29 Dec
Every day, we push more meaningless crap onto the web. We’ve devalued our relationships into meaningless numbers of friends and followers. We’ve stopped being people, and started being personal brands. Are we finally ready to reduce our identity into a collection of photoshopped images of crap we can’t afford?
Jay Dolan, The Anti-Social Media
22 Nov
This is what it must feel to be a gladiator
Dripping in sweat,
Eyes looking forward at the enemy
But the enemy is within
It is the one that restrains you
In hopes of making sure you don’t take that extra step
To keep you human
And not to become God-like.
A gladiator faces fear in the ring
I face only my beating heart
The tears falling from my chest
The stains of dirty gloves
When I lift weights, I am invincible.
I can conquer any challenges put in front of me
No limits can hold me back
I keep pushing until I can push no more
Then I push some more
Causing me to bleed
Not blood, but more salty drops
Stinging my eyes and coating my lips.
Panting breaths, I feel near death
But a pause in action makes me feel alive
The walking dead
An immortal walking among the living
I stare ahead at my challenger,
Looking at him in the mirror,
And question how much of him remains
How much further can he push
There are no words spoken in response
Just a fist grabbing the iron to throw into the air again
More hard breaths
More sweat
All of which breeds
A new gladiator
23 Aug
To me, customer service in the North can be much better than in the South because the person you are dealing with is more human – you will see them hanging out at your regular coffee shop, in the park, or they may become a customer at your business. In the South, I feel we become oblivious to the people helping us because we are less likely to see them outside of that world. People commute in from an hour away to work in Kelowna, and I will never be in their comfort zones. I have gone to the same grocery store here weekly for the past two years and almost never have the same person helping me at the front. Because of that, we shrug off the bad experiences because we believe that is unlikely to happen again. If it happens again, we move on because we do have a choice.
Speaking of choice: if there is only one business in town serving a need and it is that lousy, people have the choice of starting a new business. They can easily establish the business, hire from outside if they need to, and setup a competitive market. The original business won’t change if the customer is unsatisfied, but they will change if they start losing business.
James McCullough
Kelowna, BC
25 May
It’s amazing to me how much better I feel after setting up my own office space.
On Monday, Kylie was at her grandma’s most of the day which allowed me to get a large chunk of time to myself to sit down and get some work done. Before, when i was sitting at the kitchen counter, I was almost always distracted by things going on around me. The fridge making noises, the television behind me, even noise in the hallway. In the office space, I have nothing to distract me other than my own thoughts. I can’t quite hear the television if I have the door closed, can’t hear the fridge or hallway, and since I am on the top floor, there isn’t much to look at when looking out a window.
Today I was only able to get into the office for a few hours while Kylie was sleeping, but I feel like I did more work in those two hours than I would have done in five sitting at the counter. I sit down in my chair here and all I want to do is, well, do.
I want to work on marketing materials for the hotel.
I want to enter in receipts to keep track of spending.
I want to pick up my Kindle and read.
And so forth.
It’s a change from before because then I knew I had to do something, but not entirely want to. Now I do. This may be a reflection from the new client I am working with and I really want to help him out. My first client were not responding to a lot of my suggestions or reports that I created for them, which made it difficult for me to want to help them out more.
This office space is turning into a bit of a sanctuary for me. I am not retreating from my obligations to Kylie or my cooking duties, but I do look forward to sitting down in here to unwind and relax. I managed to get a small lamp for the desk to make it more relaxing in the night time, and moved a small bookshelf in here so I can unpack some of my books. I was looking in my boxes today, and there are some great books that have been read or need to be read soon (starting with Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus).
The rest of the room is a bit of a hybrid right now. The remnants of it being Kylie’s room are still quite prominent: fairies on the walls, Mickey Mouse, animals holding balloons, and, of course, her dresser full of clothes. Oh, and there’s a poster of Justin Bieber that truly must go at some point soon.
But it is coming together.
