The Adventures of Bloggard

Been Around the Block. Got Some Stories. These are Them.

Follow Your Bliss, Know Thyself, Change the World

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On the E1KaD forum, December 13, 2008: I enjoyed the following, which was posted today by Steve in Texas. Maybe you might like it, too —

There has been a lot of talk on [this] forum about focus, building your business, marketing and so on, but I have seen little about being self employed, knowing yourself and getting the most out of yourself and your life.

Heres my brain dump on “being” for you to use or disregard as you choose.

Why are you here?
Lets face it, working for someone else is ultimately easer than working for yourself; no accounting, chasing payments, marketing or product creation. Turn up, put the nut on the bolt, get paid, go home. So why are we working for ourselves?

For me its the need to create, plus I dont play well with morons, sorry managers. I used to write and record songs for a living. A couple thousand later I got it out of my system. Now I create other stuff. I love houses and remodeling (who knew), I bang out web applications, websites and and other apps on a regular basis I cant help myself. As my mother said when I was debating whether to build my first recording studio, “of course you should, its what you do dear”.

What is it that you “do” dear?

Follow Your Bliss
Most people can tell you what they dont like, few can tell you what they do like, or need. What do you need out of your life to make you happy? For me its peace and quiet, nature, security and doing something “interesting”. So far:

* I live in the forest – the loudest noise right at this moment is the wind in the trees and the big ol wind chime outside my office.
* I have multiple streams of income from some unique and not unique sites and products, some cash in the bank and am reasonably secure for now.
* Every day I get to create, improve or rebuild something, something that makes others go “wow, cool”.

My bliss is doing pretty well. Hows yours?

Know Thyself
Even though my bliss quotient is probably above average, there is still stuff I think I should do or actually have to do, but just cant bring myself to do.

I know I should write articles to promote my business but cant bring myself to write them (and yet here I am writing). I know I should take care of my accounting but its like pulling teeth to just do my taxes once a year. I know I should be better organized and not have 5 projects running at the same time and mountains of paper all over my office, but thats just how my brain works.

I know I work better late than early. I should always write an idea down when I get it. I love a programming challenge. I like helping others. I like solving problems. I work in bursts

I know myself reasonably well, but I still have to take action on that knowledge, like hire a bookkeeper!

What are your strengths and weaknesses? Do you need peace and quiet or lots of bustle and people around you? What can you not bring yourself to do, even when it must be done? Conversely, what cant you stop yourself from doing? You can use that knowledge to make following your bliss just that little bit easier.

Change the World
This may sound odd but we all strive for it on one way or another. For some, having children is their road to immortality, for others like myself it is to create something I can leave behind – thats partly why I did music.

I know Dennis preaches that getting that one small step in place leads to others. No disagreement here. But I would suggest thinking and striving for the larger goals of life too, like a new house, new car or to feed the hungry people of the world.

The old Hollywood saying goes “if you reach for the stars you wont end up with a handful of mud”. So if you were to reach for the stars, what would you reach for? Think of something concrete, not just money. Money is abstract and quite honestly meaningless as a goal (if you want a post on why this is, let me know as it was part of my thesis). A goal is one you can describe in detail, like a house for example. Is it a Tudor, Spanish, California bungalow? What color? How big? Does it have shutters?

Getting to know yourself, how you function and what you basic needs are may well be the answer to being successful far more than any piece of software, search engine trick or may I dare say, forum.

You cant build a house if you dont know where you want to live. Theres no point in laying rails if you dont know what will power the train. Theres no point in building up or buying into self employment until you know what your life should look like.

As always, the opinions are those of the author alone, consult a doctor or attorney as needed and dont eat the yellow snow.

Law 23 of Project Design: Successive Refinement

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San Francisco, 1976: I got my first computer! It was a high-class Cromemco, in a kit, and had a lightning fast Z80 processor that ran at (gasp) 3 megahertz, and a full 64K of memory.

I had a buddy who knew computers in and out — he wrote code for our satellites to determine whether a field in russia had wheat or alfalfa — and he put the kit together for me, cause I didn’t know how to solder back then. (He’s rich and retired long since, because he went to work for a new startup called Cisco, and they gave stock options; but that’s another story.)

He also gave me a book about beginning to program in Basic.

It showed a simple technique called ‘successive refinement.’ If you are a programmer then you know this technique but for non-programmers here, it’s really simple. And mongo useful.

