Quite a while ago I decided to embrace positive thinking. Not in a way that involves being over exuberant and obnoxious, but in a quiet, personal and understated way. You know, positive thinking for normal people who lead everyday lives.

I would say I’m pretty much your average reserved Brit. I’m not going to be jumping up and down anytime soon bear hugging strangers and high five-ing everyone in sight.

I’m not even that fond of hugging – a nice handshake is where I’m happiest.

Nor am I the sort of guy that wants to walk around with a smile permanently painted onto my face. To me, that’s fake and shallow, because life isn’t a bed of roses all the time and I believe there’s value in feeling negative emotions as well as positive emotions.

The trick, I have found, is to hear the message of the negative emotion and move on as quickly as possible.

Postive thinking has taken me a long way

Positive thinking has taken me a long way to achieving my personal goals. It may not appear so to outside observers, but my life has definitely changed for the better because of it.

And it’s thinking positively that led me to make a decision about this site… I’m going to hibernate it.

I have every intention of coming back to it to explore all the positivity and happiness stuff, but right now I can’t devote the time it deserves.

I’ll keep dropping in posts every now and then just to keep it going, but I’m going to focus most of my resources elsewhere.

The Mona Lisa Project

As for the Mona Lisa Million Project, it’s still viable but I have to rethink it. Although In truth I’ve done most of the rethinking, I just need to tie up a few loose ends.

I’m going to give it a new home and change the format slightly but the end goal is still the same… to get lots of attention for the people associated with it and to donate a great big lump of money to various charities.

My three years online haven’t been particularly profitable and you might even say I’ve been unsuccessful. Some of you will know that I’ve got several ‘failed’ ventures behind me and maybe one or two of you will know that it’s more than several!

Turning failure to success

But if you were to ask me whether I think I’m a failure I’d tell you, no. What I’ve learnt during the last three years puts me in a stronger position than ever to find the kind of success I’m looking for.

I’ve been through some pretty grim times and there have been times when I’ve nearly quit, but somehow I’ve managed to hang in there.

Learning from the mistakes

Nothing of what I’ve done has been wasted effort. For a start, the genuine contacts I’ve made with some incredibly fabulous and supportive people have been more valuable than diamond encrusted gold ingots deep fried in batter and served with vintage champagne.

Also, I’ve learnt as much from the mistakes as the little victories and I now know what I want to do and how I want to do it.

Do you see where positive thinking has taken me?!

Pretty cool or what?

I’m going to be helping one of my diamond encrusted gold ingot friends with their project for a while, but I will definitely be resuming the Mona Lisa Project again – hopefully within a month, maybe two. And I fully intend to build this site as a  place for positive thinking people to hang out – but that might take a bit longer.

Thans you all for your support with this project.

This is NOT over, it’s only just beginning!

See you soon.

David

-

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I’m tweaking, I hope that’s OK with you, if not, tough! I’m doing it anyway.

Tweaking isn’t for everybody but I like a good tweak.

What the hell am I talking about? Am I talking about my life, my diet, my nipples, my site?

You’ll never know for sure and that’s half the fun of it.

Those of you with a dirty mind will doubtless assume I’m talking about nipples, it won’t even occur to you that I’m referring to the grease nipples on a classic car that I’m pretending to own just so I can legitimately insert the word ‘nipples’ into a post. Shame on you!

Confused? Me too, but we won’t let that stop us.

I’m quitting

I’m quitting the aspects of this project that aren’t working for me.

I don’t exactly know what those aspects are yet but as soon as I figure it out I’ll get back to you.

In the meantime I’m going to entertain you with double-entendres and lots of self-deprecating humour.

If you want to unsubscribe, that’s OK, me and the other 28 subscribers will be fine on our own.

No! No! I didn’t mean it. Come back you know I love you.

(*whisper* Have they gone? Good, I never liked them anyway.)

Idiocy aside, the Mona Lisa Million Project is staying – it’s a great idea but it’s badly delivered.

Give me some time to fix it.

