An unusually wet summer. Poor infrastructure, unable to deal with too much or too little water. A country torn apart, first by corruption and political instability, then by terrorism. A collection of people who have struggled for their identity since 11 September 1948. A culture of excess, selfish self-interest and paranoid conspiracy theories.

Yes, we’re a troubled nation, but that’s not the problem here. Yes, there is donor fatigue and a global recession, not to mention the “Pakistan=terrorist haven” equation bandied about by Western media since 2001. But that’s not the problem.

Malik Riaz’s motivations aside, the man has an extremely valid point – if the richest people of Pakistan invested their wealth into rebuilding Pakistan, we wouldn’t need any external aid. The truth is that while this would result in more power being concentrated into the hands of the few (those who come forward into the limelight will not step back into the shadows when asked to), it may just be part of the solution that Pakistan has been looking for decades.

But that’s the rich and the influential – what about the rest of us? What about the 99.99% of the Pakistani population that’s part affluent, part middle class and mostly poor and destitute? What can we do?

Pakistan’s #1 Problem

• We expect the world to help (they’re better off than us).
• We expect the rich to help (they have money to burn).
• We expect our parents and family elders to help (they are responsible for us).
• We expect our friends to help (they have more time for this).
• We expect charity and social service organisations to help (that’s their job, isn’t it?).
• We expect rich corporations to help (those blood-suckers should pay back).

And the list goes on.

But we never expect OURSELVES to help.

Every nation, every society and every person faces hardships and challenges, some that will be threats to your very existence. The only way to thrive in the face of adversity – to overcome it successfully and prevent it from happening again – is to take responsibility for what happens to you and the people around you.

All of us – the rich, the poor, the middle class – we have a responsibility to help those around you. Of course it’s different for each person and it depends on your circumstances, but just because you live with your parents, go to school or make very little money does not mean that you can’t help.

Maybe you can spend an hour a day helping a local charity collect rations. Maybe you can contribute 10% of your monthly income to a local cause. Maybe you can donate some of your old clothes and books.

If you’re in business, jack up your prices by 10%, and advertise that 10% of all profits go to charity. Ideally you would pay that 10% out of your pocket if that bothers you, then you can easily leverage your position in society to generate more funds.

There are people who talk a lot about helping out, but when it comes to acting on it, they restrict themselves to ‘spreading the word’ instead of giving themselves. Yes, awareness is important, but a problem of this magnitude requires more than just words. Spread the word by all means, but give first.

There is so much we can do ourselves. Whether it’s the national education crisis (yes, it’s a crisis, because even though the literacy rate is increasing we’re grooming children for mediocrity and service and we are nowhere near the standards expected from a modern society), or floods, or something small and local, there is tremendous power in standing up to protect your own interests and of those around you instead of sitting by idly.

You can choose to determine your own destiny, you can choose to build the country and future that you want, or you can choose to stand aside watch it all go to hell.

There is no shame in asking for help. But help yourself first. There’s nothing wrong with expecting others to help. But start by giving first.

You’ll be surprised at how much we can accomplish if everyone just gives 10% of their time, their savings, their possessions – once a year – towards building a better future for our country.

Please give what you can to help your country. You can get started with this Flood Relief effort.

There’s no right answer. You could say it’s one of the five pillars of Islam, and that’s fine. You could say that you do it because everybody else around you does it, and that’s fine too. You maybe do it to feel closer to God and to purify your soul, which is brilliant, and absolutely fine.

But why do it one month in an year?

My issue, if you’ve gathered, is not with fasting nor with it’s purpose. Of all the tenets of Islam, fasting is the one that’s focused on the individual, on your inner self. Depending on how deep you want to go into the philosophy behind fasting, you could argue that it’s good for your health, you could argue that it helps you become more compassionate, and you could even argue that only by learning to discipline yourself (most importantly your mind) can you become a better person / better Muslim.

But wouldn’t an exercise of such great value to the human soul and to the sheer Muslimness of you be much more useful if it was conducted on a regular basis? In essence – wouldn’t it be better if you fasted once a week, all throughout the year, instead of 29-30 days at a stretch out of 354-355 days (lunar calendar)?

If you get past your initial horror of changing anything you’ve been taught, the benefits are mind-numbingly obvious:

1. You fast more – roughly 50 times as compared to 30 times during Ramadan. If God really loves those who fast, then you’re bound to please him more this way.

2. Countless nutrition studies point to regular fasting (as in once or twice a week) as a critical factor in improving the long-term health of individuals. Plus it’s a great weight loss tool – you’ve built a day of detoxing your body into your weekly routine – and combine that with an active lifestyle and you’ll shed weight naturally.

3. It’s also infinitely more practical. Currently Muslim societies tend to treat Ramadan as a time when it’s completely OK to blow off work because hey, you’re fasting and it’s tough. Government institutions take half-days the whole month, people stop working and focus on eating (the antithesis of what Ramadan is about – self-control), and generally it’s become an ritualistic excuse to slack off.

Let’s cut that out and make fasting more manageable and a part of our daily lives as opposed to a month that everybody stops working in.

4. It’ll make you a better Muslim. A weekly fast encourages you to explore your spiritual side on a regular basis and continously re-evaluate your life in terms of what’s right and wrong. Again, instead of taking a month off from your hedonistic lifestyle, you can build a healthy dose of moderation into it by fasting once a week.

5. Zakat is another key part of Islam, so rolling that into the day of weekly fasting again makes it a part of your regular routine as opposed to something you do once a year.

The best part is, you already have the perfect day of the week for it – Friday.

Followup Thoughts

The only argument against this is a resistance to change. There is no heresy – the significance of Ramadan can be maintained by observing the relevant days as holy ones, similar to how we treat other days in the lunar calendar. It’s actually more beneficial – to yourself and to society – than a month-long break which is preceded and followed by 11 months of hedonism.

We’ve become so dogmatic and fanatical in our beliefs that there’s no room left for either reasoned debate or accepting a difference of opinion. It’s a symptom of the divides in our society but it’s also a global trend where polarization seems to be growing by the day. We need to change the way we live – not just once a year but every week, all the time.