It has only been a few days since I finished it, and I am sure it will transform with time. Eventually, I would like to create a space like my grandfather did in his house: large work desk, bookshelves lining the room, a large window sill and bay window, and my recliner with or without a small television. He even had a magazine rack like you see in libraries (raise it up to reveal even more magazines).
Of course, the den would not be complete without a small jar to hold Werther’s Originals like he had. I think I will find a better hiding spot for it to keep away from the grandchildren. Granted, Kylie is not even 18 months yet, so I am getting really far ahead of myself.
Office Space 2.0
8 Apr
You can be scared and still do it anyway. Regardless of whatever it is.
-Merlin Mann
Merlin Mann gave a talk at Webstock in Wellington, New Zealand in February that has been sweeping around the blogosphere in various ways. It was titled “Scared Shitless.” I first heard about it during his excellent podcast with Dan Benjamin, Back to Work, but couldn’t find the time to listen to it. I did today, and it’s a wonderful message that everyone should take in if they can afford the time (only 30 minutes long).
Merlin’s talk is about fear, which has been coming up more and more for me. A part of it is that I have a feeling that I am attracting these ideas to help encourage me with my own ventures. It is scary not having a regular job and not knowing where your next cheque may come from or whether it will be enough. There have been plenty of times when I have been scared myself that I have highlighted a bit in previous posts. Here were my biggest fears that happened at the end of 2009, moving into 2010:
Having one of those things happen is scary enough. Having all three happen within a month of each other?
That’s really fucking scary.
I don’t want to focus on myself too much, mainly because I’m not in the mood to do so at this point. What I do want to write about is how fear and overcoming fear is turning into a big thing. Let’s call it what it is:
Makes sense. Once you discover your passion, the next step is overcoming you fear of taking the next step. Boat loads of people are overcoming those fears recently and doing amazing work. If you don’t believe me, read through the archives of Ashley‘s series Fear, Exposed (the latest features Tricia Karp). Those stories will help you realize that your fears are really nothing to be scared of. Everything can be solved and made better.
As Merlin Mann said so brilliantly in his presentation, quoting Bob Parsons of GoDaddy, “They can’t eat you.”
Of course, there are different kinds of fear. The one kind I see most often, and I do myself, is fear of the Publish button. Everyone tends to write something, hit Save Draft, and then never come back to it again. Or they will read something and trash it completely. Everyone wants to write epic shit.
But that puts an extreme amount of pressure on you as a writer. Words flow better if they are written out right away. Lots of editing does not improve the quality of the piece (sometimes it does), but it does take away a lot of the human aspect of writing. It is one of the reasons why I despise people who re-write their blog posts to improve the SEO quality of them.
Justin Williams wrote about publishing right away in his piece, Let the Fear Out. On a similar vein, Corbett Barr wrote about Do It Now, Do It Live.
Corbett asks a great question, “Isn’t blogging supposed to be a flexible, creative, experimental way to connect with other people?”
I have always tried to be a bit more experimental in the subjects I cover here, how I write about it, and even try to push boundaries at times to see what happens (ie Gaming the System, which got my account suspended from Triberr – my Twitter feed is now free).
Everytime I log onto my WordPress Dashboard, I look up at the top-right and see a little form to QuickPress. How many of us actually use it, though?
WordPress also has a bookmarklet to QuickPress a link. But I bet most of us don’t utilize it very often.
I think I will try a bit of a 30 Day experiment for myself, and focus on writing short pieces using either one of those tools without any heavy editing and see what happens.
No images, no videos, no linking.
Just words.
Does that scare me? Of course, but I’ll do it.
Does working as a freelancer scare me? It does, but I’m doing it.
Does being a father scare me? Absolutely. But I’m still doing it.
There are a lot of fears to be conquered. Be like Ev Bogue and create your own Scared Shitless Manifesto and start living again.
7 Apr
“Only someone who knows how to remain essentially silent can really talk—and act essentially. Silence is the essence of inwardness, of the inner life. Mere gossip anticipates real talk and to express what is still in thought weakens action by forestalling it. But someone who can really talk because he knows how to remain silent, will not talk about a variety of things but about one thing only.”