Stick with me, it’ll be worth it!

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_

Here’s the video from the link above:

‘Janet and John’ as read by Sir Terry Wogan.

Hi folks! The Mona Lisa Million Project goes well!!

We’ve got our first big sponsor and now we need another.

And then we need another eight(!) to make sure the Top Ten list shown on the front page and also in the sidebar is full of paying sponsors.

It’s important that this happens because 25% of the sponsorship fee is donated to charities through the Charity Challenge.

You can be part of this for as little as $10 (or £7) or you can get involved for $80 (or £50). Either way you’ll get your piece of the Mona Lisa, 25% of your fee will be added to the charity fund, I’ll announce your sponsorship in a blog post and if you want, you can have a featured post all to yourself.

Hey, I’ll even mention you on Twitter to 6000+ followers! Numerous times!

That’s pretty good publicity for such a small outlay!

You’re getting in right at the start. There are currently 70 great sites on the Mona Lisa. These are genuine sites from genuine people and to ensure I protect the integrity of these sites and this project I don’t link to certain sites, so rest assured you’ll be amongst the best company.

I want to do something REMARKABLE – I want to raise 1 million dollars and I want to give 25%  to charities chosen by the readers of this site. That HAS to be worth talking about. And if it’s not I might have to resort to tattooing sponsor’s names on my ….! (That is NEVER going to happen BTW)

We might not achieve the grand figure of $1,000,000, but wouldn’t it be totally amazing if we did?! A massive $250,000 would go to charity and plenty of people would be talking about the project and clicking through to see your site here.

To make it happen I need to make the best possible start and get the first ten paying sponsors in place – even if it’s only at the extremely good value $10 point (- it’s just after Christmas and not everyone who reads this site is Rockefeller, and that’s OK).

It would be fantastic to get one new sponsor every day, so that’s what I’m aiming for! One a day, every day!

Take a look at this page, find out how this project could help you promote your site and be part of something special!

Thanks.

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Today I’m updating my progress on the Project 30 Days challenge: Waking Early

As a stay at home parent who also trying to build a business, I’ve spent the last three years struggling to make any real inroads. The best I’ve been able to do is to lay a solid foundation.

The workload that goes along with the the role of stay at home dad has been massively inhibiting in terms of my progress.

The problem is that with four children aged between 4 and 10 (1 and 7 years when I first started) it’s non stop work. I didn’t believe how much work there was to running a home until I took over full time.

OK it’s not quite so bad now that my youngest daughter goes to playgroup in the mornings – but finding quality time to do quality work is nigh on impossible unless you do something drastic.

Sadly, my options are pretty limited.

For the most part I’ve been trying to fit in bits and pieces throughout the day and do the bulk of my work in the evening, but time and time again this as proven disastrous.

On the days when the children are not at school (and back when both of my youngest children were at home with me) there is NO chance of getting anything meaningful done and over time this induces stress and leads to bad patterns of behaviour.

One of my biggest regrets is that there are far too many occasions when it’s broken my heart to push the children away as I try to get things done. I’ve been given this marvellous opportunity to spend time with my children when they’re young and in some ways I feel I’ve squandered it.

I can rationalise it now that the business is becoming a success but at heart I know it wasn’t the right thing to do.

Leaving everything to the evening just doesn’t work for me. I end up being physically, mentally and emotionally tired.

The children rarely go straight to sleep, which would be fine if they would just read quietly like everyone else’s children  but they don’t. The two eldest, the boys, like to stage all-in-wrestling competitions and my youngest daughter who has just turned 4, likes to come to the top of the stairs 20 times every evening to tell us what her big sister is or isn’t doing or saying.

I regularly crash past midnight with a ton of things still to do. I go to bed exhausted and ill tempered and I wake up exhausted and ill tempered.

I know I’m not alone and I know it’s the same for everyone, but complaining about and wishing it were different hasn’t made the slightest bit of difference.

What has made a significant difference is waking early. I’m not talking half an hour early, I’m talking waking two or three hours early.

