Sometimes what is needed is something totally different than what came before it.  Trade in your two-door coupe for for a five door minivan.  Sell a Cadi and buy a Harley.  Or you decide that you’re going to see the world by hot-air balloon.

When we follow our hearts we end up places we might never have expected.  And those places feel right–they’re where we need to be–where our growth is to catalyze or where we have those invaluable human experiences; like fatherhood or where we face some very difficult choices that we can’t leave to anyone else.

I’d just like to take a moment and tell my wife how very much Love her.  Thanks for coming to an entirely new space with me.  You’re one of a kind Becky.  Let’s keep walking.  xo

–

photo credit: ephemeralmuse

I’m thinking about our tendency to be hurt by the things that those close to us say or do.  We often feel that “they should treat us better” or that “they know that hurts me”, but realistically and objectively we can ask ourselves “is it possible to find a new way to respond to this?”

Clearly if there is a pattern of hurt, than what we’re doing isn’t working.  It makes sense to try something different.  We may have asked our partner or family or friend to do something differently in relating to us.  And it’s understandable that we would start here because from where we stand it appears that the problem is on the other side of the table.

The problem with this approach though is that we rarely change ourselves or our habits unless we ourselves have had a transformative experience inside.  Meaning that asking our partner to act differently isn’t likely to work very often or for very long; and some would argue that it’s not fair to ask another to change.  I think there’s truth to that but also the topic is deeper than black and white–and certainly isn’t for this post.

My question to you is this:  What if next time you felt hurt by your partner, instead of getting all up in arms and faulting them for “doing it to you again”, instead you simply turn to them, deeply lock eyes with them and truthfully, heart-fully express “I love you” –  Would this change things?

Usually we aren’t trying to hurt one another.  It’s more a by-product of our stress and of just trying to get through the challenges of the day.  Perhaps if we were more steadfast to keep this in mind, we would have fewer scuffles and love each other more deeply in the long run.

What are your thoughts?  I really want to know.

–

photo credit: ursonate

When our needs aren’t met we start to break down.  We borrow from other areas of our lives and seek other ways  to bring ourselves up.  These other means typically aren’t sustainable because, by their very nature, they are substitutions for our deep basic needs.

Just to bring greater clarity to the types of ‘needs’ I’m referring to here I’ll use my own as an example.  For me I need clarity around expectations.  This helps me to know that I’m headed in the right direction.  Without it I start to wonder what is expected and if I’m doing what is most helpful and in everyone’s highest interest.  I also need to feel appreciated for who I am and what I’m doing.  I know that we all make mistakes and that we all need to course correct from time to time, but for me I simply need to know that “I’m ok” and that my efforts are appreciated and making a positive difference somehow.

When I start to experience flack from an important person in life (a boss, my wife, a close friend) I ask myself “wow, do I need to change something here about what I’m doing?  Have I screwed up or headed in the wrong direction somehow?”  I try very hard to be doing the right thing, so criticizm tends to stop me pretty fast and to be honest, I have a low capacity for it.  I tend to be a bit overly sensitive and I try to meter my responses with this in mind.

I’ve spoken far too much about me though.  This is really about the concept that if our needs aren’t met that we are ultimately not in a sustainable situation.  And so I’d just like to emphasise the importance of finding your words around your own personal set of imperatives.  I firmly believe that if we don’t, eventually we’ll be asking ourselves where things went wrong.

I hope that there’s some value in this post for those of you who have taken the time to read it.  I’m truly always thinking of you and asking ‘what can I offer of value’.  I hope you’re well.

Love,
Joshua

I am reminded that we need to be aware of how much we allow ourselves to be affected by the opinions of others. Everyone has opinions. That’s good. Sometimes though people have opinions about us, our choices, how we live our lives; this is what I’m referring to here.

While I feel it’s important to be open to the opinions of those whom you’ve learned that you can trust and whose rationale generally checks out with your own, I also feel that we can easily spend too much of our time and energy in concern about what people think. Or may think.