Of course there’s no way this idea would ever be accepted at large – there’s too much at stake for those who are vested in resisting practical thought and maintaining old ideals that create divisions across religious lines. If we haven’t been able to reconcile a centuries old political conflict between Sunnis and Shias, there’s very little hope to do something productive. Plus who wants to be so ‘disciplined’ throughout the year? Our laziness, more than our fear of change, will prove to be the ultimate defense against progress.

Update (06/09/2010)

The feedback I received on this idea focused on two things – one, that we shouldn’t change what’s been set down as law, and two, that spreading fasting out throughout the year would reduce it’s significance.

Given that we already pick and choose what interpretation to believe, it’s safe to say you’ve already changed your religion to suit yourself and the issue you have here is psychological and nothing to do with the sacred nature of religion.

The second point is amusing, actually. The point of fasting was never to show the world, it was never about ‘significance’, external or otherwise. The core point is, and has always been, about spiritually cleansing yourself. Sure, focusing it on one month out of 12 can concentrate the impact, but that impact is then lost in the next 11 months. But that is to ignore ground realities – the month of fasting is now the month of false moralities and feasting, with hypocrisy and over-indulgence rampant (the very things fasting was supposed to avoid). The reason for this is part human nature, and partly the insanity of asking people to behave only 1 month out of 12.

Ask them to do it every week, and they’ll learn it as a habit. Habits are tougher to let go of than religious principles, which are eagerly discarded at the first opportunity.

There’s nothing. I cleared my mind of pressing concerns, of plans and money and sex and everything else. I cleared it all out, and then there was nothing. No inner voice, no spark of genius, just space. Nothingness. I was a zombie.

We’re all zombies. The remarkable has escaped us, somewhere between the minute we started asking questions and the time we started worrying about broken relationships, about money, about religion, about survival, about houses and cars and clothes and work. WORK. Work. The spark never had a chance against Work.

What I want in life is measurable. Money. Fame. Health. What bullshit. We’ve gone from wondering what life held for us to repeatedly fall into the same patterns that we rebelled against in our youth. Maybe the purpose of life really is to become a mindless zombie, but to lose that spark of wonder and creativity from your childhood? That is murder.

Children can be adorable. They can also be very annoying. But there’s something about children that we collectively work towards destroying – their identity, their spirit, their natural capacity to create and to explore new ideas. The regimentation comes too quickly, wreaks too much havoc and leaves behind incomplete men and women, capable of surviving as sheep (with some thriving) but incapable of standing on their own to produce / contribute anything of real value to their own lives or to the world around them.

Children have the most wonderful dreams and the self-assurance to persevere beyond reason for those dreams. As grown-ups, we have the means to make any dream come true.

Maybe it’s time we stepped back from the daily grind and dared to dream again. It’s not easy, it’s not always pretty either, but you must revive that spark inside you, the one that makes you create new worlds and spawns new challenges for you.

If you can’t dream, at least make someone else’s dreams come true. We have the means to do so, every day, starting from your home and the people closest to you.

After all, wouldn’t you want your dreams to come true?

Saturday’s TEDxLahore was history in the making.

It’s a bold claim to make – history is made every single day by men and women committed to doing things instead of talking about them, all around the world and here in Pakistan.

So what makes a gathering of 400+ minds – handpicked, volunteers and easily the smartest group of people getting together in Lahore that day – an important event?

Quite simply, it inspired us to do many different things.

I won’t lie to you – there’s a good chance the good momentum built up by this event – all the feel-good factors – will be washed away in the next week as real life takes over. There’s a good chance that the new connections made (assuming that you weren’t hanging out just with your friends) will be rendered meaningless due to lack of action. If you were watching the event remotely or were present, there’s a good chance this will be the last time (till the next such event) that you felt inspired or compelled to save the country or do something meaningful with your life.

But even if 10% of the people present made worthwhile connections, even if 10% of the attendees get inspired enough to start a new venture, even if 10% of the viewers get the motivation to bring people together in future events to replicate TEDx in their cities…it would 7 hours (not to forget several weeks for the volunteers who organised it) well spent.

But enough about the value – I noticed haters on Twitter and at the event and my comments from last night still hold true – screw the haters, I was inspired several times over. Despite a few poor presentations (poor in presentation skills, not necessarily in content or the speaker’s own knowledge / skills), most of the talks were well-done and entertaining, and as the day progressed they were definitely inspiring.

After the event (and during it) the discussions tended to focus on two topics: the quality of the speakers / talks and the organisation of the event. It’s a pity that so much energy was spent discussing the event and not the ideas shared by the speakers, in a way it’s indicative of our culture which as a majority likes to deconstruct and criticise instead of tackling core issues head on.

But let’s look at these two talking points in detail:

The Speakers

Overall, a good selection of speakers and at the end, you couldn’t leave the place without a spring in your step and dozens of ideas floating in your head. It was a bit tiring sitting and listening to people talk for 6 hours (I was never a patient student), but you couldn’t leave for fear of missing something important.

I know that many people who didn’t attend or watched from afar hold this view: it’s not necessary to go to such an event to do something good in the world. That’s 100% true, but of all those people, unless you’re not doing something already, unless you’re not making a contribution to this world beyond your detached cynicism, you’re just making excuses for your inaction. As a fact, the people who attended TEDxLahore are more likely to go out and make a significant contribution to improving the world around them than the haters trying to pull them down.

I know it sounds idealistic but it’s not. I’ve put down such events myself in the past, but here I am, 8 years on from that day in LUMS when I decided that I wanted to do something significant in my life to help the country, and I don’t think I’ve succeeded in doing much. Most of those 8 years have been spent looking down at social events like these – because I didn’t believe that they were any good. That was wrong. There was plenty to learn and plenty to be inspired about – not necessarily about the things that people were doing and sharing on stage but generally about your own ideas and making them come true.

Back to the Talks – there’s a certain expectation attached to the TED brand, plus almost everyone attending the event has been fed on a diet of the best TED Talks online. Compared to these benchmarks, it’s hard to rank any of the talks as being ‘good enough’. However, many TED Talks are average, and for a brand starting afresh in Pakistan (I know they’ve done an event before) it was a good effort.

It started out fairly well, more informational than inspirational, but from the third speaker to the end of the first half of the event, it went downhill, to the point where the crowd even spoke up in response to a speaker’s innocent question about whether they had more time. But the second half was fantastic, inspirational, educational, with several standing ovations for the speakers and a genuinely positive buzz in the audience despite being a bit tired.

