How can a troubled mind
understand the way?
If a man is disturbed
he will never be filled with knowledge.

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• How you can use Social Media today to get more business
• Productivity practices that make you more effective

UPDATE: Welcome readers of JD Bentley’s blog. Feel free to take a look around.

I have just discovered JD Bentley (via Patrick Rhone) and read a post on his site that I simply must comment on:

The Web Worker’s Dilemma

The life of a web worker is in many ways very blessed. The abil­ity to dic­tate your loca­tion, your dead­lines and your work hours is an occu­pa­tional rar­ity, yet we exer­cise the priv­i­lege daily.

Some of us earn full-time incomes on four­teen hours a day, oth­ers two hours a week. Most web work­ers, hav­ing wished and worked their careers into exis­tence, are in the busi­ness of doing some­thing they love to do. All of us take advan­tage of incred­i­bly inex­pen­sive world­wide dis­tri­b­u­tion of our work.

I say all this so that there’s no mis­tak­ing the grat­i­tude I have for the work I do as a web designer. I have a job which is the envy of many.

Still, there is a problem.

And what is the problem? Bentley doesn’t feel that he is creating anything real or lasting.

This frus­trates me immensely. What work I cre­ate today may tomor­row be gone for­ever or changed beyond recog­ni­tion. There is noth­ing last­ing and noth­ing mine. What I cre­ate belongs to the web and to other peo­ple and to the com­puter I’m work­ing on. It’s not my own.

[...]

For a web worker like myself, this means that what I’m cre­at­ing is nei­ther suf­fi­ciently tan­gi­ble nor suf­fi­ciently use­ful to feel a sense of pride of ownership.

Instead I’m left with the empty feel­ing that my hands would be put to bet­ter use else­where. I have the need to cre­ate some­thing that out­lives me, some­thing that brings last­ing value.

I would refer Bentley to the rather famous work of Mr Shelley, and the words of his poem, Ozymandias: “King of Kings am I, Osymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works.”

Of course the inscription is found on a ruined statue in a shattered land, where no remnant of Ozymandias’ rule remains standing. All of our works are like this.

But.

But we can leave a legacy. We can leave a trail. The things that we make online, like this blog post or the websites that we design for our clients and ourselves, may not be concrete or physical but they can have lasting value.

If what you build or say teaches someone something new, and they can carry it on.

If what you create and share is something more than what your visitors have right now, or can brighten their day.

I’d call that lasting value.

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• How you can use Social Media today to get more business
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Creating a Special Offer to bring in new customers can be a challenge. Are you enlisting your current customers for assistance? I recently took some time to peruse an inspirational book, “101 Things I learned in Architecture School“, which has brilliant anecdotes that can be applied to your life and business outside of the architectural context.

The quote that struck me was:

“If you wish to imbue an architectural space or element with a particular quality, make sure that quality is really there.”

The author uses the examples of making sure that a wall needs to be thick in order to convey a feeling of thickness, or that a space needs to actually be tall in order to feel tall.

To read more, subscribe to the Weekly Letter.

February Subscriber Special Suggest a topic for the Monthly Letter for March and get a chance to win a free month's subscription! Just hit reply and tell me what you need to know for your personal or professional growth!

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• How you can use Social Media today to get more business
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Michael Sliwinksi presents the latest issue of Productive! Magazine.

As you know, we’re very committed to your productivity and this year we’re going to help you get a lot more done! We’ve got new, official desktop app coming this month, HTML5 mobile web version and more…

But meantime I encourage you to take a moment and read something that will inspire you to put your New Year’s Resolutions in order for the 2012 – read the newest issue of our free Productive! Magazine (#11 with Gretchen Rubin):

I have been a contributor to this magazine in the past and it is always worth reading. Click the magazine image above to go to the site and download the free PDF.

February Subscriber Special Suggest a topic for the Monthly Letter for March and get a chance to win a free month's subscription! Just hit reply and tell me what you need to know for your personal or professional growth!

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• How you can use Social Media today to get more business
• Productivity practices that make you more effective

Hoo, boy.

Blogging Is Dead… Here We Go Again | By Mitch Joel at Twist Image

Blogging is not dead.