Soren Kierkegaard, The Present Age
I came across that quote from Ryan Holiday’s post titled, “Talkativeness.”
From there, he linked to three of his own posts which I thought were brilliant and each deserved mentioning.
From A False Sense:
There is a bunch of data that shows that the more we talk about things, the less we tend to actually accomplish them. This is because—and I’m sure you can think of a person in your life who does this a lot—the act of articulating the goal entails visualizing the achievement of it, and thus partially gives us credit for it in our own minds and reduces the motivation to actually do it. So doing this diminishes the payoff. There are many people smarter than I who have written about this, but there is a word for such a process that I think its very important. It’s called reification.
This process, this intuitive understanding of what something is and why, was known phronesis. It is the method of real analysis and the mark of wisdom.
This is what we miss from blogs. We have plenty of discussion and speculation, but rarely any understanding of the issues at their most basic level.
There is the impulse when we’re angry or frustrated to take that out on other people. To be short or cruel just to slacken the tension we’ve built up. Sometimes it is harsh words, sometimes it is violence but it’s the same release. I think about that scene in Fight Club where Jack funnels all his rage and pain into destroying Angel Face.
All three discuss inwardness, how we fool ourselves into achieving goals by merely thinking of them, and, as he puts it so clearly:
one illusion becomes the foundation for another illusion which in turn has its own illusions.
I have been guilty of acting upon these illusions and creating my own delusions. After reading the Kierkegaard quote and these three posts, I realize that I need to do more than what I am doing. The achievements I think I am making are not real yet. I am stopping myself short of attaining the true goal.
The only way to get there is to turn off the outside influences and begin to focus more on myself. I speak a lot about what I am planning on doing with myself, this blog, and with my clients – but never build enough momentum to finish the task.
I have said it before, and I will say it again: time to get busy.
6 Apr
For me, this is one of those if-everyone-jumped-off-a-bridge-would-you moments. As far as I’m concerned, yes, everyone is jumping off the bridge, so I might as well, too.
Tristan Higbee
You may have been noticing something different popping up in your Twitter streams in the past month or so. I noticed that a lot of my contacts were including links with a new URL shortner, tribr.it. The thing was that it wasn’t just one or two, it was almost an entire list full of tribr.it links with the exact same message attached (here is my list of great bloggers for example). It turns out that they were coming through a service called Triberr.
It’s a service where you sign up for a Tribe, and then your members automatically retweet your links out to people without them actually knowing what’s happening.
This is a great idea in order to build traffic, but it also tends to spam your Twitter lists.
Over at the Blogging Bookshelf, I made the comment to Tristan’s post about using Fiverr to create backlinks to a site, that the links weren’t authentic. The value of the link has diminished, because they are being used to boost his traffic rankings, not direct people to valuable content. The content may be valuable but would someone click through if it was surrounded by garbage? Worst yet is that the Fiverr gig in question had complaints from someone saying that they were using their own content from the web page they were supposed to be directing to.
In the case of Triberr, the links mentioned in the statuses are not authentic, because they are not being properly curated by that user. I have no idea how many of these links are getting posted on my own Twitter feed, nor have I even read a good 90% of them (just a rough guess).
Similar to how people have been gaming the Google search rankings, you could conceivably do the same with Triberr. Since it pulls out the Title from the blog post, adds the short link, and your Twitter handle, it is a quick way to attach your name to some #hashtags and popular searches.
But why would I want it to only benefit myself?
I was joking with @ElisesReview that we could make her a Twitter/Internet meme through the use of Triberr – so, why not try it?
This post is mainly an experiment in how gaming systems may bring you the results you intended, but end up creating more junk and spam that have little value in the end. If it gets me banned from Triberr, fine with me. If I lose readership from this experiment, that’s alright, I will keep trucking along.
So, here goes.
1 Apr
If you want to start a business, you’ve got no excuse as to why you can’t make it work.
If you want to start a business, you’ve got to be scrappy, hustle, and charge forward regardless.
If you want to start a business, you’ve got to make the best of what you’ve got, and have faith that the best of what you’ve got will get better.