Drastic or what?!

But what a difference it makes.

During the first couple of weeks of this challenge to get up early every day in January, I really struggled. I was trying to get up at 6am but it wasn’t happening. I woke up but went straight back to sleep because I was still crashing my bedtime and I knew I couldn’t make much of the first hour – so it was easy to stay asleep.

Last week I resolved to get up at 4.30 every morning and I’ve done brilliantly.

I’ve managed to do it every weekday morning. At the weekend I slept until 7am as I’ve developed a cold and needed to catch up on the sleep debt. But I’m starting to see that I’ll be able to make this a regular feature.

It’s odd to be awake so early, but I get so much more done.

After about half an hour my brain is awake and capable of fresh thinking. I feel I work twice as fast and that feeling carries through the day.

By the time the rest of the household is ready to wake up I’ve already done the bulk of what I want to achieve for the day. I’m happy and smiling and taking my wife tea and toast in bed. The children’s antics in the morning don’t bother me so much and the mood in the house generally has improved.

The downside is that I feel like falling asleep about 830pm but I’ve been using this time when my brain is fatigued to do chores that will get me ahead of the game for the next day.

Actually there’s another downside… I’ve been eating more and putting on some weight. I can live with that for now as I work on building waking early from short term success into a long term habit.

For me, this has been about making time for myself, time to do things that will make a real difference to my life and my family.

It’s not easy, but it’s worth the effort.

Go ahead and check on the originator of the Project 30 Days, David Wright as he continues his decluttering challenge.

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Yesterday I introduced the first paid sponsor of the Mona Lisa Million Project – The very lovely Jay Mountford who runs a West Midlands Wedding Photography business, became the first person to take a paid sponsorship on the project – and I mentioned that it was a big deal to me!

It’s a big deal because today is the anniversary of the catastrophic magnitude 7 earthquake that killed 230,000 people, injured 300,000 and left over one million people homeless in Haiti – and it was this event that inspired me to set up the Mona Lisa Million Project.

I set an ambitious goal of raising $1Million by selling pieces of the most famous picture in the world, the Mona Lisa. I divided a million pixel copy of the image up into sections and the plan was that each section would be auctioned off and sold to the highest bidder. From the income the auctions generated I intended to give up to 80% of the profits to Haiti.

Sadly it was a little too ambitious and try as I might, I was unable to generate any paid sponsorships and the idea never really took off - until now!

We’re a year in now and the project has changed in many ways. Sadly, after a few months Haiti fell out of the public consciousness and I realised I needed to make some changes. To give the project a chance of success I reluctantly changed the way we support charities and introduced the Charity Challenge.

Although Haiti is no longer the main focus of the project I am very pleased to say that we were eventually able to donate some money to Haiti in the name of this site and its readers. And It’s now the readers of this site who decide which charities we support – and perhaps in the next Charity Challenge Haiti will be nominated again.

Despite the changes, the aim of this project is still to raise one million dollars and yesterday on the eve of the Haiti anniversary we took the biggest step towards achieving that remarkable goal when Jay became the first paying sponsor.

To me this represents the turning point and I aim to build on this breakthrough and push this project to meet its full potential.

I am massively proud of the Mona Lisa Million Project and have every confidence that it will be a success.

I am also proud of all my sponsors and the people who have supported me over the last year with comments, tweets and encouraging emails. Thank you all.

And thank you Jay for setting the example I hope other people have the confidence to follow.

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Links to Haiti News:

Haiti devastated by massive earthquake

Haiti earthquake: After so many promises, why is the country still struggling?

Haiti earthquake one year on: the lost generation

In pictures: Wolfgang Tillmans in Haiti

ShelterBox Founder describes enormity of Haiti response

Save The Children: Haiti one year on – More needs to be done

Battle for Haiti

Picture credit

I’m delighted to announce that Jay Mountford Photography is the first paying sponsor to join the Mona Lisa Million Project.

And I’ve got to tell you I’m thrilled to bits.