You also have to understand that not everyone is the best speaker or the most interactive speaker – in fact TED Talks aren’t meant to be super-interactive. They’re meant to share ideas and their possible applications. They are meant to inspire. From that perspective, they should have gone with fewer speakers and a more compact program, but that doesn’t take away from the overall quality of the speakers and the event.

The Organisation

You can look at the few negatives – it didn’t start on time, some famous applicants got rejected, there were sound issues at some points, there were connectivity issues for remote speakers, there wasn’t enough done to promote the event, the theme was overwhelmingly cultural and socio-economic despite an obvious infusion of technology in every subject, etc etc.

Or you can look at the overwhelming positives – the sound worked well most of the time, whenever they faced connectivity issues they were resolved, not abandoned, to organise such an event while you hold regular jobs and without being paid for it is near-impossible, they did an excellent job of engaging the crowd whenever the mood seemed sagging, the plant a tree idea was fantastic even though many people left their plants at the event, and the live streaming worked well most of the time.

And last but not least, for a free event, this had better speakers and better content than many events I’ve paid to attend.

It’s easy to sit around and complain but the real question is, what can you do about it instead of complaining? Either fix it or shut up, and most people did neither. We’re geared as a society to accept things for free, and the TED association set the bar high, but there was genuine quality throughout, and the mid-session dip experienced at the end of the first half shouldn’t take away from an overall successful event.

It would be remiss of me not to offer suggestions for the next TEDxLahore and for all future TEDx sessions:

• Pick fewer speakers but do not compromise on their presentation skills.
• Get better sponsors. The Wi-Tribe sponsorship was excellent, so was Nestle’s, but they could have done a bit more – perhaps partnering with a local social media company to boost awareness of the event itself, working with a newspaper / tv channel to enhance coverage, working with a local production company to manage the sound / recording, etc.

  I got the feeling the people in management didn’t have a lot of marketing experience, and future events should, as a requirement, have marketing folk in the mix, people who bring in new ideas to promote and reduce costs. I’m volunteering.

• Enhance networking opportunities amongst attendees. Let attendees decide to share their profiles and contact details, and allow attendees to interact online and outside the event as well as onsite. Also allow speakers the option to share their profiles if they wish to do so.
• Get the audience to rate the speakers and provide feedback to the speakers after the event. In fact, get audience feedback in a measurable, systematic way for the whole event. You won’t improve until you learn to give people what they want most.
• Manage the attendee selection / rejection process better.
• Generate enough funds from sponsors to pay the volunteers – you’ll get better work done, and on time too.
• Let me manage the next TEDxLahore event

Post-Event Thoughts

The ideas shared on the stage got drowned out – and it’s a pity. Still, there was some excellent coverage of the event on twitter by folks like Awab, Sehar and Haris, and since all the talks will be available online, I encourage you to go and watch a few of them. Especially the ones by Dr Asher Hasan, Dr Zeeshan, Dr Nadeem and the gentleman from UK who was streamed through Skype and talked about the power of ideas in changing the world (Mr Majid, I think). These were by far the best talks, although most of the rest weren’t bad either.

The videos should be uploaded later next week, make a point to watch them.

And whatever you do, remember that taking action and working together is more important than just talking and trying to keep your ideas to yourself. Of course, there’s ownership of ideas and there’s a desire to do things your way, but you can either learn to work with other people, or you can go at it on your own. The third option is doing nothing, and that’s unacceptable.

You’ll read about how forcing yourself is the wrong option when it comes to fighting procrastination and that you can go much further by being nice to yourself. You’ll also read about how expectations attached to tasks can make them impossibly difficult to complete and how to work around this. Finally, you’ll read more about short-term vs long-term rewards, and why, in cold hard numbers, procrastination is a bum deal for you.

This is based on my own experience in dealing with procrastination, insightful sessions with close friends on how to deal with unrealistic expectations and what I’ve learned from reading a diverse amount of helpful material on the topic, including Anthony Robbins, Michael Masteron, Robert Ringer, David Allen and many others. You’ve all been a great help in improving my life, thank you.

1. Stop Procrastinating By Being Nice To Yourself
2. Procrastination and Unrealistic Expectations
3. Procrastination and Short-Term v Long-Term Rewards

Stop Procrastinating By Being Nice To Yourself

Procrastination starts with how you talk to yourself.

The moment you tell yourself “I have to do this” or “I should do that” or “I must do it” (or any variation), you’re essentially trying to force yourself to complete a task.

And how successful has that been with the last kid you’ve tried that with? It works sometimes but usually it’s a pain in the ass until someone smarter than you comes along, gives the kid some love and positive incentives, and gets the job done.

We’ve grown up, but emotionally our sub-conscious is primal, geared to rebel against force (what we mistakenly call ‘free will’) and resist ‘control’, or in other words, resist anything that leads us to do what we haven’t decided to do ourselves in the first place.

The sub-conscious definitely responds to something (otherwise we’d never get anything done), and that’s incentives. “What’s in it for me?”, far from being a ‘bad’ question to ask, instantly helps you focus your priorities in terms of WHY doing a particular task is important to you (financial gain, personal image, social acceptance, altruism, avoid going to jail – all tangible, solid incentives for us to do something).

By talking to yourself in terms of how completing a task will benefit you (instead of ‘forcing’ yourself to do something), you’re far more likely to WANT to do it. And once your attitude shifts from ‘resisting’ to ‘looking forward to’, most imaginary obstacles (I don’t have enough time, it’s too difficult, I don’t know how to do it) are replaced by positive thoughts on how to get things done (how can I take out time for this, I can do this step by step, maybe I can ask someone for help).

‘Just doing it’ doesn’t work on everyone, and failure to bring yourself out of a state of procrastination can make you feel worse about yourself. But if you’re change the questions you’re asking yourself, if you simply stop trying to force yourself and find out how to motivate yourself, you’ll learn two things:

1. You’ll realise that some of the things you’re beating yourself up about not doing are actually things that have no benefit for you. You can just NOT do them, guilt-free, by accepting that these tasks have little or no meaning to you.

2. You’ll find out that for the things that really matter to you, you have massive incentives to get them done. And once you complete those tasks, you’ll have made tangible progress in your life, something that will make you feel 100 times better (warning, exaggeration) than when you were procrastinating.

Once you get addicted to that feeling of accomplishment, there’s nothing quite like it.