When a stranger glares at me because they’re displeased with my appearance, or my driving or any number of other things people can choose to judge or be offended by–I don’t care. Sorry.

I’ve got to focus on my family and the people in my life who are generally supportive (like you); not upon the people who would have me be a different person because they aren’t happy with who they are.

On the other side of this coin I’ve gotta remember not to be that person. It’s easy to fall into a habit of fault-finding, so to be fair I also want to mention that I’ve been there. And I have no desire to be the one pointing out another’s ‘transgressions’ or areas of improvement. It’s not my place.

How does this check out with you?

-Joshua

We share.  And learn.  We are not afraid to express emotion or to call each other out on our bullshit when necessary.

We are bound by the common struggles of life and by the lessons that a man might learn.  By our struggle to stand in our purpose in spite of the doubt and fear that may be upon us this very moment.  We do it anyway.

Discarding dogma and seeking a higher vision in all things, these men learn to harness a tremendous force in their lives and to express it in masterful ways.  Creating art out of life–a testament to who we are while we have the chance to be.

Who’s with me?

I just finished watching Bedtime Stories (amazon link).  It left me with the feeling of “your life is now…live it dammit!”  It really got me thinking.  You’ve heard it before… “do the things you want when you’re young”, we all have.   But what I’d like to do is to ask you to take a moment–invest it really–and ask yourself “what is it in my own life that I am struggling with that I don’t want to die knowing I haven’t overcome?”

It’s a simple question really, albeit a scary one. What, if you change nothing about how you’re living, will you die having to come to terms with?

For me right now it’s my health.   Sure, I’m young (29 if you care) but I’m finding that things aren’t quite how they used to be.  Okay I’m being vague…I’ve got a belly.  And I’m not feeling energetic and agile like I used to.   Hmmm, still weak.   Okay…I was walking recently and felt my belly jiggle, how about that!?

Sure, I’m not a ‘heavy’ guy, but it’s not fun feeling a truly negative change in my body when all my life I’ve been very thin, agile and energetic.  I’m not even 30 and I’m so much less energetic than I was just 5 years ago.  Something’s GOT to change.  And now!

I believe that most things in the universe actually work in more of an exponential or ‘compound’ fashion (in contrast to our tendency to view things as if they have a linear progression), that said I’m sure that if I don’t make a change now, one day I will look back and ask myself “where did I go wrong?”

Now really the point of this post is really about you and what YOU want to get out our life.   Not me.  But you see where I’m going… HONESTY

We’ve got to be ‘brutally honest’ with ourselves because there’s some part of our make up (most of us anyway) that likes to hide from the facts.   It’s why we dress up our dead.  –  Respects to anyone grappling with loss right now.

My point is to cut the proverbial shit.  Quit kidding yourself.   There are things that are important to you that you aren’t making happen.   It may not be your waist.  Or your pocketbook. Or your car.  Maybe it’s riding a motorcycle.   Or taking your kid camping camping every month.   It doesn’t have to be what we see on TV or at the movies.

Hell, if it’s collecting every damn version of every Derek Jeter baseball card ever made–and that’s what really matters to you–than do it goddamn it.   Enjoy it.  When you’re laying in your hospital bed at the end of your life… you’re gonna damn well wish you had.

And now you’re gonna make me eat my words.   And I’m glad of it.

What’s your takeaway?

–

PS.  Love your family.  Love ‘em like people might think you’re a little wacky.  Really, it’s okay.  :)

Oh… PSS.  Shout out to my buddy Juan Hernandez who seeded this whole train of thought by sharing this video of his amazing high-speed motorcycle ride yesterday (a thrill to watch) http://youtu.be/Ofxhrw1rDE8

–

photo credit: thenoizz

End in the end, it will all just be an interesting chapter in web history — but, for now, when big Twitter changes come…what will it bring? — Okay, enough setup…here’s the meat of it.

Twitter is changing. We may not like it but it’s happening. So what will it mean? Well it’s very possible that a flatening may be occuring.

