Mind the Beginner

I’ve been blogging for almost a year now and last week I tweeted a question, asking how people got their blog to grow. You can read stories all over the net of people having a hugely successful blog within a year. I’m defining success as a lot of comments on each blogpost and hundreds/thousands of subscribers. Although this blog isn’t exactly what you call unsuccessful, things could be so much better. And that’s where I really could use your help.

Guest posting and engaging with other bloggers is key. That and being useful to your readers  -  Corbett Barr

The quote here is what I got back on my question via twitter. Guest posting and engaging with other bloggers isn’t to hard. My plans for that are simple: Guestposting on any blog that will have me. Small blogs and big blogs, none will be left  out as long as they fit in the same niche. To get in touch with more readers I’m going to dive deep into the blogosphere and comment on at least three blogs every single day. Of course those comments need to add value, a simple “First! hahaha”  or “What a great post, please visit my blog” won’t cut it. The most effective is looking for new blogs out there you didn’t comment on before, it’s getting your name out there. Frequently posting meaningful comments on the same blog will get you noticed by the writer and readers and so that’s also a good idea to get out there.

What is usefulness?

Usefulness is useless if nobody knows that you’re there

But I’m left with a single problem: I have no idea if my blogposts are useful to you. Am I writing things that matter and help? Or is it all a load of **** that nobody really finds interesting to read and/or is just dime a dozen content? How would you describe usefulness when it comes to blog content.

A long while back I laid out the plan on growing my blog  A blogpost filled with 16 building blocks to a succesful blog was what resulted. Back then the goal was 500 pageviews a day or 300 subscribers. I haven’t reached either – yet-, but the blog is still growing slowly every month and it’s only a matter of time until those goals are reached. There is no doubt in my mind about that. If there is one thing that I’ve learned from the successful bloggers out there is that things very rarely happen overnight. You’ll have to really commit and it can take years to build a really useful blog which is successful. Being useful by writing good content, answering questions and providing help is one side of the coin, it’s useless if you don’t reach anybody with it so you’ll have to market your blog as well. Usefulness is useless if nobody knows that you’re there.

I’d like to ask you two questions:

1. Is this blog useful to you?
2. What would make this blog more useful to you?

Blogging is very different from writing a book, you can actively engage with others and address issues that come up. It’s a great way of communicating and I want to make your experience on this blog better. Help me help you and we’ll both profit from it.

Thanks for the support my friend, I hope to hear from you

In my view there is one single skill that’s at the basis of all other skills and that’s truly essential to personal development. Although it’s very important few people ever master it. I would even goes as far as to say that without this one skill -although mastering it isn’t necessary- it is impossible to have personal development, personal growth, success, getting things done, meditate, or learn anything.

An essential skill indeed for without it, you’re stuck.

Quite literally stuck, stuck in either the past or the future. Because that’s the whole problem. This one essential skill is:

• Being in the present

There are many variations on this subject but they all boil down to the same thing. If you’re not paying attention to what you’re doing things can go terribly wrong very fast or on a smaller scale you’ll not remember the name of the person who just shook your hand.

Remembering names and reflecting

If you’ve ever read a book on social skills (Dale Carnegie’s How to win friends & influence people for instance) you’ll know that the single most appreciated word by all people is their own name. If you’re able to remember a name because you were totally present when you heard it you’ll make a great impression if you manage to call that person by his name the next time you two meet.

Whether it’s learning a new skill, meeting new people, writing a blogpost or going for a drive. There is so much to gain from every experience in life just by being present to experience it.

So why is it so hard to be in the present? It’s because we’re constantly either thinking about the past or dreaming up a future. The first can be relived (well, sort of) the second is pure fiction. Reliving the past is completely useless save one thing. Lessons to be learned or in other words, reflecting on what happened to avoid those mistakes in the future. It’s what all students should do after an exam. Check the mistakes and reflect on them.