People will tell you that being lazy is bad, or that you have to meet certain expectations in life. The thing is, it’s OK to be lazy if you don’t have any pressing goals or if you’re not aiming too high in your life. It’s OK to switch off once in a while and take it easy. What’s not OK is beating yourself up over things you might not want to do.

Procrastination and Unrealistic Expectations

A common reason for procrastination is the extraordinary amount of expectations attached with important tasks. The more important a task, the greater the expectation attached to it that you MUST do it. The greater the expectation, the greater the resistance, meaning that the things that really matter in your life are those that you are subconciously resisting the most.

What usually happens when you’re procrastinating? You find it a lot easier to motivate yourself to finish small, unimportant tasks or laze around – there are far fewer expectations from you in these situations, and it’s a surefire way of deflecting the stress that the high expectations create. In fact, the expectations can be so extreme that you could procrastinate about something for months, even years, with your life suffering irrepairable damage in the process.

Sidenote: I have it on good authority that this stress has led to otherwise smart, dedicated people dropping out of university in their final year. The stress of expectations can bring anyone down, no matter how smart or how intelligent they are. In fact, the smarter you are, the more you tend to think about things and the worse it will be for you.

Eliminating these expectations is easier said than done, but it’s something you can become better at through self-awareness. We try too often to fit ourselves in an idealistic mould, an imaginary description of ourselves made up of social expectations, childhood dreams and peer pressure. Thing is, we’re changing all the time, evolving so to speak, so to stick to one description of ourselves is ridiculous, and it’s just as ridiculous to use the dreams of 10 years ago or the expectations of people who’ve NOT lived your life to be the foundation of that self-image.

Learn to build your own self-image, from your dreams today and from what you expect of yourself, today. Don’t let the past or anyone on the outside try to weigh upon you, it will only distort the truth, bring you down and generally get you to waste a lot of your time and energy. You don’t have to burn bridges – far from it. But having the awareness to know who you are and how that doesn’t change simply because you don’t do something ‘important’ will help in managing those extremely high expectations.

And mind you, these expectations have to be reduced to a point where they stop bothering you and you can start thinking of these tasks in more positive, incentive-based terms. It will happen with time as you learn to create a truer self-image and learn to reduce the importance of the expectations attached to each task and instead focus on the benefits of the task itself.

And you know what? When you let go, when you can look at a ‘to-do item’ without feeling the weight of attached expectations, you’ll realise that you have a clear picture of what’s really important to you and what’s not. It’s becomes a simple matter of picking tasks based on their value, and that in turn makes it easier for you to get them done.

Procrastination and Short-Term v Long-Term Rewards

An inevitable outcome of procrastination is the overvaluing of short-term rewards over long-term rewards. As the famous procrastination quote goes, hard work pays off over time, but laziness pays off right now.

Thing is, it doesn’t pay off (unless you use the time to think and work through the crushing expectations and focus on the incentives, thus motivating yourself to go back and get the task done). It doesn’t pay off because you’re if that task is important to you in value (not expectations), then putting it off for the future means you’re denying yourself the rewards of getting it done. So for as long as you defer this task – be it your quest to lose weight or do your MBA or spend time with your family – you are losing, every day, the rewards that you would have gained by getting these important things in your life sorted out as quickly as possible.

There’s no equivalent mathematical model for this, but if you put the value of losing weight at 5 / day (important but not top priority) and the value of eating junk food at 2 / day (fun but not your life’s main goal), then you’re effectively getting lesser rewards every day by continuing to pursue an unhealthy diet / by not working out.

To take a different, and equally common example, let’s suppose the decision is between completing your higher education and getting work experience / enhancing your professional career. Both are important, but the weight of expectations might lead us to skew the importance of the less-important task higher than it actually is.

So let’s say the value of doing your MBA (or completing your bachelor’s degree) is at 10 / day – one of the most important goals in your life. On the other hand, gaining work experience and furthering your professional career is also very important to you, let’s say around 7 / day. The thing is, when you have to decide between two important tasks, your decision-making gets needlessly influenced by stress and an inability to accept change. It might be that you find studying too stressful and working, with less expectations since you’re starting out fresh, a lot less demanding. It might be that you’ve already starting working and feel comfortable, and don’t want to uproot yourself and push to a new environment.

The mind can create all sorts of rationalisations to justify decisions, but the only reason that matters is this – what’s more important? You do what’s most important first, and the rest can follow.

As a rule, “I’ll do this some other time” is not an acceptable reason not to finish something right away (or in the near future). If you don’t have time now with your current workload, do you think you’ll have time in the future, where not only you will have a similar workload but also have a dozen or more ‘deferred’ items that you want to do at ‘some other time’? Of course not. If you don’t have time today / now, you’re not going to have time for it tomorrow / next month / next year.

It’s not just short-term v long-term, it’s also about maximising your life’s value and making sure that you don’t waste what you have. I said earlier that being lazy isn’t bad in itself – it’s not, but deliberately choosing to do something less important and foregoing the more important things in your life is criminal.

So be lazy if you’ve got nothing better to do, stick to what you’re doing if that’s the most important thing in your life, but if you’re procrastinating, snap out of it. You’re only hurting yourself, and you’re missing out on doing what’s important in the best possible time – now, the best years of your life left to you.

Also See:

10 Ways To Get More Done In Less Time
10 Simple Rules For Online Success

Sometimes you might find it difficult to show up with your “A” game – however, if something is difficult it isn’t an excuse for not making it happen. If you find it difficult it just means that you either need to find a shortcut (work smarter) or dig deep and push through (work harder).

Today I want to talk about something related to competence – risk-taking.

Part of the philosophy of giving a project your 100% every day is that you are always pushing for improvements. At one time or the other, this push will require you to take risks, and it is at this point in time that you will feel the most resistance, when you will find it most difficult to ‘bring your A-game’ to the table.

Risk-taking is an integral fact of business and blogging. Every day we’re faced with choices that require us to leave the comfort of the familiar and venture into the unknown.

Should you hire a new writer? Is this new ad network worth your time? Will you take time out today to build links to your blog instead of writing your daily 5 articles? Is it a good idea to purchase advertising on that site or would it be smarter to keep the money and reinvest into a new design?