Blogging is only dead if you’re a brand trying to use a Blog as an extension of your advertising or as a way to attempt to control your corporate messaging by using it to humanize the tone. For the rest of us, a Blog is freedom of expression. It’s a place where people (and yes, this includes the people who make up the brand) share, engage and connect with one another. I’m not jaded (or stupid). I know that people would much prefer to tweet or update a Facebook page or record a quick video on YouTube (it’s easier to create and easier to consume), but not all content is created equal and there are many different audiences for all of this content inequity. Blogging is not dead. Blogging is just a lot of hard work and you have to know what the vision and strategy is at the outset. The reason that most of these Inc. 500 brands have killed their Blog is more likely connected to a lack of vision and conversion model than the popularity of a Social Media platform.

February Subscriber Special Suggest a topic for the Monthly Letter for March and get a chance to win a free month's subscription! Just hit reply and tell me what you need to know for your personal or professional growth!

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• How you can use Social Media today to get more business
• Productivity practices that make you more effective

As the fletcher whittles
and makes straight his arrows,
so the master directs
his straying thoughts.

February Subscriber Special Suggest a topic for the Monthly Letter for March and get a chance to win a free month's subscription! Just hit reply and tell me what you need to know for your personal or professional growth!

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• How you can use Social Media today to get more business
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Here we are in the first review of 02012, ready to kick some ass and take some names!

UPDATE: My friend Dave Seah has posted his 2012 Groundhog Day Resolutions here.

Taking a look back, some details

I have read 13 books so far this year, fiction and non-fiction. Most of them are in the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. The final book is scheduled to come out this year and I am going to read all 13 of the current books to be ready for the conclusion. I have been waiting, like, 20 years for this.

The new writing strategy is paying off, as I am able to really sit down and focus on the direct, actionable information that has been going out in the Weekly and Monthly Letters. The feedback has been good, and I thank everyone who has subscribed and let me know what it is that they most need right now to make a difference in their work and life. If you aren’t subscribed yet, click one of the orange buttons (the Weekly Letter is only $1.49 per month, do it).

I was able to re-connect with some of my friends and colleagues from BT (Before Tavern), and we have been recording some conversations that have become the weekly Wednesday ICMM podcasts. It has been very illuminating to talk to people in different fields and learn from them. The call that I published yesterday was particularly illuminating, if you’d like you can listen to the more personal venting portion of the call on my Journal.

The Morning Pages has been an excellent investment in time for me, helping to clear away some of the cobwebs in my mind and explore some creative new ideas. I did fall off the wagon for a few days (more on that below), but I have seriously re-committed to them and will make the most of them.

Why the “02012″??

A few of you have noticed that I have changed my calendar notation a little, adding a 0 in front of the 2 in the year. This has to do with my investing some time in reading about The Long Now Foundation and what they are doing in the areas of archiving the world’s information and thinking about really long-term planning. That extra 0 out in front indicates that we should be thinking on a longer horizon, The Long Now postulates a 10 thousand year span, and that the things that we do today will have an impact far, far down the line.

What were my goals for this period?

My recurring tasks and Big Rocks included the following for the review period (12/12 – 2/2):

December/January

Recurring tasks:

• Weekly “Staff Meetings” on Saturdays – review what worked and what didn’t for the previous week. This also involves the use of a Daily Activity Log to help find my high energy points and keep me from getting off track. I only missed one, the week that I was “tuned out”.
• Morning Pages every day. Unload my mind, watch for trends. Missed 8 days, because I was down. Extra emphasis has been places on this activity ever since.
• Scheduled “Social Media” time for networking, sharing, and chatting with friends and colleagues. This resulted in a lot of great collaborations, particularly the podcasts and some amazing Facebook chats.
• (starting 1 Dec) Daily zazen – Again, I didn’t do it every day, because I didn’t feel like I needed to. I only did it when I felt the need. The very best results occurred when I felt like I did not have the time or wasn’t “in the right space”. Breaking boundaries and creating new pathways. Good stuff.

Big Rocks:

• Create mini-consulting packages – Two of four are complete
• Visit family for Christmas – a good time was had by all! I did some cooking and got to talk to very interesting people…
• Write script and create slides for Social Media Marketing presentation #2 – not complete, as I am still in negotiations with the Chamber as to when I can schedule it to be a workshop
• Schedule, reserve space for, and market January SML Workshop – This did not work out.

