Hi all!

Quick announcement: As most of you know I’m working with Vittana, a non-profit with a website that helps its users make microloans to support the education of students in developing countries. Tomorrow we’re doing a big push to help fund 100 women’s educations and we already have a lot of influential bloggers and twitterati on board to help spread the word!

If you’d like to help us reach our goal, here are some things that you can do:

• Go to our Vittana students page and make a loan to support the student of your choice!
• Join the #Vittana4Women Twitter Chat Thursday, March 8th 10:00 AM PST 1:00 PM EST and learn how education empowers women and why this makes a significant impact on communities as a whole. More info about it here: http://www.hollywoodhotmoms.com/join-us-for-vittana4women-twitter-chat/
• Follow @Vittana on twitter and “like” Vittana on facebook.
• Spread the word! If you have a blog post of your own please consider writing a short blog post and tweet about International Women’s day. To make it easier for you, I’ve provided some HTML with the banner to place on the top on your post. Here it is:

<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.facebook.com/Vittana"><img title="Help Support 100 Women's Educations" src="http://blog.vittana.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/banner6.jpg" alt="" width="100%"/></a></p>

Also, check out the posts on the vittana blog about women empowerment. Some great stories here to get you and your friends inspired!

As a networker, your goal is to establish contacts with people who you don’t yet know, as well as maintain and grow relationships with people you’ve already met, in the hopes that in the future you may be able to do business with them. Although it certainly depends on the openness of the network that you’re trying to break into, I’ve personally found that, to borrow a Japanese phrase, “just showing your face,” can often be enough to make the connections you need.

All it takes takes is a little repetition:
The first time, people don’t even see you.
The second time, they don’t notice you.
The third time, they are aware that you are there.
The fourth time, they have a fleeting sense that they’ve seen you somewhere before.
The fifth time, they actually have a short conversation with you.
The sixth time they ignore you intentionally.
The seventh time, they start to get a little irritated with you.
The eighth time, they start to think, “There’s that person again.”
The ninth time, they start to wonder if you might be someone important.
The tenth time, they ask their colleagues and friends about you.
The eleventh time, they wonder if you’re really as “amazing” as people say you are.
The twelfth time, they start to think that you must be good at what you do.
The thirteenth time, they start to feel you have value.
The fourteenth time, they start to remember wanting to work with someone like you for a long time.
The fifteenth time, they start to mention you on twitter and connect with you on linkedIn and facebook.
The sixteenth time, they start to think that they may work with you sometime in the future.
The seventeenth time, they invite you out for coffee to discuss ways you could work together.
The eighteenth time, they curse bad timing for keeping them from working with someone as awesome as you.
The nineteenth time, they make deliberate plans to hire you/fund your company/make you a co-founder.
The twentieth time…you’re working together.

If you feel like you’ve read this somewhere before, you probably have. This guide is actually based on a guide on advertising written more than a hundred years ago by a London businessman named Thomas Smith. Smith’s guide was about product advertising, and though some might object to my comparing advertising to making personal connections, the similarities are striking. So striking in fact, that it took me less than five minutes to adapt Smith’s guide on advertising to produce one on networking.

The great thing about networking today is that the Internet, the blogopshere, and various social networking sites can do a lot to accelerate the twenty-step process mentioned above. “Showing your face” in person is ideal, but “showing your face” on twitter, facebook and in RSS feeds isn’t so bad either. It ‘s these cheap and versatile technologies that allow you to “advertise” yourself through multiple channels when in the past only large corporations had the resources to do so.

Multiple channels is key, because it’s not just about maximizing your exposure to a certain network of people; it’s also about maximizing the variety of channels through which they are exposed to you. Just as Google search results tend to favor websites with links coming from a wide variety of other websites, people tend to have a higher opinion of another person when that person’s “social mentions” come from a wider variety of sources. In other words, it’s better for you to have three good mentions coming from three separate sources (e.g. one positive mention each from a family member, a coworker, and a client) than for you to have five recommendations from five similar sources (e.g. five mentions from five family members). It’s not enough that you have some positive recommendations on your LinkedIn profile.  After all, anyone can stuff their LinkedIn profile with recommendations from their bestest buds at work. But, if you also have positive mentions within a certain audience on twitter and some random person I meet at a party says something good about you, my opinion of you would become much more favorable than if your mentions only came from one source.

While showing up often, and showing up in as many different places as possible is, to borrow a phrase from Woody Allen, “80 percent of success,” It’s important to understand that all networking efforts would be worthless without that other 20 percent: doing good work. In the end, all the advertising in the world won’t help sell a product if the product itself happens to suck.

My consistent appearances at tech and startup events was useful in that it got people to talk/ask about me when I wasn’t there. Because I showed my face often, people were curious enough about me to ask my friends and coworkers about who I was and about the kind of work that I did. Luckily for me people had good things to say, because in the two and a half months that I was unemployed I had steady stream of job prospects coming my way. In fact, I recently landed a community manager gig with the Seattle based startup eVenues,  an online marketplace for meeting rooms and event spaces. They’ve got a pretty respectable list of meeting rooms in Seattle and on the West coast. I didn’t even send the guys my resume.

How are you “showing up?”