You might think that’s an exaggeration, but I promise you it’s not. And you’ll understand why I feel this way after tomorrows post.

We already have plenty of fabulous sponsors who joined with promotional (free/nominal fee) sponsorships but this event marks a great moment for this project.

This is the moment when the Mona Lisa Million Project finally begins to meet its potential to raise money for charities chosen by you.

As you may already have gathered, 25% of each sponsorship fee is donated to good causes through the Charity Challenge, so in addition to getting some great publicity and promotion, sponsors know that a large proportion of their fee will be used to support good causes.

This huge turning point came when when Jay, who you might otherwise know as Mocha Beanie Mummy demonstrated her faith in the project by paying a $46 sponsorship fee.

It’s a big deal for me and for the project because Jay is well established and respected online, with a number of trusted sites, so I hope other people will now have the confidence to follow her example and purchase a paid sponsorship.

Let me tell you a little about Jay’s site which is linked from section R5/12 of the Mona Lisa.

Jay Mountford Photography

If you’re looking for a Wedding photographer in Birmingham and the West Midlands, then you must drop by Jay’s site and have a look. I’d spend time trying to convince you that Jay is fantastic photographer but I couldn’t do her justice.

I’m not saying this because Jay is my first sponsor, I’m saying because it’s true.

Look for yourself:

Jay Mountford - Children's Photographer Birmingham & West Midlands

Jay Mountford - Baby Portraits Birmingham, West Midlands

Jay Mountford - Wedding Photography Birmingham, West Midlands, UK

Jay Mountford - Wedding Photographer - Birmingham, West Midlands, UK

There’s more to see in the gallery so why not drop in and have a look at:

• Wedding photography

• Baby portraits

• Children

I look forward to publishing more of Jay’s photographs in a featured post coming soon.
Thanks Jay for being my first sponsor and thanks for supporting the Mona Lisa Project.

-

Site: Jay Mountford Photography: Baby, children & wedding photographer
Twitter: @JayMountford

Project 30 Days is a great new site created my David Wright where he documents his progress in changing one bad habit each month over the course of a year. David’s first challenge is de-cluttering.

My first challenge is waking early. I want to get the best out of the day and make sure I achieve my goals. I set myself the task of waking up at 6am every day and here’s how I’ve done so far:

It’s been a disaster!

I’ve failed on a spectacular scale and in someways I’ve even made things worse.

It started well and I managed to get up early on the 1st and 2nd of January but that’s it. I haven’t been able to do it since.

I even predicted it!

Before I even started, I recognised that there might be difficulties and I highlighted 3 of them:

• Illness
• Oversleeping
• Interupted sleep

….and all three played a part in my failure.

None of the family have totally shaken off the colds that developed after the bout of flu over Christmas, which leaves us all pretty jaded and makes the children a little more needy than usual.

At the best of times one or more of the kids wake up during the night shouting for daddy because they’ve had nightmares, but when they’re ill they tend to wake more – which means I tend to wake more.

The cold and the disturbed sleep inevitably led to me over-sleeping, which meant I started my days in rush as westruggled to get out of the door on time for the school run. Which of course led to frayed tempers resulting from the drama. Not the best way to start.

I then spent most days playing catch-up and trying to get the online work done whilst neglecting the housework (I’m a stay at home dad in case you didn’t know).

Working in the evening doesn’t work

The bulk of the online work got left for the evening and this is where it really started to go wrong.

The children refused to settle most evenings and I was up and down the stairs every 10 minutes. This did nothing to enhance my mood, which in turn did nothing for my productivity. I was also conscious that my wife was in the living room on her own while I was on the computer. And because this has been a source of tension before it played on my mind and added to the pressure.

Because everything took so much longer I ended up getting to bed at 2am most nights and 2.45 on one night and so it was no wonder I was oversleeping. Unfortunately I couldn’t break the cycle because I had time critical things to do.

Sleep Debt

I’ve ended up with sleep debt and become next to useless.