What I mean is this…
Much of what has made Twitter so significant has be that it’s been a democratic platform. Anyone can post. Anyone can read. Anyone can follow… You get the idea.

It’s also been less then impressively profitable for the founders given it’s global (and relationally…instantaneous) proliferation and impact. Only Facebook has seen faster numbers of adoption.

It’s been interesting to watch as Facebook makes moderate to serious changes to their platform on practically a seasonal basis, while Twitter has remained, largely unchanged in comparison.

Facebook has managed to piss off millions upon millions of people simultaneously. — Simultaneously! And on many occassions. Twitter’s community, on the other hand, is significantly smaller, but in many ways more loyal to the brand.

Facebook has become the social network of convenience. While Twitter is largely untapped. Which is why I think it might be wise for the powers that be at Twitter to continue to make changes slowly. We’ve seen what happens when you change something emotionally charged for millions of people. Massive trust is lost.

Now is an opportunity for Twitter, but if they go about changing too much too fast, I’m afraid they may leave some of their audience behind as well. Or at least their trust and loyalty.

They occur as we sleep. While our neurons are firing and our minds are set free. We dream. We explore. We find paths yet undiscovered. And ultimately we find our way.

It’s not always fun. It’s not always pretty. But is always ours. At the end of the day, when we are are weak and tired and our minds are unsettled. We seek vision. We grasp for our purpose. We seek to divine.

We are one. We are realeased. We give way — and merge.

We are returned to the abyss that is our birthplace. Our mother. Creativity. We are born. We live.

Here are a few ways I’ve discovered to find the peeps that you’d most like to follow.

For the newbies: (you can probably skip this part)

• Follow some of your Gmail contacts. If you didn’t do this when you started your Twitter account, you can do that here.
• See who they are following. You’ll usually find more friends in your circles this way; often people you wouldn’t have thought of on your own.
• Tweet about topics that you want to connect with others on. People want to connect with others on similar topics and with people who share their same basic attitudes that they themselves possess.  So tweet!

Once the training wheels are off:

• Browse Listorious for who is listed in the topics that interest you. Follow whole lists or just people.
• Run some simple Twitter searches for the more obscure terms that interest you (perhaps kayaking San Diego)
• Explore who is on lists that were made by those who you already follow or who you find to be interesting or influential.
• Follow insightful, funny or interesting commenters on blogs that you read.
• Explore some influencial tweep’s favorited tweets (such as Scobleizer’s favorites) for interesting twitterers to follow.

Ninja skills:

• Twiangulate some of the peeps you already follow to see who they commonly follow.
• Use a free service called RSSFriends to watch who certain tweeps follow.  You can then decide if they are someone you’d also like to follow.
• Find tweeps using Tweepz, a site that allows you to search by bio, name and location — and to sort those results based on follower/following counts, language and more. You can even combine search metrics, like this search which uses both the bio search terms “twitter addict” and the location search term “san diego”.
• Run a specialized Google search to find people on Twitter by words used in their name/username or their bio (example “work at Google“).
• When you meet interesting people in real life, ask if they Twitter.  It really doesn’t have to be “weird”.
• Engage in interesting conversations and be useful to those who follow you.  Don’t be spammy.
  (I know that this isn’t really advanced, but you’ll know why it’s listed here)

For every technique I’ve listed here, I’m sure there are many more that I’ve missed. Why not add to the conversation by adding your peep-finding strategies in the comments?  Be sure to leave your Twitter handle for others to find you.

If you found this article useful, please consider sharing it below.  For more on using Twitter for business subscribe to this blog or follow on Twitter

Aardvark attempts to provide you with answers from people who actually know about the topic you’re inquiring about. And it’s actually quite useful. Apparently even Google thinks so since they acquired Aardvark back in February for $50 million.