If you want to start a business, you’ve got to find opportunity in the gloomiest of situations, and leverage it with every ounce of energy you can muster, until you’re absolutely exhausted-and then wake up and do it all over again.
If you want to start a business, you’ve got to forget your pride, be humble, and DO WHAT IT TAKES.
But most of all, if you want to start a business, you’ve got to start thinking like someone in business.
Ashley Ambirge is one of those rare people who have the ability to capture your attention regardless of what subject she is talking about.
She is sassy.
She has attitude.
She tells it like it is.
She makes you want to do more.
Her newsletter is also one of the better ones out there, and I always look forward to receiving it. Her book, You Don’t Need a Job, You Need Guts, looks incredible, but I lack the funds to purchase it right now. In time, in time.
While you look at her blog or follow her on Twitter, I’m going to start thinking more like a business man and start doing some hustling – and yes, even on a Friday night.
28 Mar
If you can’t write your idea on the back of my calling card, you don’t have a clear idea.
- David Belasco
This was found in an insightful post from Leo Baubata of Zen Habits, titled “Your Emails Are Too Long.”
The ideas of minimalism, and using Twitter as the main form of communication have been in the back of my mind for several weeks now, ever since my post about email and about dimensional language. It has made me question whether I should be working on cutting down the length of emails I send to clients, and whether I should eliminate it altogether on the business website. But because it is so widely used still, would I be alienating potential clients and never hear from them since they don’t know what Twitter is?
Wish there was a contact form that would send the message as a tweet to you directly, instead of email. Is there anything like that out there right now?
The David Belasco quote also reminded me of this one from Mozart:
My great-grandfather used to say to his wife, my great-grandmother, who in turn told her daughter, my grandmother, who repeated it to her daughter, my mother, who used to remind her daughter, my own sister, that to talk well and eloquently was a very great art, but that an equally great one was to know the right moment to stop.
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
20 Mar
CloudFlare is a service that does one thing: make websites better.
CrunchBase
I first started to pay attention to CloudFlare when I saw the post on TechCrunch from its CEO, Matthew Prince: What Losing TechCrunch Disrupt Meant to CloudFlare: OMFG.
I was not sure what I was getting into, especially when Michael Arrington is quoted as describing the company as “Muffler Repair for the Internet,” but I bravely read on. And I’m glad I did, because I really was missing out on something.
Here are the vital stats that he mentions:
Of everything he mentioned, two things stood out for me: the amount of time saved, and the amount of attacks they diverted. That convinced me. So, I popped over to their website to learn more about how it works.
The overview illustration makes it quite simple to understand. Cloudflare receives the request to view your webpage, filters the traffic, and then sends it onto your web host. Installation of it is simple and painless. It is just a matter of changing the nameserver your domain is pointed at, and giving Cloudflare all of the current addresses at your webhost.
That’s really all there is to it. After that, your site loads normally – well, not normal; faster than normal. I did not track the actual metrics, but I have been noticing a difference since I installed the service nearly a month ago. There are lots of testimonials on the website saying the same thing about the service: it’s faster.
That is only one of the benefits of Cloudflare, though.
My site is not prone to attacks from hackers or spammers, but it has blocked out 150 attacks (out of 16,000 page views).
It also clearly differentiates the search engine crawlers from the regular traffic in their analytics portion of the dashboard. They claim their analytics are more accurate than the traditional javascript located on the website. My numbers were certainly much higher than Google Analytic’s:
Unique Visitors: 1,437 (CF: 1,534)
Page Views: 2,272 (CF: 11,984)
I’m not sure if Google Analytics filters out my visits and views, since I assume I am the one that looks at the site the most. Maybe someone reading this can tell me why they think the numbers are so different.
One of the real bonuses of their analytics software is the ability to zero in on one day – from 12am to 12am, with hourly traffic numbers. I am sure someone running various marketing campaigns will find this information useful. Here is a screen shot of those analytics at work:
Take a look at their site and try it today. You won’t regret it.
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