Meatless Super Links--because some of Google’s spiders could be vegan.

(Pic of the links at SEOMoz! http://lockerz.com/s/134343171)

Note: This is an open cover letter to Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOMoz, a company I would love to work for. If you are not CEO of SEOMoz, it’s possible I might want to work for you too—just check my Hire Me page to see if we might get along.

Hi Rand,

By the time you read this post I assume that you’ve received the links I sent you. As you might have guessed when you opened the box, these are no ordinary links. These are Super-Links. Please enjoy them with care. Super-Links can be very powerful and often dangerous when misused.

Being in the SEO business, I’m sure you’ve realized that Link Building isn’t as effective as it used to be. As you know, many websites with high quality backlinks have been penalized (Pandalized?) for having–in Google’s eyes at least–a poor user experience and shallow content. It’s enough to make one think that the profession of the link builder (at least when it comes to links churned out from widgets, badges, and quizzes) has gone the way of the blacksmith and milkman.

Building with Super-Links, however, is a different story. I’ll wager that after you received the can of links I sent you, your organic search traffic continued to increase at the rate that it has in the past instead of dramatically decreasing–which was what COULD have happened had I not sent you these links. So, in other words, I MIGHT have helped you dodge a bullet. Correlation is not causation, I know, but you still have to wonder…

You don’t have to thank me. I must admit that this was not a completely selfless act. I know you’re looking for a kick-ass community attaché and I would love to sit down and interview for that position. In order to prove that I could fulfill that role, I thought it’d be good to show you how creative I could be when it came to doing community outreach.

I haven’t been in the startup world long. I decided to change careers when I had an idea for a little startup of my own. In pursuit of that idea, I taught myself how to code and built goldhat.org. Goldhat was (and is!) a passion project of mine. I wanted web content creators an alternative way to promote their great work on the web and I believed a micro-patronage system similar to flattr.com’s could be it.

To me, this resonates with SEOMoz’s core purpose: “To Simplify the Promotion of Ideas on the Web” Someday maybe my little project will grow and do just that, but you guys are doing that right now, and this is something I would love to be a part of.

If you want to know more about me, and why I’d be a good fit for your team, please check out this page.  Also, my resume can be found here.

Sincerely,

Kenji

Brain Crack is the novel or movie script knocking around in your head that you haven’t started writing yet. It’s the web app without a line of code to its name. It’s that “slam dunk” million-dollar-business that you’ll “eventually” get to starting.

Because these ideas are so perfect in your head, you hesitate to get started on them, knowing that the end product will often be disappointing in comparison to what you had originally dreamed up. So you sit, do nothing, and dream.

I’ve been there more times than I’d like to admit. Recently, I’ve been turning a potentially profitable business idea over in my head, but considering how full my plate is with my job search and my passion project, goldhat.org, I know I’ll probably never develop it. So, instead of enjoying this Brain Crack all by myself, I thought it would be better to free up a bit of mental RAM and let the world know about it. If the idea sucks, I’ll have the comfort of knowing that I didn’t waste time working on it. If the idea has promise and one of you actually decide to create it, I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that I can actually come up with a viable business idea. Just keep me in mind when you’re hiring, OK?

The idea is simple enough: let’s create a deals site with a game layer. A working title for the site is deal-roulette.com (Domain is available last I checked, but hyphenated domains are tacky anyway). Essentially the user experience would be very similar to a game of Russian Roulette (minus the dire consequences!). The user inputs their credit card information before they play the game and then cycle through five or six deals. Each time they choose another deal, there’s an increasing likelihood that the user will land on the “must buy” deal. If that happens, they will have automatically purchased said deal.

Obviously, for branding issues, it might be a good idea not to use the word “Roulette” so as not to associate the the site with such a violent game.

The user interface might look like this:

Click to Enlarge

Non-registered users would be welcome to play a “practice round” of the deals game with the deals from last week. For the practice round, there wouldn’t be any rewards or risks involved, but this way they can familiarize themselves with the rules of the game as well as with the quality of the deals.

What would it take?

I imagine that it wouldn’t take long to develop a project like this. An experienced Rails developer could probably put together a prototype within a week or so. Setting up a payment gateway with a business model such as this might get a little tricky considering the legal issues around online gambling that might arise, but once that hurdle is cleared, you’d be good to go.

The real difficulty is the business development side. Signing five to six deals a week would require at least two to three folks working the phones full-time. It’s a saturated space, so the sales team would run into a lot of initial resistance from daily-deal weary merchants. This is why it’s probably best to focus on niche markets that haven’t been covered so much by giants like Groupon, Living Social and the army of deal site clones.

Although there are many possibilities for a deal roulette type site, I thought of a few that might work:

Travel Roulette

Although there are many complexities that I’m not addressing in this short blog post, random discounted trips to exotic locations could be a possibility. Travel Roulette’s biz dev team could get in touch with a few travel agents and ask them about last minute deals and post them on the site. Travel Roulette would provide those tickets at a steep discount, offering the travel agents a cut, and the thrill-seeking 20 somethings interested in playing “spin the globe” could play the same game online.