Here I’d just like to mention something that relates back to my post about timing.  Aardvark (like any web social network) has users who are active at various times. This said, it makes sense to position your question at a time when it’s likely that your specific question will get answered.   This isn’t possible with Aardvark’s basic web interface or their iPhone app, however Aardvark also offers the ability to ask questions via Twitter, which has the side-effect of making it possible to schedule questions.

The usefulness for asking via Twitter is you can ask your Twitter followers at the same time.  You can also use a service like Hootsuite or SocialOomph to schedule your question for a time when more people are going to be active or for when users who’d be more likely to know will be available.

Tonight I’m just asking a general question about managing documents in the cloud so I made it for early morning (7:45am PST).  My rational is that at this time early risers will be available and also, that they may be a more organized faction of the Aardvark community.  Really the big deal here is that there will be a great deal many more users available at this time than when I thought of the question late at night.

A better example of this might be a question like “I’m planning a trip to NYC next week. Got any tips on great breakfast cafes on or around Main St?”  Something like this would probably do best scheduled around morning time in NYC, so take account of time zones too.

You can schedule a question on Aardvark by scheduling a tweet to be sent out at anytime you wish and including “@vark” in the tweet.  Have fun!

-@JoshuaGuffey

I can’t really take credit for this question.  I read it somewhere a while back in some form and I’m sure I’m paraphrasing it.  Unfortunately the original source escapes me right now.  But the point remains: If we were to be consistent about the things that matter most, we’d be far along the path to where we’d like to be.

For me one of these things is writing.  For you it may be getting up and out the door daily for your morning exercise.  Or spending a few minutes in reflection before you switch modes and begin to engage with the world.

Whatever it is, it’s powerful and it’s something that you’re not doing consistently.  If you were your life would be a revolution and you probably wouldn’t feel the desire to read this because inside you’d know you were already doing that thing.

Something else to remember here is that we are learning, changing, growing beings.  We’re never static.  We’re either growing or dying.  That said, your ‘one thing’ is going to evolve right along with you.  As such it’s important to be asking this question frequently to reconnect with where our efforts could be better spent.

What’s your ‘one thing’?  Why not leave a comment and this can become a brainstorm for those of you who participate?

After getting a shower, putting a tiny breakfast in my belly and grabbing my morning cup of joe, I find myself in creative mode.  I realize that I want to write, record, compose, construct or in some way create.

What I’m not in the mode to do is to consume new ideas or concepts just yet.

I recognized this ‘mode’ as I felt a resistance to immediately dive into Twitter.  I care very much about what is happening with you and with the rest of the world.  This isn’t about you.  It is about my need to respect what what my mode currently is and to flow with that tendency rather than fighting it.

If I’m in creative mode, I’d better damn well be creating.  Especially considering there is so much to read, digest and respond to in a given day.  When I am in a creative mode, perhaps the very best thing I can do is to surrender to it, letting it flow.  And then when I’m finished, take a step back and view it as part of the whole…part of the world that I haven’t yet engaged for the day; and allow it to be my starting point.

How about you?  Does think make sense?  Is this true for you?

photo credit: scenar308 (Highlands & Kührointhaus)

So I started to write about a related topic and the keyboard revolted. Or maybe it was my fingers.

In any case this post about “which are my favorite Twitter clients and why” pretty much wrote itself.  It’ll be useful for you if you are looking to reduce confusion or streamline your interactions on Twitter.

What is a Twitter client and why do I care?
The best user experience for Twitter is generally achieved using a Twitter client, an application that acts as an intermediary between you and Twitter and does some of your bidding; or at least makes the experience easier and more enjoyable.  Twitter clients also tend to make engaging on Twitter more feature-rich and faster than if you were to engage simply using the web interface.

My favorite Twitter clients and why they’re worth your time
On my Mac I use Tweetdeck.  It’s powerful, customizable and I find that it keeps me in the conversation.  It can however be overwhelming if you have many columns and haven’t customized the notifications to only alert you of the high priority items, like your @ mentions and lists you like to keep a close eye on.  If you need help doing this leave a comment on the blog here and I’ll help you out.