Over the week I felt immense pressure to get the online work done and felt guilt at not having the house in order but I’ve learnt a great deal from the experience.

Fatigue

But one of the main things I’ve learnt is how badly I use my time. It didn’t help that I was tired but seriously I squander my time like you wouldn’t believe. It’s not done on purpose but I think it comes about because I wander about in a befuddled haze jumping from one task to the next as demanded by the circumstances – and by circumstances I mostly mean the children.

So what caused me to notice? Well, sitting at my computer at 1am ready to collapse onto the kitchen table brought into sharp focus the fact that I’d spent prime working time during the morning surfing Twitter and catching up on blogs! It all seemed like genuine work at the time but looking back… Argh! Just Argh!

Perhaps this is a challenge for another month but I realise I need to take some remedial action now to improve that aspect, and I’ve done exactly that.

I’ve implement a new system for dealing with my workload so fewer things drop through the cracks and also so that I’m able to get a quick grip on what needs to be done – and this is especially important when life gets chaotic (and being a stay at home dad it does, often!).

I find that having just refereed one of the many fights the children have over trivial things like, “He just called me a poo head”, or “THAT’S MINE!”, sitting down at the computer and waiting for creativity or inspiration to strike, or hoping I’ll recall what I need to do next is a bad idea. It doesn’t happen. The default is to check email, Twitter or the RSS reader, which are huge time sucks.

So I’ve taken to writing down a detailed list of what I need to do. and I just churn through it one item after another. It’s a pain to do but it’s working out well.

Get more sleep

So, back to the challenge… I’ve realised that I need to get enough sleep to avoid the sleep debt > which leads to fatigue  > which leads to a loss in productivity > which then leads to getting to bed late > which leads to getting up late etc, etc, etc.

I also need to get enough sleep to recover from the minor illnesses that plague me at the moment.

So here’s what I’m going to do:

I’m going to get up even earlier!

I’m going to get up at 4.30am like I used to do when I was working (before I became a chooch ). It’s not easy but it’s possible.

This will doubtless lead to me being ready for bed by 8pm but it wouldn’t be the end of the world if I fell asleep while spending a relaxing evening in front of the TV with my wife. Nor would it be so bad if I fell asleep upstairs while trying to settle the children in the evening.

So, waking early is still the goal – but I’m now mindful that my time management might be my main problem. We shall see!

I’ll update this again next Monday but I wanted to leave you with an insight into Dave Wright’s world (as he’s the guy who inspired me to set this challenge for myself).

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Do you feel like a failure?

Do you feel like you’re letting yourself and your family down?

Has everything you’ve done to improve your circumstances failed?

Are you ready to give in and just accept your fate?

Or can you access just that smallest particle of self belief that says you’re a decent human being and you deserve happiness and success?

I hope so, because you are a decent human being despite whatever evidence presents itself to indicate the contrary. At heart you’re a good guy and you deserve to be happy.

So, if you can access even the smallest speck of self belief, and I urge you to try, then cling onto it and nurture it even in the face of utter desperation and overwhelming fear. Because if you can silence the fear just long enough do just one positive thing, you can start to turn your life around.

Revel in the joy of that small success, in the success of doing the thing – not the result, but the doing. And then do it again. Use the momentum to do one more positive thing.

Don’t get hung up on the outcome, it’s irrelevant, it’s the success of having done the positive thing that counts. That’s where you can start to feed your self belief. It takes just one positive act to start it off.

Try to make sure your positive thing is meaningful and matters. Spending two hours networking on Twitter is nice (I know because I’ve done it) but the chances are it’s not as meaningful or important as you think.

If you feel you’ve hit rock bottom and you’re as low as you can go and you can’t access the self belief then just do it anyway. The small feelings of success are cumulative and will help rekindle your self belief.

And if you think I’m talking total twaddle, then listen to this inspiring woman who will tell you that rock bottom provides and excellent foundation for building on. As you’ll find out, she has failed on an epic scale.