Here’s how it works …

You first state what the program is to do, in one sentence:
“Manage a mailing list”

Then you refine that, as precisely as possible, still in ordinary words —
“manage a mailing list
input of an address
finding an address
editing an address
sorting the addresses
printout of the addresses
printing addresses on envelopes
printing addresses on labels

And then in similar manner you break these down. Pretty soon you discover that stating what it’s to do starts to look like code, eg:
“bubblesort( addresslistname, ascending )”

After a while it’s all code, and it will have these virtues —
(a) It’s structure will seem logical to a human
(b) therefore it’s easier to debug and later modify
(c) you tend to avoid can-of-worms code that goes everywhere

Now, and here’s my point, what’s really lovely is that this approach will work fairly well for most any project of any kind.

Successive refinement.

With this, you can become … refined. Cool.

Go Thee Forth and Prosper!

Remembering John Lennon

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Entrance to John Lennon's home at The Dakota

New York, December 9, 1980: In the evening, John Lennon returned from the recording session at The Record Plant in New York. The limosine let him out in front of The Dakota, the gothic stone building pictured in the movie “Rosemary’s Baby”, and as he and Yoko Ono approached the building, Mark David Chapman called out “Mr. Lennon?” and shot Lennon five times with a .38 revolver.

Lennon was hit in the torso and the back. He called out, “I’m shot,” took a few steps, and collapsed. When policed arrived, they found Chapman standing nearby, the gun on the ground. A building security guard asked Chapman, “Do you know what you’ve done?”

Chapman replied, “I just shot John Lennon.”

Police rushed Lennon to the emergency room at the Roosevelt hospital, but he could not be revived.

Something died for many of us that day.

The sound of the Beatles, coming from the radio, startled us, back in the day. Those were college days for me. But perhaps you remember when you first heard their harmony, the enthusiasm, the sound was new and fresh.

A memory floats, quiet, like a blossom in a busy stream, and rushing around a bend, is gone.

A Tale of Toblerone …

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Barbarella Reflects Upon LifeA Movie Theatre near Picadilly, London, 1968: Funny how memories come back to you. Pointless little things, a turn of phrase, the way some trees looked against the clouds on a dim horizon.

One of the moments in my life that I remember, from time to time, from 40 years ago, and still laugh each time, was a snippet of conversation overheard, when I first sat down in a theatre in London, to watch the film Barbarella.

The film had not yet begun, and I gradually became aware of the two guys in the row right behind me. Being American, it seemed to me that their cockney accents were thick as bad pudding.

Said one: “I’m going to the confession, mate.”

Said the other: “Get us a Toblerone, eh?”

“Save me seat?”

“Guard it wi’ me life, I will!”

Perfect Man, Perfect Woman

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Someplace, Any Date: There was a perfect man and a perfect woman. They met each other at a perfect party. They dated for two perfect years. They had the perfect wedding and the perfect honeymoon. They had two perfect children.

One day the perfect man and the perfect woman were driving in there perfect car, they saw an elf by the side of the road, being the perfect people they were they picked him up.

Well as the perfect man and the perfect woman were driving with the elf, somehow they got into an accident. Two people died and one lived.

Who died and who lived?

The perfect woman, because the perfect man and elves aren’t real.

The Holiday Cheer Touchstyle Club

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Weed, California November 2008: Hot on the heels of the Mobius Magnificent Layaway Plan … comes the “Holiday Cheer” Touchstyle Club, with perhaps hundreds of dollars of savings for deserving little girls and- Oops, I meant to say dollars of savings for deserving musicians around the globe.

Yes, the Touchstyle Club, strange visitor from another planet, who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal man; and who, disguised as Kent Clark, mild-mannikin at the Daily Bungle, a grape necropolitan snoozepaper …

As you can see, things are going downhill fast here at the on-site news center. That’s because I stayed up late last night, and then woke up early with yet another set of bonus stuff for anybody wanting to save perhaps Hundreds of Dollars — oh, did I say that already — well, perhaps I did.

If you’ll take a quick peek, you can see why I’ve become over-excited. Be sure to *read every word*, from top to bottom, and then let me know what you think, you good little boys and- I mean, you good musicians, you.

Here it is —

The Holiday Cheer Touchstyle Club.