App Roulette

Since apps are a lot cheaper than plane tickets (not to mention the fact that there are no location constraints), I was thinking that each non-loaded app would be either FREE or extremely cheap (25 cents to 50 cents). However, within these deals was a much more expensive app at its full price (anywhere from $5.00 to $10.00). Users would both enjoy the thrill of getting a deep discount on some great apps for very cheap or even free while risking a possible $10.00 purchase.

Obviously this is just an idea, not a working product, but I believe that there’s something to it. I’d love to hear your comments about whether or not something like this would work. I’m a little busy with my job hunt and my current project to get started on a project of this size, so if you’d like to run with the idea and develop it, please be my guest!

Photo Credits:
Roulette: Stoneflower
Flag of Iceland: Eizoman
Misty River:HelgaBJ
Northern Lights: Bruce89
Morocco: Archer 10
Australia:Ed Yourdon

What are you thinking about right now?

Are you thinking about what you have to do? What you should have done already but you haven’t done yet? Are you thinking about something you did that you wish you hadn’t done or perhaps done differently? Are you debating whether you should do A, B, or C or perhaps stay in bed and do none of them at all?

It takes some time to think these things through, I know. So please come back to this post once you’ve finished thinking. Come back when you’ve decided what you’re going to do (or have already done it). Come back when you’ve turned over an issue of your past, looked at every angle of it and are satisfied that you can let it go, so that you never have to think of it again. Come back when you’ve chosen A, B, or C or have decided to call in sick and stay in bed all day.

Come back when you’ve done any of the above. Don’t worry, this post will be here when you get back. It can wait.

Finished? Great. So let me ask you the same question again:

What are you thinking about right now?

Are you thinking about what you have to do? What you should have done already but you haven’t done yet? Are you thinking about something you did or didn’t do that you wish you hadn’t or perhaps done differently? Are you debating whether you should do A, B, or C or perhaps stay in bed and do none of them at all?

Sound familiar?

The morning gong woke us at 4:00AM. We were to get up and sit: spine straight, chin tucked, hands in our laps and direct all of our attention to the breath flowing in and out of our nostrils for two hours until breakfast time.

The first morning’s meditation was a struggle, not just because of an overall grogginess but also because of a never-ending stream of reminiscences, regrets, recriminations, resentments, assessments, aspirations, apprehensions, speculations, machinations, anxieties, fantasies and other errant thoughts–one after the other.

Up until now there had always been something to distract me, something to silence that stream. For me it was usually work, hulu, twitter, facebook, reading, writing, coding, or beers with friends. These activities kept me from recognizing just how scattered, how unfocused and untamed my mind really was. In the past few years, however, even the distractions didn’t seem to work.  I might have been watching one of my favorite shows on hulu, but for the life of me I couldn’t seem to watch it the whole way through. I’d pause it at the ten minute mark and check twitter/facebook/email/my phone/whathaveyou and then go back to the show (given that I wasn’t distracted to do something else after that).

I knew that I wasn’t the only one with a shattered attention span. One only has to look at the proliferation of productivity apps, guided relaxation tapes, and blog posts like this to know that people are desperately searching for ways to stay focused.

Personally, I had found certain guided meditation mp3’s to be most the helpful for regaining focus.  I would close my eyes and count from 1 to 10 after every breath. After about ten minutes or so I’d let go of the count all together and focus only on the breath. It usually worked.  If I was in a good or even neutral mood at the time of meditation I’d find that just 20 minutes helped me stay focused and present throughout the day.

If I was in a foul mood, however, the meditation would provide me with a feeling of well being at first, and then after an hour or so the negative thoughts and emotions would start to creep in, and before I knew it I was upset, distracted, or stressed out again. It felt as though my occasional 20-minute sessions of meditation provided only a temporary relief, like I was snipping away at the branches of the tree while getting nowhere near the roots.

Who Teaches the Technique?

About a year ago, Creighton, a friend of mine, told me about a 10-day retreat at a “Meditation Center” in Onalaska, WA (one of many worldwide). Onalaska is a rural town about halfway between Seattle and Portland. This center, among the many others, are built and maintained by an organization founded by S.N. Goenka, who also teaches the technique of Vipassana meditation to all the students through audio and video recordings of his instructions and discourses. “Vipassana” means to see things “as they really are” and is allegedly the meditation technique that the Buddha taught at his own meditation centers in India more than 2500 years ago.The pure technique was all but lost nearly everywhere but in Burma where it had been passed undiluted from teacher to student until the present day.

The organization that runs the centers is nonsectarian and people from all faiths are welcome to attend the retreats to become established in the technique.  There is no course fee and all costs of the retreat are covered by donations which students can make after completing the course.

After hearing about the course, and reading about my friend’s own experience on his blog, it was only a matter of time before I had decided to make a commitment myself and enroll.

Course Rules and Timetable

On the night of our arrival, we were assembled in the men’s section of the dining hall for orientation. Distractions during the retreat were to be kept to a minimum. We were forbidden to have any cell phones, reading materials or writing materials on us and were to turn them in for safe keeping at the beginning of the course. Men and women were to be segregated at all times except when we gathered in the meditation hall. We were forbidden to talk with, touch or make eye contact with any of our fellow students (questions for the assistant teachers were allowed during prescribed times, however). Finally, we were expected to keep to the course timetable, which meant nearly 10.5 hours of meditation per day. They served breakfast and lunch but no dinner ( the best meditation is done on an empty stomach!), although we did get an hour break at 5:00PM for tea and fruit.