When faced with choices, our minds do something very interesting. You will intuitively know what the right decision is (as long as your priorities for your blog are straight), but whether you will be emotionally inclined towards it will depend on how ‘familiar’ it is. With choices that result in taking the unknown path (i.e. taking a risk), chances are that you will come up with rationalisations to avoid taking that step.

Real-world example – I have a friend who runs a very successful construction business. It takes him 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, plus another 6 hours on Sunday. That’s 78 hours per week of work, and this guy is running himself into the ground while building his business up. On one hand he’s happy with his success, but on the other hand it’s clear that he’d like to grow but cannot scale the business. Why Not? Because he hasn’t found a way to replicate himself.

This is a situation many bloggers are familiar with. After a certain point it becomes impossible for a blog to grow unless the owner leverages money for other peoples’ time instead of working on it 24 hours a day. Whether it is hiring a designer or a programmer or just to bring in new writers, it’s a risk the blogger has to take and as a result there’s a natural resistance to it.

This fear of the unknown (for that’s what it is – fear) limits you as a blogger. To paraphrase the Roman historian Tacitus (who was talking about leaders), the desire to play safe stands against every great blogger and blog. There will come a time when you will hit a plateau in your blog – and if you want to move past it, you will have to overcome your fear of the unknown, take risks and push forward to the next level.

Risk Taking 101

Some people look at guys like Tim Ferriss and Matt Furey and wonder how some people can accomplish so much in their lives – it seems inhuman until you realise that these people have an extraordinary willingness to take risks and explore the unknown. This drive doesn’t always pay off, but in most cases you end up being better off than before.

Today’s takeaway: Look at your blog and your blogging efforts and pinpoint the risks that you’ve been avoiding for the last few weeks or even months. Pick one of these risks, discuss the options with your friends and family (or people who know your business) and if it’s the right thing, do it.

And then repeat this once a day (or once a week if you’re doing ‘projects’) with your blog. You don’t have to turn into blind risk-taker, but by constantly pushing your limits and what you do with your blog you’ll not only grow your blog but you’ll also discover new opportunities in blogging and business that were never available to you before.

This article was originally written on 25 Sep 2007 for Performancing.com.

Simply put, craft your killer headline first. Simply writing any ordinary headline won’t cut it – you need to dig deep, hit the headline swipe files and spend time creating a gem of a headline.

How this helps bloggers:

• Forces you to focus on the main idea behind your post, which in turn helps the internal monologue run clearer.
• Guides you towards the type of post you can / should write. If the headline is designed to create a discussion, then you can write a conversational post. On the other hand, a list headline can help you focus on creating a list and perhaps fleshing it out to create cool linkbait.
• Allows you to get off a good start – a great headline with an average article will do better than a great article with an average headline in terms of social media. You might think it’s unfair but that’s how our minds work especially in an attention-starved economy. The headline is king, and everything else leads from there.
• If you find the basic idea not interesting enough, you’ll be able to stop there and not waste time writing a long post only to find out later that it doesn’t get a good response from readers.
• You may end up with several headlines, leading to several concrete post ideas instead of a jumbled up bunch in your head.

The next time you’re stuck for ideas, try this approach – write the headline first, and shape the article accordingly. If it works for sales copywriting (where success is measured in hard numbers), it works for blogging as well.

Further reading:
101 Great Posting Ideas That Will Make Your Blog Sizzle
Posting Tactics for a Well Rounded Blog
10 Killer Post Ideas

This article was originally written on 8 Sep 2007 for Performancing.com.

The reality is, us bloggers could use a huge kick up the ass once in a while as well. We get sloppy, we sometimes let our standards slide and worst of all, when it comes to making improvements we look at external factors, not ourselves.

Last month I started compiling a list of ’strategies’ to improve my own blogging – I’m sharing that list here. We can’t become better bloggers overnight – it takes a lot of hard work, just like a blog – but like working on a blog, the best results are achieved when you stick to it and work at it for a long time.

1. Create a Commitment to your Blog – and then keep it

In simple terms: right now, someone else who is just as smart as you is working hard to get their blog to the top. They’re committed to the vision they’ve set for their blog, and they’re doing whatever it takes to make it a reality.

The big question is, why aren’t you?

Find that one target for your blog that you are willing to work the most for, and then get busy doing it.

2. Focus on the Conversation on your Blog

Blogging is a one-to-many medium, but smart bloggers know who to turn it into an active group conversation between the readers and themselves. This requires the ability to communicate effectively – and it’s something that us bloggers can train ourselves to do better.

If you want to engage your readers and improve the conversation on your blog, you have to a) be clear, b) refocus your attention towards the audience and c) become credible.

3. Don’t Settle For Being Good Enough

If you’re a good writer (and a good communicator), you should be able to talk the talk when it comes to blogging about a particular subject.

But can you walk the walk? For a blogger dealing with subjects that involve practical application (self help, any skills-based area (SEO, web design, wood-working, photography, fitness, self defense, etc), competence in your chosen field goes a long way in establishing your credibility.

4. Love Your Blog, Love Your Blogging

A blogger’s passion for his subject and his blog shines through his writing. If you have passion, your words will carry conviction, your ideas will be persuasive and you will come across as someone who cares about his work. Without passion it’s quite hard to maintain the drive and energy needed to work on a blog day in and day out (not all of us are blessed with god-like self-discipline).

And if you’ve lost your passion one day (it happens to the best of us), here’s how (and why) you can continue blogging without losing your step.

5. Be Positive and Trust Yourself

Blogging is a tough gig. It takes a lot of time and hard work to be successful and if that wasn’t enough to make you glum, there is always a snarky commenter or two (or hundreds) lurking around who have little else to do but send negative thoughts your way.

It’s easy to throw in the towel when the going gets tough, however if you approach blogging with the knowledge that a) it will be tough and b) your reaction to problems (and therefore the likelihood that those problems will be solved) will depend on your attitude, it becomes clear that you have to stay positive.

Successful people don’t get to where they are by accepting defeat when they get knocked down. Dust yourself off, get back up and go at it again. It sounds a bit cheesy, yes, but as long as you believe in what you’re doing and believe in your own ability to make your blog a success, you’ll do fine.

6. Problem Solving

There are two kinds of people – those who deal with their problems and those who use them as an excuse not to move ahead in their lives.
This doesn’t mean that you turn into a robot – in fact I would strongly recommend having channels / avenues through which you can vent about your problems. It helps to clear your head and to focus on the solutions instead of your emotional reaction to it.