If left unreflected you might act the same way in a similar event, even though it was the wrong answer/way the last time. Just because you either don’t know what’s the right answer or because you’re not present (thinking of the last time it went wrong) and going on auto pilot.

There you have it, the one skill that is at the basis of everything in personal development: being in the present. For without it you can’t learn, you can’t grow, you’re stuck.

Get unstuck, come into the present, right here, right now is where it’s at. Stop waisting time in the past or future, the past won’t change and the future isn’t here yet.

A small sidenote, not related to this blogpost it’s more of a notification. I won’t be doing a weekend update this weekend as I’m participating in a introductory period at university. I won’t have a pc or wifi where we’re going this weekend.

You might have heard of this one. The quarter-life crisis is a phase you go through somewhere in your twenties or as Wiki puts it “a term applied to the period of life immediately following the major changes of adolescence, usually ranging from the early twenties to the early thirties.”

It’s a phase where all kinds of insecurities develop. Again, Wikipedia provides us with a nice list I’d like to share:

• feeling “not good enough” because one can’t find a job that is at one’s academic/intellectual level
• frustration with relationships, the working world, and finding a suitable job or career
• confusion of identity
• insecurity regarding the near future
• insecurity concerning long-term plans, life goals
• insecurity regarding present accomplishments
• re-evaluation of close interpersonal relationships
• disappointment with one’s job
• nostalgia for university, college, high school or elementary school life
• tendency to hold stronger opinions
• boredom with social interactions
• loss of closeness to high school and college friends
• financially-rooted stress (overwhelming college loans, unanticipated high cost of living, etc.)
• loneliness
• desire to have children
• a sense that everyone is, somehow, doing better than you

There are a few here I confess suffering from. Although I don’t feel the need to have children I do feel “not good enough”, an underachiever and the sense that everyone is doing better than me. With one foot I’m in the adult life, after all, I’m 26. But on the other hand I’m going back to university this September and hopefully will be busy with that till I’m 30 something. In the mean time all the kids I grew up with are now engineers, run their own practice or are lawyers and have been doing so for a few years now. I feel left behind.

I know there are more people out there suffering from this. After all, there is a term for it right? We feel we missed the train somehow and got left behind.

Advantages of the slow life

But taking things “slow” in this way has offered me with a perspective few other have. I doubt anyone who by the age of 26 is fully tied up in a dayjob and a social life, perhaps even with kids would have a chance to break free from it all. Let’s just say I didn’t get suckered in when I was not fully conscious about it and now am in the position to choose if I take that step and settle down.

Yes there is a downside, my monthly income is laughable to anyone working full time. To anyone working actually… I don’t own a car, all I have is a motorcycle I bought for 200 euro’s and maintain myself. (If you’re wondering what a 200 euro motorcycle looks like, follow this link.) I don’t own a fancy laptop/macbook pro and I don’t run a highly successful business. I do however have a lot of free time on my hands at the moment. I have few obligations and if I want to get up somewhere around noon that’s just fine. Sure, I have gaps in my resume you couldn’t fill with a dumptruck but who cares. That damage has been done already. I’m not successful according to most people, I stopped being that as soon as I decided the first major I took in University wasn’t for me and I dropped out for the rest of the semester. It took me almost six years to complete my training as exercise therapist which should take only four years. Again, failure. (Or look on the bright side: persistence)

Crystal mind

You know what?! I actually don’t care about all that. Yes I suffer from a quarter life crisis but it’s not stopping me. It’s actually my source of strength. The ideas on what I want to do with my life are crystallizing perfectly inside my mind and I have concrete steps I know I have to take to make these things come true. Take that you soon-to-suffer-a-midlife-crisis-former-classmates! You might have that nice job right now and the nice car (did someone say Ferrari?) but I’ve got a life philosophy, I’m writing a bucket list and I’m setting up a freedom business. None of these are signs of success in the traditional sense so I’m also working on that master’s degree to rub in their faces and learning skills I deem essential to become a Location Independent Professional (or LIP for short). The rubbing in is only a nice benefit by the way, I really want to learn those skills.