Days 1-3: Clearing the Mind and Sharpening Focus

The meditations in the main hall were guided by recordings of Goenka himself who led us step by step through the technique. For the first three days we focused on “Anna Panna” or “Awareness of Breathing” meditation.

Of all days the first was the most difficult.  I was already in a state of agitation when I had arrived at the center and focusing on my breath with eyes closed only seemed to amplify this restlessness. I had expected the meditation exercise to have a calming effect, since that had been my experience with most “awareness of breathing” exercises I had tried in the past. There was one major difference, however.  We weren’t allowed to use any visualizations, mantras or counting to help focus our awareness.

Counting my breath had always made meditation easy. When I did this I could usually clear my head of most thoughts within the space of ten to fifteen minutes. I came to realize, however, that counting the breath was essentially the crutch that kept me from developing a deeper, more sustainable level of focus.

Counting is a crutch because it only clears the conscious mind (the thoughts and feelings we’re currently aware of) while it does nothing to clear the subconscious mind, the wellspring of those thoughts.  If the mind was to be likened to a room, and our muddled thoughts was steam fogging up that room, we’d  find that the subconscious would take up nearly the whole space.

In this room the conscious mind, or all the surface thoughts and emotions that we’re aware of, would probably be the size of a medicine cabinet mirror on the wall. To focus on one’s breath while simultaneously counting from one to ten would essentially be like wiping off the steam from the mirror. The conscious mind may be clear for a day or two, but eventually the fog starts to creep back in, and then we’re back where we started.

To focus on the breath without counting is like opening the door to the room. The steam flows out of the room but the mirror remains fogged up. Because the conscious mind is the only part of the mind that we are aware of, it appears as though we’re making no progress, when in truth we’re making significant progress.

The first day of meditation felt very much like this. I don’t think I’d be able to count how many times I found myself diverted or distracted from the breath by this or that random thought. Even when I was able to focus on the breath, there was always chatter in the background. For me it was usually the song “Barlights”, (particularly the “I feel alive” refrain). I’d like to count myself as one of the lucky ones though, because on the last day of the retreat when Noble Silence was lifted, I found out that one guy had the theme song from Gilligan’s Island in his head, while another guy had the Apples and Bananas song.

As we progressed onto Day 2 we narrowed our focus to the “touch of the breath.” This meant that we were to concentrate only where the breath brushed past our upper lip and the entrance of our nostrils.

This required much more concentration on my part. While the song in my head didn’t completely go away, it did recede into the background. By the end of the week, the background noise was reduced to mostly instrumental music; it seemed that my attention had focused to the point that there was no room for me to subvocalize lyrics in my head.

On Day 3 we kept our attention on the triangular area beneath the nostrils and above the upper lip, but this time we were to observe whether or not we could pick up any sensation other than the breath. This could be any sensation: heaviness, lightness, contraction, expansion, pulsating, itching, or any other subtle sensation which we weren’t able to name. By the end of the night I’m pretty sure I felt all of the above. When I collapsed at the end of the day and released my attention from that narrow area, it seemed as though anywhere my attention went that every nerve ending ignited with energy. Random showers of sparks beneath my skin.  It was almost as though I was witness to a fireworks display within my own body.

Day 4: Learning the Vipassana Technique

A very high level of focus is needed just to begin learning the technique of Vipassana meditation, and so, for the first three days, we were required to do awareness of breath meditation just to prepare for it. I had read beforehand that it was a body scanning technique, and because I had already observed strange and subtle sensations all across my body without even looking for them, I felt confident that I was ready to learn.

On Day 4, we were instructed to direct our attention from the top of the head to the tips of the toes and while some parts of my body (hands and feet especially) pulsed and tingled, I found other parts (like the middle of the back and certain places around the ears and scalp) to be blind, blank and devoid of any sensation whatsoever. I found it very frustrating, especially considering how cocky I felt before we had begun.

We were told that whenever we came across a blind spot to accept the fact that we were not able to pick up any sensations there and to spend a minute or two focusing on that area until we became aware of any sensation, be it subtle or gross. After that we were to move on to an adjacent part.

But Vipassana is not only an exercise in sharpening one’s awareness of sensations; it is also an exercise of increasing one’s equanimity to sensations. We had to learn not to judge or react to any sensation, be it pleasurable or painful. In order to develop this quality we were to hold the same posture for the duration of each sitting. Because holding the same posture for an hour can be very painful, it was an opportunity to observe the pain directly, objectively, and learn not to react to it or judge it. Unfortunately, this was not something I was able to do the first time around. I gave in to the pain at around the 40-minute mark and changed my posture.

Days 5 – 6 Refining the Technique

The first time I tried Vipassana was disappointing, but we had more than enough time to practice and refine the technique. Eventually, I was able to move my attention freely through every part of the body, even to the point where I was able to achieve a feeling of free flow from top to bottom. It was like a subtle wave of electricity coursing through my skin.

There also came a point where I was able to focus my attention directly on the intense pain that welled up from my knees.   The truly difficult part was to maintain enough presence of mind to continue scanning the body while bearing the pain.