I also use Tweetdeck on the iPhone but strictly for the lists functionality.  I use it to stay up on my local peeps as well as lists I follow for news and happenings in the spaces that concern me.

Tweetie for iPhone has been for a long time my absolute favorite iPhone Twitter app.  It’s really great for accessing my main Twitter home feed and responding quickly to peeps I see there.  It’s highly intuitive and pretty fast.  Where the performance begins to break down is with lists.  Which is exactly why I use Tweetdeck for lists.  Tweetie is just too slow in this regard.  For most everything else it’s great though.

Hootsuite is good if you have a need to schedule individual tweets. Like for example, you have a thought or find some news at 11:20pm when you know that nobody will see it if you share, so instead with Hootsuite you can share it at a later time.  Just select ‘send later’ and choose the day and time you’d like it sent.  This functionality is available on both the iPhone app and the web app.

Tap 11 is my new shiny object as Twitter clients go.  I’m an analytics guy.  I get my kicks from stats and from drawing actionable conclusions from patterns.  If you like to track things too, you might like Tap 11.  In addition to being a more than decent Twitter client, it offers the added ability to view charts and stats about all manner of things you can geek out on.  It is still in private beta though, so you’ll need to request access.

What are your favorite clients and why? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below. Thanks for reading.  ;-]

-@JoshuaGuffey (whispers: “follow, follow”)

–
photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/evablue

We plan. We strategize. We save and invest. And then…what?

Often times these things fall out from under us. Sometimes we could have done something to prevent it. Other times–not so much. We hold to the thought that our lives will unfold as planned, when we know damned well they don’t.

In our lives we minimize physical clutter by reducing the number of things we own and manage. In our thought space–the vortex of our planning, whirring minds–we can reduce clutter by applying the rule of 80/20 to our planning and our expectations about where our life is headed (it may not be where you expect).

I read a great post today by Jeffrey Tang of at The Art of Great Things, that really brought this home for me and helped me to frame what productive planning might look like (hint: it’s not planning every minute detail til you’re ready to beat your head in). I got a lot out of it and I wanted to share it here with you. ;-]

In the words of Noel Gallagher, “a dreamer dreams she never dies”. Perhaps you’ll want to listen to Champagne Supernova or Stop Crying Your Heart Out while you read the above post.

-Joshua Guffey

What does all of this mean to you? How do you see the role of planning and productivity to fit in with a ‘necessary acceptance’ of a reality we don’t fully control?

You know you want one!

Now adding a Facebook button to your WordPress hosted site is as simple as installing a new plugin.

A bit ago I posted about adding a Facebook ‘like’ button to your posts.  The process was a bit janky since no developers had yet released any WordPress plugins to accomplish this task.  Now there are about a jillion plugins to accomplish this. Hooray!

I looked over several of them and settled on WP Facebook Like. I certainly didn’t test them all, so there may be a few out there that have some extra bells and whistles, but this one seemed solid, so I’m giving it a go.

The nice thing about adding this to your posts is that as people visit and ‘like’ your stuff, that shows up in their ‘recent activity’ stream, which is nice if your trying to use social media for business.

To install it:
Go to Plugins > Add New in your WordPress admin and search for “wp facebook like”.  Click the install button.  It’s that easy.

Like I said, there are several, so if you’re trying to get this exact one, be sure that you’re not installing some variation on this name.  The most notable of which simply adds the word “button” (ie. “wp facebook like button”).

By default you’ll see the button on all posts after the post content.  some users may want to have the option to exclude the button from certain posts or enable it manually only when desired, and I’m sure either a later version of this plugin or a different one currently available will offer this, but that wasn’t important to me.

So far I like it a lot.  It’s simple. It works. Tada!  (try it out below)

[note: If you're using WordPress version 2.9.2 or earlier it seems you'll need to select "iframe" as the embedding method. The default of "xfbml" works fine on WordPress 3.0 beta-1.]

For more ways to implement social media for business or just to connect, follow me on Twitter or subscribe to this blog