Revenue Generating Activities

I have created a couple of new things:

• My consulting services have brought in three new clients for regular meetings and coaching.
• The Weekly and Monthly Letters subscriptions (see the big orange buttons above)

This will continue to be a focus in 02012: client acquisition and retention. Because that is really the essence of being in business, right? I have set a very modest goal of $2,000 in revenue for the next review period, which is something that I should have been doing all along. Then again, I’ve been at or near that since I went freelance again, so I will begin to be more aggressive with that in future review periods.

Business “Vehicles” for 02012

There are several vehicles that I plan to use to create revenue this year:

1. Premium Content. While there will still be quite a bit of free content available here, such as podcasts and other thoughts that I share, the lions share of thought and effort will be going into my Weekly and Monthly Letters. As the archives of these pieces of content grow they will be bundled up and re-issued for the Kindle.
2. Consulting. This is where the real fun is, helping, teaching, coaching and raining small business people how to use Social Media for Marketing.
3. Free Workshops. The Chamber of Commerce is my vehicle for creating exposure to my knowledge and experience. In exchange for this exposure I will be offering several workshops on various topics (Social Media Marketing, Time Management, Creativity, etc) to Chamber members.
4. Paid Workshops. I am putting together a series of Premium workshops dealing with specific Marketing and Small Business Development topics that will be offered to small groups. The attendees of these intimate events will be able to walk away with actionable plans, lists of Next Actions, and a road-map to making positive changes in their business.

Blogging/Writing Highlights

Weekly and Monthly Letters are turning out to be a lot of fun to create. Looking forward to building the subscriber base.

I have been publishing a podcast nearly every Wednesday, featuring smart and interesting people in a variety of fields. This will definitely be staying as a regular feature.

There has not been quite as much writing as I had predicted, but then the Holiday Season has a way of taking over the best-laid plans. In any case the real focus and discipline is not intended to begin until today anyway. This is where the rubber meets the road.

Personal Projects

The Social Media Literacy Project is moving along, and I will be able to invest more time on it this period and going ahead. I had planned to launch it in Beta this month, but it is simply not ready.

Drawing. I am still interested in drawing/water-color painting. Have been doing little exercises here and there. I am going to experiment with creating a new routine and incorporating drawing/painting exercises during the week.

Grading my work

I am proud of what I accomplished in this period, although I have to admit that I could have been more productive.

I did have one bad week, from around the 17th to the 24th of January, where I was a little down in the dumps and spent a lot of time on the couch reading instead of “showing up” and doing the work. I really lit into myself in the morning Pages for the 26th.

What is planned for the next review period

SMLP. I was overly optimistic about getting it rolling out in ßeta by February. It is a BIG project! I may have some helpers soon, otherwise it is gong to have to wait for March.

Since the majority of my writing efforts will now be directed to the Letters I am planning on doing more podcasts in the future with some of my colleagues.

In December I wrote, “I will also be returning to the NaNoWriMo project that I started. Once it was clear that I could not finish the 50k words by the end of the month, I simply abandoned it. Now it is going to be scheduled for a definite period each week.” Well, it wasn’t. I got too busy, then I got too depressed. As of right now, I am scheduling time two days a week to get out of the office and do some work on that novel.

So there it is, the very first review of 02012! I will be starting to keep track of things for the 03.03 review starting tomorrow, and if you read the free newsletter this week you know about the big plans for the annual review. Remember, if you would like some help putting together a review process like this, just hit reply (or Comment below if you’re here live) and let me know!

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• How you can use Social Media today to get more business
• Productivity practices that make you more effective

Wow. Michael (A Better Mess) and I had a looong and wide-ranging phone call, rather late in the evening last week. It took me a while to get it edited properly…

We talked about the “Foundations” of Michael’s productivity practices, which he has been blogging about quite a bit lately:

• Getting into GTD
• Starting small: e-mail, tasks
• Conquering paper with Evernote
• Using the application or platform that works best for you
• Dig in and really learn your system

This podcast is about 45 minutes long.

February Subscriber Special Suggest a topic for the Monthly Letter for March and get a chance to win a free month's subscription! Just hit reply and tell me what you need to know for your personal or professional growth!

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• How you can use Social Media today to get more business
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My Friend Ja-Nae Duane posted a link to a HBR article on Google Plus this morning:

Tackling Business Problems

Integrate Your Marketing With Your Purpose

We’ve talked about this since the financial meltdown. Now it’s time to do it: Unlink pay from performance. The evidence keeps growing that pay for performance is ineffective. It also may induce executives to take company-killing risks. There are other ways to motivate employees that yield better results at lower cost.