There were short windows of time when I was able to look at the pain objectively and in those moments the pain lost its control over me. For minutes at a time, the part of the mind that judges, that divides things into categories of “good” and “bad”, “pleasant” and “unpleasant”, “painful” and “pleasurable” went dormant, and I was finally able to see the pain without judging it, without thinking of it as a “bad” thing to be avoided. It was only then that I truly understood what Shakespeare meant when Hamlet said “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” at an experiential level.

These moments came and went. The judging, reactive part of the mind would resurface and the pain would become pain-ful again. The intervals of clarity, however, lengthened as I continued to practice. There was one instance where I had been sitting for around an hour and fifteen minutes, when I found myself in the grip of a pain that wouldn’t go away. I grimaced. I swayed back and forth and there arose within me an “I give up” sensation.  It felt as though my whole body was going to wilt under the mental pressure. Somehow, however, there was a part of my mind that still held on to a shred of deeper awareness. I thought: “Let’s see what’s on the other side of this ‘I give up’ feeling.”

And that’s what I did.  My body did buckle over, but I waited, only a second or two it seemed, and suddenly that wilting, “I give up” sensation which I had thought was coming from within me, now seemed like a wilting flower more than 20 feet away. After that point the pain didn’t bother me at all. My mind was still and clear, and I was actually disappointed that I couldn’t sit longer when I heard the gong ring for tea time.

It was that breakthrough that helped me understand why we were asked to maintain the same posture during a sitting. For me, it helped put space between me and the sensation I experienced. In moments of clarity I no longer thought: “I am in pain.” But rather I thought: “I am aware of a very strong burning sensation.” Because I was detached from the pain in this way, I no longer reacted to it.

Not only was I able to develop a sense of detachment from physical pain, but from emotional pain as well. Through meditation, I was able to see very clearly that emotions were nothing but sensations in the body, albeit more subtle than a strong pain in the knees. Worry may manifest itself as a tight throbbing in the chest. Elation may feel like a shower of sparks rushing through the arms and legs. Whatever the emotion, there was a corresponding sensation.

Because I had developed the faculty to see physical pain for what it was and bring space between my sense of self and the sensation that my body was having, I found that I was able to do this for emotional pain just as easily. As I write this, I’ve already had come across several situations that have triggered a “negative” emotional sensation. Because of an increased level of awareness I was able to recognize those sensations the moment they arose. Also, because of a more developed sense of objectivity, I no longer identified myself with the emotional sensation. If I felt anger, I no longer thought “I am angry” but rather, “There’s a a tension rising up from the chest.” I chose not to react to the sensation, and also chose not to identify myself with it. Because of this it passed away just as quickly as it had come. There were no angry thoughts, no angry words spoken, just a ripple in the water and then everything was as still as it was before.

Days 7 – 10: Catharsis

We were told that when we stopped reacting to situations as they happen, the negative emotions from the past would start to bubble up to the surface. The explanation for this that made the most sense to me was that suffering was akin to a fire burning, and that every time we react negatively to a situation we add fuel to the fire.  Because we continue to have negative reactions to situations, we continue to add fuel and the fire never burns out. If we stop reacting, however, the fire will consume all the emotional baggage of our past.

On an experiential level, it seemed to me that negative emotional patterns tend to “lodge” themselves in some part of the body. For me, all the career related anxiety I’ve had over the past two years probably manifested as a pain in my right shoulder that ran up my neck to the right side of my face. The more minor negative emotions were so subtle, however, that I only noticed them on the body during meditation.

I imagine that there is only so much room in the body for negative emotions to manifest. The rest probably get stored up in the subconscious as psychological complexes waiting for some trigger to pull them up into our conscious awareness. It seems only natural that if we work to eliminate these emotional reactions that are currently lodged in the body, that our body will naturally attract the old baggage like a magnet. To put it another way: a clean sheet of iron will gather more rust than already rusty sheet.

By the 6th or 7th Day I began to feel those negative emotions welling up. The emotional pain didn’t seem to bother me, however, because I was able to distance myself from it. Like my burning knees the pain was there but it was no longer pain-ful. I felt the stress, the anger, the fear and the grief rise up within me and pass away as soon as it had come. It really did feel like I was throwing up the demons of the past. This purging of negative emotions continued until even after the course had ended. It wasn’t a pleasant experience, but it was an incredible catharsis.

On the final days of the retreat we were instructed to direct our awareness to the body when we weren’t formally meditating, to observe all sensations as we walked, ate, showered, and in bed as we were about to go to sleep.

On my meditative walks I found myself overwhelmed by the beauty of my surroundings. For the first time since I was five-years-old, there was no barrier of thought or judgment between me and what I observed. Little things like raindrops hanging from stalks of the tall meadow grass, or the quiet of the forest in the morning actually brought me to tears.

Practicing meditative awareness before bed also had incredible effect. I remember having a dream where I was on a pirate ship and was forced to walk the plank. My eyes opened and the first thing I was aware of was a shower of cold sparks running down the length of my body. I then realized that I was awake and shortly thereafter I was able to identify the sensation as fear. I don’t think I remember being so aware, especially just after waking up.  I went back to sleep and the next morning when the gong rang at 4:00AM, I woke up energized.

