and you need to write a LOT, because only practice makes perfect and you need to rewrite, rewrite, rewrite and edit, edit, edit to get a product you’re happy with.

This goes for ourselves as well.

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The Simple Things

I want to take a moment and be a bit philosophical. Please bear with me…

In school you’re usually asked to write about the things you like. Whether it’s playing with your friends, riding your bike, or buying new toys, it’s good to ask yourself the question, as a kid and more importantly as an adult – what makes you feel good? What do you like to do? What brings you enjoyment?

You might end up with a long list of things or you might just get a handful. The important thing is to single out those that are easily achievable and “simple”.

Many people think you need to be rich to experience the good times regularly, but you don’t. You only need to learn how to appreciate the right moments and the simple things.

So what’s a simple thing? That is entirely up to you. It can be a morning coffee with the newspaper (I feel good just picturing that), a Springtime walk through a park, a glass of wine with your loved one, a pint of beer with friends, a refreshing jog, a bike ride, a tennis match, a Sunday drive, a nice talk with a friend, a good book, pretty much anything.

These are all things that could make me feel like a million bucks and basically cost me nothing. The key is to pause at the right moment and just feel, to remind yourself that this moment is good, this moment is a blessing, that you’re actually one lucky bastard to feel that good.

It’s all about appreciation and understanding; to appreciating the good times and understanding why they are good and why there’s no-one to stop you having them.

It’s the beauty in the simple things in life. Because then every life can be wonderful, inspirational, and fulfilling – no matter the outside circumstances (there are of course other things that factor in as well, but I think you know what I mean).

Remember that you don’t need a Maserati, a 60-inch LED TV, the latest espresso machine, the 27-inch iMac, that Gucci dress, the Louboutin shoes, the Prada handbag. You may want these things, but you don’t need them.

I want them too. I want all of that and more and I work hard as hell to get there. But I try my best to sometimes stop for a minute and just look at a leaf as its slowly sailing to the ground and think that I’m experiencing life in one of its most glorious moments.

I know it’s an extreme and corny example, but it paints the picture.

Do you appreciate the simple things in life? Why not ask yourself that question, because it might change everything.

Because even a very complicated life can sometimes be very simple and beautiful.

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