Not many of us will enjoy the sort of success that JK Rowling has achieved after turning our failures to success, but we don’t need to.

Success means different things to different people. Your success might be finding a small income source to chip away at your credit card debt in the knowledge that your gig might lead to something bigger and better, thus enabling you you to wipe out the debt in quick order.

Your success might be opening the lines of communication in strained relationship. It might be eating chocolate every other night instead of every night so that you can feel healthier. It might be decluttering your home to replace chaos with order. Or it might writing some quality content to grow your online business.

So you might not achieve success of the magnitude enjoyed by Jo Rowling but taking positive action and feeding your self belief will more than likely take you to a better place than you are now.

So do it. Do one positive thing right now!

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Picture Credit

Don’t be sad. Not today. Have a day off.

Get together all the stuff that’s annoying you and bringing you down and stuff it into your sadsack.

Do it quickly and don’t dwell on it.

Now, take that big old sad-sack and throw it in the cupboard under the stairs, or chuck it in the loft, or lock it in the shed at the bottom of the garden, but whatever you do, don’t carry the damn thing round with you all day. Not today anyway, remember you’re taking the day off.

I know that I’ve used my sadsack before as trophy to prove to the world how crap my life is on any given day. Hey look at me, my sack is so much bigger than yours… and fuller… and heavier too! Or maybe that grotty old sack acts as a warning to other people to stay away?

Just don’t do it. It’s a colossal waste of time.

Believe me, it a COLOSSAL waste of time.

Besides, it’s a huge fashion mistake. Sad sacks are so 2010 baby!

Seriously, when you consider what you put in a sadsack, you’ll probably notice that so much of it is really insignificant to the point of being meaningless.

The problem for me, was I found it was the meaningless and trivial stuff that derailed me. Being woken up 20 minutes early by the children (who were incidentally, full of the joys of spring and eager to get on with the day) would sometimes leave me grumpy till lunchtime. Someone looking at me the wrong way would start an internal rage that might last half an hour. The ignorant swine who didn’t say thank you when I held the door open for them would leave me cursing under my breath and add to my conviction that the vast majority of the population are jackasses.

And if all three happened on the same day…. BOOM! my world could come crashing down around me.

It’s a shame, because while I was busy feeling sad, bad and angry, I was neglecting to do the important things, things that really would make a difference to my quality of life. The thing’s that would solve the underlying issues, which as we all know, were the root cause of the gross overreactions.

But since I decided to get over my long and boring midlife crisis and started to change the way I think about life, I’m much less vulnerable to having my day hijacked by trivial nonsense. Instead, I take pride in doing the things that will improve my life, focusing on the positive and being open to the possibility that today will be the best day of my life.

So do yourself a favour and ditch the sadsack, feel lighter and brighter…

- or even “Zesty” (thanks for ‘zest’ Jay ).

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Good news!! You’re all too late, I have my first customer!! More details to follow but check out the Top 10 list in the sidebar or on the front page.

On the front page of this site there’s a list of the Top 10 sites on the Mona Lisa Million. At the moment the Top Ten is a list of fabulous sites who joined the project last year but because the people behind the sites were so fantastic, I didn’t charge them a bean. Perhaps I should have and then at least I’d have 10 beans?

Actually you can’t pay in beans it needs to be real money, money that I’ll happily share with charities.

So here’s the thing. You could jump straight into the Top 10 by being my first paying customer.

Ten US Dollars (or whatever currency you want to pay in, provided paypal accepts it) will get you in the Top 10. Probably the Number 1 spot!

I need to start the ball rolling with this project and I know I said I wasn’t going to push the Mona Lisa on you but damn it all, I’ve changed my mind. Why, because it’s bloody brilliant and I think you should be part of it.

Get involved now so that you don’t have to kick yourself later when you’ve been priced out of it.

Besides, I think it would be cool to brag about being the first paying sponsor.

Be that sponsor! Go to this page and see the pricing options. You can start at $10 or go straight for the $80 option and be reasonably assured you’ll be on the top spot for a while.

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