Practicing meditative awareness while walking, eating, showering etc. seemed to amplify the effect of our formal meditation sessions. Eventually I was able to perceive a uniform flow of subtle sensations up and down my body. This didn’t happen all the time, as we were told that a high level of awareness will tend to bring old emotions to the surface. These old emotions would manifest themselves as blind spots on the body. Sure enough, the sessions I had after experiencing incredible flow were replaced by a complete dullness. Observing these blind spots triggered strong emotional reactions whose cause might have been a year ago, ten years ago, or even more. The emotions were sensation alone, so who’s to say?

After the Retreat

The retreat ended on the morning of the 17^th, and even though we were allowed to talk to the other students on Day 10 in order to re-acclimate to the outside world, I still felt hypersensitive to everything around me. Other than calling my parents to tell them I was alive, I made no other contact with the outside world. I didn’t even power up my laptop. I think it would have been difficult to go out and meet anyone that day because some particularly strong emotions were welling up and I needed all my attention on them to ensure that I wasn’t overcome by them. I spent the rest of the day meditating in my apartment and writing down notes about my experiences.

In the days since returning from the retreat I’ve noticed that I’ve been able to maintain an incredible level of focus. I’ve been able to devote nearly all my time to the tasks which matter most to me without being diverted by twitter/facebook/email/hulu/whathaveyou. Perhaps most notable of all, is a sharpening of all my senses. One example: I remember that shortly after having my first cup of coffee near the end of the retreat, I could feel the caffeine snake through my veins and capillaries of my left arm. Food tasted better, and I could feel the texture of every grain in each mouthful of my favorite granola cereal when I came back home. The incredible new level of perception was intoxicating.

If you’ve read my last blog post, you know that I write this in a period of transition, but I can’t help but feel optimistic about the future. I have so much energy, so much focus now that I really (really) do feel like I can do anything without having my motivation sag along the way. Because of this, I feel positive about making meditation a permanent part of my daily routine.

Meditation Resources

If you’re interested in meditation, but are unsure about making the commitment for a 10-day retreat, I highly recommend checking the mp3’s from Free Buddhist Audio. One track that had been especially helpful for me before the retreat was the 20-minute awareness of breathing meditation. There’s also a 40-minute version if you need extra oomph.  Try this and other forms of meditation and see if it provides any benefits. If it does, you may find the motivation you need to commit to a 10-day retreat.

As of last Thursday, I am no longer working at TeachStreet.com.

To make a long story short, they hired me to drive traffic to the site. For the first few months I did just that, and helped increase traffic by over 50%.  To do this, I reached out to influential bloggers to earn links, guest blog posts and include them in a growing community which we called the Featured Blogger Program. Generally speaking, more links meant more traffic…at least it did until Google drastically changed their algorithm on February the 24th.  After the update, TeachStreet was (unfairly, we think) hit hard, and much of what I had done in the past to help increase traffic simply wasn’t effective anymore.

Ever since then, I had found it very difficult to stay motivated.  I had brainstormed new and creative ways to earn links and tried many new projects–none of them seemed to work. As the months progressed, I became increasingly aware of how little my efforts were contributing to TeachStreet’s bottom line.  Although I hadn’t admitted it to myself, I knew that deep down my job would probably be gone.

Since I knew that it was just a matter of time, last Thursday’s news came to me as both bit of a shock and a bit of a relief. It wasn’t fun to tell everyone goodbye, but considering what I had learned about the industry and the connections I had made in my short time there, I was in a much better position to find a great job in the startup/tech world than I was before I had started at TeachStreet.

When I had come to TeachStreet last September, I was ready to take any job at a startup. In fact, I had only spent one week looking when the CEO, Dave Schappell, offered me a job.  I liked the company, I liked its mission, and I liked the people who worked there.  I signed on without hesitation, and found myself working there the next day.

If I were to make that same decision over again, I still would have taken the job. Since I hadn’t spent much time “shopping around,” however, it should have come as no surprise to me that the work I found myself doing wasn’t always the best match for what I considered to be my strengths and weaknesses.

Thankfully, this time around, I have plenty of savings and time to carefully consider my next move. I’ll be reading several career books and hope to share some of the best insights that I can extract from them on this blog. Finally, I’ll be going on a 10-day meditation retreat in the hopes that I can gain a bit more clarity about what is really meaningful for me and to make sure that my next career decision reflects that deeper level of self-knowledge.

It’s never fun to get the axe, but I do feel optimistic about my next step. I want to personally thank Dave and the TeachStreet team for the opportunity for all that I’ve learned as well as the opportunity to connect with the wonderful people in the Seattle Startup community. It has been a great ride, and I’m excited about this new chapter.

UPDATE: Looks like some friends of mine are sharing this blog post. I didn’t plan to apply to anything until after the retreat, but just in case here’s my Resume.

A word of warning to the Type A personalities like myself, however:   The ten minutes per day DID help me stay committed to Goldhat, but very often I had tried to push myself to work when I had no energy or willpower to do so–especially on the weekends.  After about a month of this, I suffered a minor burnout. When I had recovered, I made sure that I didn’t force myself to work when I knew the quality of my output would suck anyway. Now, I’ll often end my work when I still feel like I can get more done. This helps me build a reserve of energy which carries on to the next day. So far, this seems to work for me, and I’ve managed to keep a reasonable balance between productivity and sanity.