However, if you’re not dealing with your blogging problems intelligently, you’re just holding yourself (and your blog) back from it’s true potential. Find a solution, outsource it if you have to but fix it if it’s important (and stop worrying if its not).

7. Take More Risks

Part of the philosophy of giving a project your 100% every day is that you are always pushing for improvements. At one time or the other, this push will require you to take risks, and it is at this point in time that you will feel the most resistance, when you will find it most difficult to ‘bring your A-game’ to the table.

Look at your blog and your blogging efforts and pinpoint the risks that you’ve been avoiding for the last few weeks or even months. Pick one of these risks, discuss the options with your friends and family (or people who know your business) and if it’s the right thing, do it.

8. Learn the Art of Self-Promotion

Self-Promotion is something most of us are uncomfortable with – and it’s not just the prospect of ’selling’ that turns us off, in reality its insecurity (cleverly dressed as modesty) that holds us back.

As a blogger – whether you want to promote your own services or you’re promoting your blog – you have to learn to blow your own horn. No one else will be doing that for you, so celebrate your success (small or big), talk up your achievements and put yourself firmly in the minds of your readers (and anyone else who wants to listen).

9. Sharpen Your Focus

You’ve heard many bloggers talk about how you should ‘focus’ on a few key projects. Trouble is, not everyone intuitively knows exactly how to turn that ‘focus’ knob up to 100%, and even if you know how to do that, what do you focus on?

The two keys to having a clear focus in your blogging are ‘priorities’ and ‘concentration’. If you have priorities but no concentration (like me), you’ll know what to do but never get anything done because you’ll get distracted all the time. On the other hand, if you have concentration but no clear grasp of your priorities, you will be excellent in something but won’t make much progress (because you’ll be focusing on the wrong things).

10. Instill Character In Your Blog

Character in a blog means:

• Delivering on what you promise
• Doing what you do to the best of your ability
• Staying true to your purpose in face of adversity or success

You don’t build a successful blog by copying the top bloggers on what they’re doing right now – you look at what they did at the start, what type of ‘foundational work’ they did to reach this level.

Getting the foundations of your blog and removing the cracks in it should be your first and foremost responsibility – everything else flows from that.

11. Adopt Othermindedness to be more Charismatic

The four steps to being more charismatic on your blog:

1. Be Passionate and Positive
2. Expect the Best of People
3. Give People Hope
4. Share Yourself

When it comes to being charismatic, the bottom line is othermindedness.

12. Give More to Get More

If you’ve read “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” by Robert Cialdini (highly recommended), you’ll know that ‘Reciprocity’ is one of the six key ways to influence people (the others are: Commitment / Consistency, Social Proof, Liking, Authority and Scarcity). When you give first, you create a subconscious debt on the other person’s conscience which they will feel the need to repay or risk suffering from guilt. It’s how we are socially wired.

What we’re NOT socially wired to do is to give first and ask later – in fact, we’re selfish (like it or not) and do exactly the opposite. If you want to succeed as a blogger, want to grow your blog and want to do both of these things super-fast, bite the bullet and invest in your future. The relationships you build as a result, with your readers and your friends, will be the foundation for your rapid growth in the future.

13. Go For Broke

They say that “good things come to those who wait” – and while I value patience, it has its place and it is often a convenient rationalisation for people who are afraid to take risks. There are times when you have to grab the bull by the horns and attack an opportunity with full strength.

In simple terms…you can’t wait for opportunities to knock on your door. You have to put yourself out there, put your blog out there, and make sure that you’re first in line when any opportunity comes up. You’ll take risks. You’ll make mistakes. But you’ll be much better off at the end of it than when you started, which is where you would have stayed stuck if you hadn’t moved in the first place.

14. Learn the Art of Listening

As bloggers our job is to talk – we talk to our readers, we talk to advertisers, we talk to our employees, we talk smack with competitors – it’s pretty much a full-time talking job, blogging.

However, in all this talking we need to find the time to shut up and listen to the people around us – to learn what they want, to learn from their suggestions, criticisms and support, and to spot ideas in what they do and say. Listening to others (and more importantly, to the right people) gives you the kind of knowledge few people can hope to attain, and with that comes the ability to do make a genuine difference in your own life and that of others.

15. Build Relationships

We all know that it’s important to build relationships as bloggers but do you do it unconsciously or do you take out time each day to dedicate to networking?

Some of us are naturally better networkers than others. For the rest of us, it would be advisable to take out time every day and spend it on networking. Whether you do your relationship-building through forums, social networks or person to person, it’s important that you take out at least an hour a day for it.

Like almost everything else in blogging, it won’t pay off immediately but once you’ve been doing it for some time the results will bring in many blogging and money-making opportunities and you’ll start getting a lot of help in your blogging efforts.

16. Learn Your Trade

We’re not talking about being competent in your area of interest; learn your trade as a blogger. You don’t have to be a crack designer but you need to know basic design principles and understand aesthetics. You don’t have to be a WordPress guru but it pays to understand how themes and plugins work and how you could work with them in a cinch.

Monetization, SEO, networking – learn the skills and tools of your blogging trade, and you’ll invariably improve as a blogger.

17. Vision

A top blogger without vision is like a top athlete running at full speed backwards on the track. He may be the fastest (and you may be the best at what you do), but if he doesn’t know what his prime objective is, he’ll keep going in circles.

The same goes for you as a blogger. Define your vision, understand it and integrate it in your life – you need to know where you are going, and you need to keep it in mind whenever you work on your blog.

18. Know When to Stick or Fold

Sticking to your guns (self-confidence) and working hard on a project when the going gets tough are admirable traits, and worth cultivating. However, as a blogger you must also know when to cut your losses and move on.

Your decision may be based on your financial situation, the amount of time you have available, new opportunities knocking on the door, etc. Whatever you base your decisions on, don’t base them on your emotional attachment to a blog, or your ego which tells you that you can do everything at same time.

19. Stop Controlling Everything

If you’re really good at what you do (writing, monetization, design, SEO, etc), you might get stuck in a pattern of trying to do everything yourself.

As a pro blogger, you don’t have the time to handle all the writing, the design, the research, the promotion and administration of your blog yourself. Outsource as much as you can (you can always outsource your blogging chores for free), hire help so you can get more work done.