Thanks mainly to provisions linked to performance, CEO compensation has skyrocketed in recent decades, while its correlation with actual corporate performance has remained as weak as ever. This has been most true in the U.S., where among the S&P 500 the ratio of average CEO pay to average employee salary went from about 40:1 in the 1970s to 325:1 in 2010. The ratio isn’t as extreme in most other countries, but the trend is the same. Below the top level, mismatches between pay and performance aren’t so acute. [emphasis mine, Ed.]

Getting paid for performance is the only way to make things work. The trick is that the performance metrics have to be honest. Here is the kicker in that article, which the authors don’t seem to consider to be the root of the problem in the first place:

“CEO compensation has skyrocketed in recent decades, while its correlation with actual corporate performance has remained as weak as ever“

If there is no apparent correlation between actual corporate performance and the compensation of the people responsible, then someone is cheating, robbing and looting.

The Great Thanksgiving Hoax

Each year at this time school children all over America are taught the official Thanksgiving story, and newspapers, radio, TV, and magazines devote vast amounts of time and space to it. It is all very colorful and fascinating.

It is also very deceiving. This official story is nothing like what really happened. It is a fairy tale, a whitewashed and sanitized collection of half-truths which divert attention away from Thanksgiving’s real meaning.

The official story has the pilgrims boarding the Mayflower, coming to America and establishing the Plymouth colony in the winter of 1620-21. This first winter is hard, and half the colonists die. But the survivors are hard working and tenacious, and they learn new farming techniques from the Indians. The harvest of 1621 is bountiful. The Pilgrims hold a celebration, and give thanks to God. They are grateful for the wonderful new abundant land He has given them.

The official story then has the Pilgrims living more or less happily ever after, each year repeating the first Thanksgiving. Other early colonies also have hard times at first, but they soon prosper and adopt the annual tradition of giving thanks for this prosperous new land called America.

The problem with this official story is that the harvest of 1621 was not bountiful, nor were the colonists hardworking or tenacious. 1621 was a famine year and many of the colonists were lazy thieves.

In his ‘History of Plymouth Plantation,’ the governor of the colony, William Bradford, reported that the colonists went hungry for years, because they refused to work in the fields. They preferred instead to steal food. He says the colony was riddled with “corruption,” and with “confusion and discontent.” The crops were small because “much was stolen both by night and day, before it became scarce eatable.”

It wasn’t until the colony instituted a program of “plant and grow your own food or you can starve on your own” that things started to get better. In fact, a lot better:

In 1614, Colony Secretary Ralph Hamor wrote that after the switch there was “plenty of food, which every man by his own industry may easily and doth procure.” He said that when the socialist system had prevailed, “we reaped not so much corn from the labors of thirty men as three men have done for themselves now.”

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• How you can use Social Media today to get more business
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February is Pull Your Sofa Off the Wall Month! What? Yep, apparently it’s “official”, a time to take a good, hard look at your living room, family room, whatever room in your home that has a big, stuffed sofa, couch, love seat (or whatever you call it).  Clean up that room, get your stuff organized, and pull that couch out from the wall to feature that piece of furniture!

Here’s how:

1. Clean up. Start by removing all the clutter that has accumulated in this busy room as well as giving the room a good, old-fashioned cleaning, from top to bottom.  Look for spider-webs in the corners, vacuum up those dust-bunnies, and scrub away the stains on the carpet.
2. Get organized. Sort your stuff (you don’t have to call it clutter) into “keep,” “donate” and “toss” piles, and remove those donate and toss items right away.  Decide which of the keep items will remain in this living room and which should be stored somewhere else in your home.  Take the things that don’t belong here to the rooms where they do, leaving you with just the furniture and other decor you want to keep.
3. Pull your sofa off the wall.  Now it’s time to get creative!  Since you have removed everything that no longer belongs in this room, find a good place for that sofa in a way that accentuates it.

Share the pictures of your before and after!

February Subscriber Special Suggest a topic for the Monthly Letter for March and get a chance to win a free month's subscription! Just hit reply and tell me what you need to know for your personal or professional growth!

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• How you can use Social Media today to get more business
• Productivity practices that make you more effective