Don't discard. Keep all your pieces in play. I’ve been thinking about that Margaret Atwood quote I posted, “You’re supposed to do one thing.
If you do more than that, people get confused.” It’s not just that other people get confused — you yourself get confused. You love all these things, but you feel like you’re supposed to pick one. The best talk I ever heard/drew on the subject was Steven Tomlinson at TEDxAustin in 2010. He told this story: he was going around trying to figure out what he was supposed to do with his life, so he decided to visited a professor named Will Spong, who had a reputation for being a no-nonsense hardass. This is the stupidest question anyone has asked me. He went on to explain, “You don’t need a career, you need a calling. The thing is, you can cut off a couple passions and only focus on one, but after a while, you’ll start to feel phantom limb pain.
So, yeah, it’s a lesson I constantly have to re-learn: don’t discard. Thanks, Steven. 34 Tools to Help You Create Better Content From Start to Finish (and Beyond)
Monoculture: How Our Era's Dominant Story Shapes Our Lives. By Maria Popova What Galileo has to do with the economy, or how Wall Street is moulding your taste in art.
“The universe is made of stories, not atoms,” poet Muriel Rukeyser famously proclaimed. The stories we tell ourselves and each other are how we make sense of the world and our place in it. Some stories become so sticky, so pervasive that we internalize them to a point where we no longer see their storiness — they become not one of many lenses on reality, but reality itself. And breaking through them becomes exponentially difficult because part of our shared human downfall is our ego’s blind conviction that we’re autonomous agents acting solely on our own volition, rolling our eyes at any insinuation we might be influenced by something external to our selves.
That’s exactly what F. The governing pattern a culture obeys is a master story– one narrative in society that takes over the others, shrinking diversity and forming a monoculture. Public domain images via Flickr Commons. How to Find Your Purpose and Do What You Love. “Find something more important than you are,” philosopher Dan Dennett once said in discussing the secret of happiness, “and dedicate your life to it.”
But how, exactly, do we find that? Surely, it isn’t by luck. I myself am a firm believer in the power of curiosity and choice as the engine of fulfillment, but precisely how you arrive at your true calling is an intricate and highly individual dance of discovery. Still, there are certain factors — certain choices — that make it easier. Gathered here are insights from seven thinkers who have contemplated the art-science of making your life’s calling a living. Every few months, I rediscover and redevour Y-Combinator founder Paul Graham’s fantastic 2006 article, How to Do What You Love.
Future. Digital. Conversion. Social. Google. Why SEO Someone Else's Site - Whiteboard Friday. OK, we know what you're all saying.
You're saying, "But…why would I want to help someone else rank for my brand? " Stick with us, though. You can leverage the strength and authority of other sites to help increase the authority of your own site. This week, Rand discusses this theory and shares a few reasons why (along with examples of how) you should work SEO on someone else's page to help yourself. Have you tried this tactic before? "Howdy SEOmoz fans. How to Manage a Sales Pipeline. Managing sales? What is that? A frightening number of CEOs are so accustomed to handling sales on their own that even when they do get around to hiring a sale team, they neglect to put in place a process for building and tracking a sales pipeline.
A sure sign that a sales organization is suffering from what Jennifer Fremont Smith calls "no processitis": "Sales people will make optimistic statements with no hard data. " Fremont Smith had founded four companies and is now the vice president of HighStart, a Boston-based consulting firm that helps bring new products to market. In each case, her first order of business was to build a sales pipeline. Simply put, your sales pipeline is the amount of business you attempt to close in a given month, quarter, or year. Fremont Smith and several other savvy CEOs are very keen on using sales pipeline data in order to maximize conversions—and minimize excuses. Everything is my fault. I cut two chapters out of my book because they were too nasty.
They vented all the awful details about how my terrible employees staged a mutiny to try to get rid of me, and corrupted the culture of the company into a festering pool of entitlement, focused only on their benefits instead of our clients. Afterwards, I spent a few years still mad at those evil brats for what they did. So, like anyone feeling victimized and wronged, I needed to vent - to tell my side of the story. Or so I thought. So do you want to know the real reason I cut those chapters? I realized it was all my fault.