I’m 26 and I’m ready to take on the world, on my terms!

How do you feel about your life? Please leave a comment, I’d really like to know.

[update 20090611] I just stumbled across a blogpost that seems to fit in nicely with this post “I am a failure – The Biggest lie out there” and I would really like to share with you. Got it through @scottbradley[/update 20090611]

I was reading the success stories of several IT people (Bill Gates among others) about how they got where they are and th hard work it took. According to the writer of the stories it all boiled down to investing about ten thousand hours into something before you become really good at something. Ten thousand hours, that equals twenty hours a week for the period of ten years. If you work at it full-time (forty hours) you could get there in five. Sixty hours a week and you have spent the ten thousand in about three and a half years. 

Just think about it, do you want to become a world class guitarist? That’s going to take you ten thousand hours. A master in martial art? Well, that’s a different matter because that takes a lifetime of dedication if you ask any true master. A computer programmer, a dancer, you get the idea.

“If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I’m not discouraged, becaue every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.” – Tomas A. Edison 

The number of things you can master in a lifetime is limited. It’s so much work that you should choose carefully what you really want. At a young age the choice might even be made by your parents (piano lessons). The advantage of starting young are not that you learn faster. It’s that you have more time to practice and have less preconceptions as to what it’s supposed to be like.

Where I’m going with this

Where I want to go here is the investment it takes to become a master in something. But how do you do this? How do you invest your time so you will become better every time you practice. 

Have you ever tried learning a new skill and ended up doing the same old thing over and over again? (I know I have, playing the same songs over and over on guitar.) This is where you make or break the practice. As soon as you realize that you’re not actually doing something new but repeating what skills you already have stop right there. Look at what you are doing and where you want to go with the practice. 

Doing what works is not the way to go, you only learn by doing new things and messing things up. No mistakes equals nothing learned. Practicing should be a constant search for the imperfections and trying to better yourself. As soon as you stay within your comfort zone and refuse to make mistakes or don’t bother with them you might as well stop practicing.

Be honest to yourself and look at your practice. Don’t settle for the same old thing every time. Challenge yourself to learn new things and never be content. Settle for perfection, nothing less.

I’ve written before on handling all the information that we are bombarded with every day. But what I haven’t told you is what the key is to success in studying. Actually, the success to almost anything we try. The key is caring about what you are doing. If you care enough you won’t let yourself be distracted by other things because you take what you are doing seriously.

Take what you are doing seriously

Take this blogpost for instance. I’m not writing it in the wordpress interface or even in Microsoft word (Yes, I use windows) but a very simple and distractionless writing program called Q10. I’m looking at a black screen with orange letters. Nothing else in here, not even a command bar. It’s all done with keyboard shortcuts. Why do this? I care about my writing and don’t want any distractions.

Distractions always have an influence on what you are doing, how can you study properly with music in the background (barok music is the only exception, more on that in the near future) or with the TV on. You’re constantly being drawn towards the easy way out of studying into a passive kind of entertainment or Internet-related activities such as checking an e-mail the instant it hits your inbox. If you care about what you are studying or reading, would you have the tv on? My guess is you might even tell your housemates or family not to disturb you while you are studying right?

So how do we use this key? Fake it until you make it comes to mind, turn of any distractions and do only the one thing you should be doing. I’m not saying it will be fun every time but the better you get at studying the easier it all gets, you just might begin to enjoy studying. Deny yourself any sensory input other than the material to be studied. Care or fake to care about what you are studying and I promise you, you will get better at whatever you are studying.

How to apply this during class This is very simple: Let’s face it, there might be other places you’d rather be or other things you’d rather be doing but at the moment you’re stuck there. The only thing you can do that makes any sense is to pay attention. It’s just common sense right?

The key is to care