20. Patience

What you’re working on now will not pay off tomorrow but in a few months. What you accomplish this month will pay you back 10x in one year.

The effect of cumulative growth is stunning, but to reap the full benefits you have to be (you guessed it) patient.

This doesn’t mean that you should sit back and wait – no, patience here means being patient with results, not with your efforts (you should still be going for broke).

21. Have Fun

The good thing about self employment is that you can choose to have fun on your own time, on your own terms. Take time off from your blog (not too much time!), change the pace on your blog (write something light hearted once in a while) and most importantly, if you find yourself thinking that your blogging is a chore, step back and re-evaluate what you are doing.

Bonus #1: Self Discipline

You’re not going to last a day as a professional blogger if you cannot discipline yourself to practice new habits and improve your blogging consistently.

Bonus #2: Balance

Blogging is fun and games sometimes but that doesn’t mean that you throw away all that you’ve earned and accomplished in the name of fun.

Find balance in your blogging – from varying the depth of your articles to dividing time between blogging and promoting to finding some personal time in all the blogging mayhem (take Sundays off, for example).

You’re not going to read this list and become a better blogger overnight – it takes time and commitment, and it works best if you take one strategy at a time and apply it purposefully in your life until you have mastered it.

This article was originally written on 26 Dec 2007 for Performancing.com.

My niche is boring and / or non-technical – how do I turn it into something popular and linkable?

Last week I stumbled across a Wikipedia article that was, despite its dry (and boring) subject matter, doing quite well on Digg.

The article in question is this introductory piece on Montessori. You might want to take a few minutes to go through the article and figure out any angle that would make it interesting to the average Digg user. My best idea (and this was after reading the Digg link) was about how the Montessori system was a cover for brainwashing little children and sapping their creativity.

Paranoid delusions apart, I strongly doubt that my spin would have done better than this take:

Monetessori Method, the educational system of Google founders.

It is, for lack of a better term, f’n brilliant.

Instead of forcefully making a boring topic appear interesting, this digg user took something that would guarantee attention (Google founders) and related it to a quite uninteresting topic. The result is a Digg headline that probably got enough *blind diggs* to make it popular and it ended up getting 562 diggs (as of writing this article).

I have to admit, when I saw this headline I was in a hurry as well and gave a blind digg before I had time to read the page itself.

The only problem with this linkbait (although to be fair it was just a test) was that it could have been done much better (in terms of optimizing the landing page and in attracting links, if the digger had set up a page on their own site instead).

If you want to do some linkbaiting for your website but are having trouble making your content *interesting*, stop forcing the issue. Instead, follow this simple 3 step process:

1. Find something interesting that appeals to the largest possible audience – it could be anything, Google, grave health risks, global warming, the war in iraq, etc.

For more in this, learn how to attract attention from mainstream media.

2. Find a common thread between the *interesting* and your *boring* content. The most important component is the title (see Michael Gray’s post on title bait) but you also need quality content to back it up.

3. Prep your linkbait for social media goodness. Make it easy for your readers (and especially readers from social media sites) to share your article, make it visually appealing (these two posts on formatting blog posts are good, standard advice for linkbait formatting as well).

Once you can master the art of making uninteresting content interesting using this process of association, the rest of the social promotion stuff is relatively easy to implement. Then, all you need are friends to digg your linkbait…

This article was written on 13 Dec 2007 for Performancing.com.

This article proves 10 time-tested methods to get more work done than before AND free up the time we tend to ‘borrow’ from outside our work schedule.

These suggestions are work well for bloggers, entrepreneurs and especially anyone whose work routine needs to be flexible because of their family / social circumstances. The key is to integrate these habits into your daily routine, otherwise it’s not going to bring you any results.

GENERAL TIPS

These are general habits that set the foundation for increasing productivity and using your time effectively.

1. Time & Task Chunking
There are two things you must start doing right now:

• Think of the time available to you in ‘chunks’ or ‘blocks’.
• Group related tasks together, and assign them time chunks.

Working on related tasks in the same time chunk makes it possible for you to get through those tasks faster than you would otherwise as your mind becomes attuned to doing a specific type of task. You might have heard the tip on writing your blog posts for the week / day in one go – this works because once your writing juices get flowing, it’s easier for you to write that second and third article for the day / week.

Why time chunks? I’ve discussed in detail later, but in essence the idea is to a) break down your work day into manageable time periods (input, output or just processing) and b) help you concentrate better on your work.

2. Smarter Email Management
Ideally you should be checking email just once a day – however in practice this is a difficult habit to adopt from the start, so I recommend restricting yourself to 2 checks – once in the morning to deal with the urgent stuff and once in the evening to answer emails, etc.

Daniel has more on effective email management. A great tip from the article is to NOT read your emails unless you’re ready to deal with them (reply, take an action based on it, etc). Usually what happens is that we tend to read an email once and then don’t take action on it for a few hours (or days). That leaves an open loop in our work cycle – either you’ll keep being reminded of unfinished business by looking at that unattended email or you’ll have it floating around in your head.

Only read an email if you’re ready to take immediate action on it. This is why I suggest splitting your email checking time into two steps – urgent and regular processing. Scan email headlines to pick out urgent matters and discipline yourself to leave the rest for later, when you can go through each email and deal with it there and then.

A last word on email – learn to write emails that deal with such simple follow-up questions as ‘what if this happens?’ or ‘how do I do that?’. Close possible loops by discussing alternative scenarios and solutions, as well as providing references in advance in case someone needs to know how to do a particular task.

3. Say No To Feed Abuse
Earlier this year I wrote an article on Search Engine Journal on why you should dump 90% of the feeds you read. At that time, I was spending 2-4 hours every day just browsing through feeds, and at the end of it I’d have so much in my head that I would find it difficult to sift through the unimportant stuff and focus my thoughts on the important, bloggable material.

Since then, I’ve dumped my feed reader altogether. I now rely on 2 types of news sources – editorially-aggregated news (a good example of this is the Search Engine Land’s SearchCap) and my network of contacts who end up emailing / IMing me the the hottest news. I wouldn’t make a living as a news blogger this way but in terms of ‘winning back’ time that can be invested elsewhere, this approach is an absolute must.

You don’t have to dump your feed reader, but cut down to reading aggregated roundups of your niche (and if there isn’t anyone doing that currently, that’s a perfect opening for you in that niche).