Productivity insights aside, I’m very pleased to share with you a video interview I had done with Marquis Parker of marquisparker.com. Marquis is an MBA and business blogger whom I had met through my outreach for TeachStreet’s Featured Blogger Program. In addition to sharing his own insights about business and careers, he frequently interviews entrepreneurs, bloggers and successful businesspeople and gets them to share their stories. I’ve never shared the complete story about my career path on this blog, so anyone who’s interested can check it out here. Hope you like it!

A note: in order to prevent web scrapers from stealing his content, only the newest post on his site is available to those who don’t have an account with marquisparker.com. If you’ve come to this blog post late, you can still check out the interview after registering (for free).

Ten Minutes Is All It Takes

When I had moved to Japan after graduation, it was my plan to make a little money and work on my novel. I’d teach English classes during the day and hammer out a few pages at night.  By the year’s end I’d have a finished draft, good to go.

Instead, by the time I got home from work most every day I basically said “Fuck it. I’m tired,” and cracked open a beer.

Sound familiar?

“It’s Hard to Find the Time”

When you have side projects, be they in writing, photography, or an entrepreneurial venture, it can be difficult to put in the time or muster the energy needed to make them cook.  The problem was that you used to have all the time in the world.  You went to classes, did your homework, and worked on your passion projects afterwards.  Sometimes your homework was your passion project, as it was for me as a creative writing major.

Then you graduate, and before you know it your get your first job and eight hours knocked out of your day. If you haven’t developed enough self-discipline, you’ll find yourself going to the bar instead of going home and working on that project of yours.

That was pretty much what I did when I lived in Tokyo.  It took me five years to write five chapters of my novel.  Most of that writing was done on the weekend when the guilt from not doing anything had pushed me so far that I forced myself to squeeze a few paragraphs out of my brain. My passion project, that thing that was supposed to be “fun,” turned into a form of torture.

But you gotta eat, right?  You can’t slack off at your job and be working on your passion project on the side, can you? You’ve already spent eight hours working. There’s no way that you’re going to spend another two or three hours working on your novel (or whatever it may be). You want to blow off steam.  Have a drink. Veg in front of the TV. You worked hard. You deserve it.  Besides, you’re tired now, how good is your writing (painting, coding, etc.) going to be when you’re as exhausted as you are? You’d best wait for the time for when you feel inspired.

If the above paragraph sounds anything like your internal monologue when you come home from work, I recommend that you read this blog post twice, maybe three times so that you can catch yourself rationalizing as it happens. Inspiration isn’t going to come if you just wait for it.  You must make the time for Inspiration to come forth.  If you don’t, you might as well resign yourself the fact that you’re never going to work on your project again–that way you’ll at least feel better about not doing it.

My (failed) Attempts to Make the Time

I’ve tried many methods to motivate myself to work on my side projects.  One of them was the “break the big goal into mini-goals” method that Stephen Covey often talks about.  I tried that, and placed deadlines for each chapter until, one year later, I’d have a finished novel.

That didn’t work. For some reason all the mini-goals just made me think more about all those chapters that I had to write. Also, the arbitrary deadlines that I imposed upon myself for how much I should have gotten done by what date had no power on me.  The moment I fell behind in my schedule I was too demotivated to continue.

I also tried the “one page a day” method. There was a problem here too. Some days I came home so tired that I collapsed on to the bed.  I couldn’t write a page to save my life. When two or three days passed with nothing written, I abandoned this resolution altogether.

When I started working full-time last September, I had another side project, goldhat.org, that I had spent the better part of 7 months putting together. I wasn’t writing a novel any more, but I was (and am) just as passionate about the web app as I was the the novel I was writing.

When I was self-employed with no fixed income (a term which I believe should replace the term “unemployed”), I could spend every waking hour of the day coding for the app. When working for TeachStreet, I found that, like before, I was spending no time at all on my side project.

I justified the 2-3 months not working on Goldhat based on the fact that I was getting used to the new job and I had a three hour commute to Seattle twice a week.  When I finally found an apartment and and was getting into a smooth workflow, however, I realized that I had no more excuses. I had to make time for Goldhat right away or it would fizzle and die.

The Ten Minute Rule

I reflected upon my failures to make time for my novel in the past and realized what I had lacked: momentum. I would whip myself up in a motivational frenzy and then sputter out a week later.  What I needed was a commitment, even a small one, that I would make every day for my project.

This was my resolution: No matter what happened or how exhausted I was, I would devote ten minutes a day to one of my side projects, be it this blog, goldhat, or both.  If I felt like continuing after the ten minutes that was fine, but I had to spend 10 minutes minimum.

This took away all my excuses because no matter how busy or tired I got, there was no way that I couldn’t spend at least ten minutes.  Most days I ended up spending much more then the minimum ten minutes and often worked for two hours or more.  There was one day where I had come back from the gym ready to collapse, but I forced myself to spend at least ten minutes staring at the code for Goldhat’s WordPress plugin.  I don’t think I wrote a single line of code in those ten minutes, but the next day I was bursting with ideas on how to make the plugin work.  Because I was anxious to try those ideas out, I went straight to coding that day and probably spent more than three hours on the project.  This was on a weekday, mind you!

In the two weeks or so since I’ve imposed this 10 minute rule I’ve completed a stable version of the Goldhat WordPress Plugin, wrote an announcement for it on the Goldhat Blog, and also wrote the blog post preceding this one about writing out of your niche.  I probably could have done more If I committed myself to these projects full-time, but I’m still very happy with my progress.

This blog post itself is a product of the 10 minute rule. At 6:00PM yesterday I felt mentally exhausted. All I wanted to do was have a slice a pizza and a nice big glass of wine.  I remembered, however, that I hadn’t yet put in my 10 minutes and got to typing. I started writing at 6:00, and found myself at the end of this 1300+ word blog post at 8:09PM.  All I needed was those first ten minutes to get over a bit of inertia, and then I was good to go.

It's easier than you think.

As you may have noticed, this blog has been pretty quiet as of late. If you’ve been following me on twitter, however, you’ll notice that I’ve been writing quite a bit. I’ve been doing blog outreach for the hundreds of categories on TeachStreet, from Fitness Classes to Algebra Classes.  Oftentimes this outreach takes the form of guest blogging.  Each week we’ve tackled different categories, and though I do get a lot of support from the team, I’ve been doing most of the writing for the guest posts.

I’d be lying if I said this didn’t push me out of my comfort zone as a writer, especially when writing about subjects that I had no knowledge about. It forced me to be imaginative about ways that I could provide value when writing guest posts outside of my niche. I’ll admit that I floundered at first but I eventually did come up with a good system.

The system had three elements:

1. Deep Research — The first real challenge for me was to write for an animal law blog, something I knew very little about. How could I provide value to an audience who knew much more about the subject than I did? The answer was simple: research! I dove deep into the Internet and gathered information on peculiar laws regarding animal treatment around the world. By the time I was done, I was able to provide some interesting examples of laws the blog’s readers probably weren’t familiar with.  I may not have had the legal background that most of the blogs writers did, but because I put in the time to find something interesting I was able to provide value.

2. Providing a Personal Perspective –  There’s nothing more engaging than a personal story.   Perhaps you want to write for a programming blog but you know you have nowhere near the level of programming expertise that you think a blog post would require.  As a beginner, however, you can always provide personal reflections about what starting out as a programmer is like.  Everybody was a beginner at everything once, and it can be refreshing for experts to remember what it was like to be a beginner again.  I used this angle when writing about Zumba (A latin dance cardio exercise) on the TeachStreet Blog.

3. Using your expertise as an angle – I’ve only tried Yoga once (and it hurt) so I know that I’m not very qualified to give any advice on that topic. As an SEO for TeachStreet, however, I know many SEO techniques that would be useful to a yoga teacher who might be interested in promoting their lessons online. It doesn’t end at SEO skills, however.  Maybe you are (or were) an accountant by trade.  You could easily write an excellent blog post about the costs involved to set up and run a yoga studio.  Just because you’re not an expert in Yoga doesn’t mean you don’t know something that yoga enthusiasts would find useful.

One lesson that I’ve learned from all this guest posting is that you should never believe that you aren’t qualified to provide value in any situation.  Doing so will limit the number of new things that you try and thus hamper your growth as a writer.  Give it a shot, and if you don’t hit the target, shoot somewhere else:

If you wanted to have a look at what I’ve been writing here are the links.  Most of these blog posts were published in December:

If you want to start with the best ones, it seemed that the posts on Urban Muse Writer, The Omniglot Blog and the Amateur Traveler were to most commented on/retweeted.

Don’t Know the First Step? Start Learning. (The Entrepreneur on Campus)

Why You Should Master The Art of Downloading People (Oddpodz.com)

Disappointment: The Key to Creative Freedom (The Urban Muse Writer)

Zumba: Adding Spice to Your Workout Routine (Hive Health Media)

7 Ways to Effortlessly Thread a Needle (Sketchee.com)

Why I Still Go To Libraries (hhibner.blogspot.com)

Whatever You Do, Don’t Tell Kids They’re Smart! (SimpleLeap Blog)

Travel as a Spiritual Experience (The Travel Word)

Odd Animal Laws, Odd Culture (The Animal Blawg)

3 Things I Learned About Americans By Not Living With Them (Amateur Traveler)

Learning a Foreign Language While Living Overseas (The Omniglot Blog)

How to Make Money From the Grave (Wills, Trusts and Estates Prof Blog)

The Top 3 Education Trends of 2010 (EduInReview.com)

How To Deal With Difficult Reading Assignments (Psych Futures)

Zumba: A Beginner’s Experience (The TeachStreet Blog)

Bargains to Look For In January (Bargainmoose)

How to Make Your College Application Stand Out (My College Calendar Blog)

My Love Affair With Rotten Soybeans (Swanky Dietitian)

The 121-year-old Nintendo Game (Yehuda Games Blog)

How Making More Money Can Drive You Into Debt and How To Avoid It (Finance Wand)

Mount Nokogiri – Home To Japan’s Largest Sitting Buddha (Travelogue of an Armchair Traveller)