4. Downtime = Networking?
Schedule some downtime for your self during the day – afternoon is a good slot, so is late night after you’re done with everything else (including planning for the next day). By downtime I’m not talking about taking a break, I’m talking about indulging yourself in IMing and random web browsing – putting aside time for IMing is one way to get the most out of the exercise, especially because the short time forces you to do the important things first (including networking, of course).

Some people will disagree with this approach, and I admit that I’m quite often online all day, if only because these days me and Ryan are coordinating a few Perf projects. In such cases I’m only available to chat for one or two people and with everyone else, I’ll have to wait till the important stuff gets done first. It’s hard but it’s the only way to eliminate the distractions that get in our way and stop us from getting work done.

5. ‘Heavy Lifting’
Set aside time daily for some heavy lifting – i.e. intensive work. You don’t have to do this at the same time every day (although in terms of building your rhythm and improving productivity that surely helps) but you should allocate the same amount of hours to it every day.

The ideal solution for me is to have two ‘heavy lifting’ chunks – one in early / late morning and the other either late afternoon or early evening (never at night). This allows me to start the day off by getting a good chunk of my work complete, and before the day is over I’ve done everything for that day, giving me time to enjoy the rest of the day and obviously plan for the next day ahead of time as well.

6. Input / Output / Processing
I’ve started thinking of a typical work cycle as 3 distinct phases.

1. Input: Any task that involves the intake of information. Browsing, feed-reading, etc are input-oriented activities.
2. Output: Any task that involves you producing something – blogging, programming, designing, etc.
3. Processing: When you’re dealing with ideas, knocking off action items, planning for the next day or evaluating progress.

In practice, you want to limit your inputs to the ‘absolutely necessary’ and maximise your output. Most of the time we spend our day the other way around – reading a lot and doing / writing very little. In terms of achieving your goals, that’s a brain-dead approach – why would take up any habit where you’re deliberately limiting the amount of work you can get done?

Sometimes people don’t segregate processing from their input / output states. I disagree – it’s vital that you set aside time for processing your inputs as well as for planning what needs to be done in the future. The processing phase is key to giving your perspective on what you’ve done, what you want to do next and how to get that done.

Like the concepts earlier, thinking of your work cycle in terms of these 3 phases will help you focus on why you’re doing certain tasks and therefore help you get the most out of your time.

WHEN WORKING / HEAVY LIFTING

The 6 tips mentioned above concern basic habits. From #1 and #5, you’ll remember the concepts of time chunking and heavy lifting. The rest of this article concerns tips on how to make the most out of your working time, especially the time when you need to be 110% productive.

7. Stay Offline
Turn off your browser, your IMs, etc. If you’re blogging and need access to feeds, open all the required web pages in your browser and then disconnect.

There are two major problems when you’re online and blogging / writing / programming / strategising at the same time: one, you have the option of distracting yourself, and two, you’re leaving yourself open to the possibility of being distracted by someone / something else (a news item popping up in your feed reader, an email).

I can hear you saying – ‘what if its important?’ Sure, it probably is, but you’re smart enough to know that the work you’re supposed to be doing is certainly important, while something that you might miss in those 3-4 hours is most likely not important. You’re most likely not missing much by going offline, but you’re definitely losing a lot by dividing your attention.

Of course, there are obvious exceptions. However for 95% of us, those exceptions are just theoretical (we’re not as special, essential or important as we like to think).

8. Turn Off Your Phone
I don’t know about you, but phone interruptions are the worst when I’m blogging. Whether it’s a message or a call, even the one minute it takes to shift focus from one thing to the other and then bringing it back can have you lose your momentum, pushing you back by 5-10 minutes or more.

Turn your phone off, or at least on silent and train yourself to ignore the phone. When blogging, check your phone between blog posts if you absolutely must, not during.

What if it’s an emergency? Like I said earlier, our imagination paints the world far worse than it really is. In case of an emergency and especially if there is a real need for you, the person looking for you will find a way to contact you. In any case, keeping two numbers (one for social and professional contacts, one for close friends and family) allows you to turn one off and then you can decide to ignore the second one. This only works if implement it properly and make it clear that the second number is only for emergency use. Drastic, yes, but since you’re only going to be doing this for a few hours each day, it’s worth it.

At the end of the day, us ADD-affected entrepreneurs need every little bit of help they can get.

9. Be Alone While Working
Admittedly this is more of a personal issue – I feel that I cannot work at my best, with full concentration, if someone else is around in the room. From getting distracted by what they’re doing to feeling the urge to strike up pointless conversation, I tend to get very little done when there are people around.

To get the most work done, find a quite spot where you can be alone. If that’s not possible, try ensuring that your immediate physical area is clear and free of distractions.

If all else fails, chain yourself to the desk and lock yourself in the room until you get work done.

10. Deadlines
When faced with a project, nothing ruins it more than having a deadline far into the future. Break your projects down into smaller, bite-sized tasks and set impossibly short deadlines for getting them done. You’ll find that not only do you psychologically motivate yourself into getting things done quicker, you’re probably doing less work than you would if you approached it as a large chunk and set aside weeks or months to get it done.

Process each project, break it down, and get it done as quickly as possible.

(Bonus) 11. One Thing At A Time
This part is especially for those people who claim to be multi-taskers. I’m sorry, but there’s no such thing as multi-tasking.

• If you plan your work in advance, you’ll never be rushed enough that you need to do 2 things at the same time.
• And if you concentrate on one thing and get it done before moving to the second, you’ll get both of them done faster than if you tried to ‘multi-task’.

If you’ve lived all your life multi-tasking, it’s possible that you’ve achieved some success because of that approach. Unfortunately, multi-tasking is an emergency, short-term response to a failure of planning and a product of panic. It slows you down, and as a long-term strategy it’s just stopping you from planning your tasks properly.

Multi-tasking forces you to be inefficient and unproductive. Don’t fall into / stay in this trap.

Summing It Up
I hope you found the above tips useful. Following any one of these tips will immediately boost your productivity, but when you start applying several of them together is when you will see the real benefits – these tips were far better in tandem than they do on their own.

Comments are welcome.

Also read: 10 Tips for Razor Sharp Concentration.

This article was originally written on 21 Dec 2007 for Performancing.com.