To Maintain A Healthy Level Of Insanity

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Ginette Degner’s blog, November 2008: The Bloggard has completely stolen this list from Search Engine Diva, even the title, because it made me fall about. Maybe you’d like it, too.

1. At Lunch Time, Sit In Your Parked Car With Sunglasses on and point a Hair Dryer At Passing Cars. See If They Slow Down.

2. Page Yourself Over The Intercom. Dont Disguise Your Voice!

3. Every Time Someone Asks You To Do Something, ask If They Want Fries with that.

4. At the Office, put Decaf In The Coffee Maker For 3 Weeks . Once Everyone has Gotten Over Their Caffeine Addictions, Switch to Espresso.

5. In the Memo Field Of All Your Checks, Write For Marijuana.

6. Skip down the hall Rather Than Walk and see how many looks you get.

7. Order a Diet Water whenever you go out to eat, with a serious face.

8. Specify That Your Drive-through Order Is To Go.

9. Sing Along At The Opera.

10. Five Days In Advance, Tell Your Friends You Cant Attend Their Party Because You have a headache.

11. When The Money Comes Out The ATM, Scream I Won! I Won!

12. When Leaving the Zoo, Start Running towards the Parking lot, Yelling Run For Your Lives! Theyre Loose!

13. Tell Your Children Over Dinner, Due To The Economy, We Are Going To Have To Let One Of You Go.

14. Pick up a Box of Condoms at the Pharmacy, Go to the Counter, and Ask Where the Fitting Room is.

How to Write

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Weed, California, October 2008: Outside, it’s Autumn for sure. The air is crisp and chill, and I feel grateful to be in my room, where the morning sunlight falls in stripes through the venetian blinds upon the white-painted wall, and my desk lamp is a warm color here where I work.

I just entered a contest online with a copywriting guru, with a question about writing, and I jotted down for him what I know, and then asked the biggest question that I know.

So I thought: Lots of people don’t write, but it’s easy and fun. Maybe not everybody knows how. And actually, writing information or a story (or anything) is not actually that difficult, though many people think so.

So here, plain and simple, is how to write.

THE BASIC PROCESS OF WRITING

The whole trick, in my experience, is to have (a) some notes and rumination time, during which the subconscious will actually begin structuring useful stuff behind the scenes; (b) an outline can be helpful (mainly because it starts you working with the material); and (c) to sit down and start writing.

THE REPUTED “WRITER’S BLOCK” IS AN ILLUSION

If you discover yourself staring at a blank sheet of paper, and not writing, then either you may not have done your notes and rumination; or you must may be feeling a ‘block’ which is actually just a kind of perfectionist interference from your own mind where you’re actually thinking of things to say and rejecting every one as it comes.

The cure to getting past ‘blank sheet of paper’ is to get out of bed and before anything — no brushing teeth, no coffee — start writing any junk that comes into your head, related or not related, your dreams, your opinions, wild thoughts, any and every thought that comes to your head. After practicing writing stuff on paper, the block will vanish. This is a reliable cure. It’s the darndest thing.

HOW TO MAKE YOUR WRITING “GOOD”

When you sit down to write your main project, if you can’t write *good* stuff (in your opinion), then *blather* on paper. You can always (1) write any kind of garbage (in your opinion), and then simply (2) later take out all the crappy parts.

Once you have a mass of material, then simply the willingness to rewrite will reshape it into good stuff.

HOW TO KNOW WHAT’S “GOOD”

And although it’s not always possible to say what’s the *best* presentation, pretty much anyone can use the A-B method to ask themself, “Which is better? A? or B?” And you always get an answer to this kind of question (from the subconscious). You’ll also discover that the answer is reliable.

THERE IS NO BARRIER TO WRITING

Looked at this way, writing may take time, but there is no barrier. You will write stuff, and you will rewrite good stuff. It’s just that simple.

THE ONLY QUESTION TO BE ANSWERED

“What is the best way, or just a workable and reliable way, to choose exactly what to write?”

A simple question.

The Target for the Question: The piece of writing selected should (by definition in our situation) attain the goal that you have for writing anything in the first place. That is, what to write is a derivative of what is your goal in life, what is your goal in this situation.

Sometimes the answer to this question will be simple and clear and obvious.

Other times, perhaps not so.

But in that case, you can simply write about the question. Use the technique above.

Clarity will emerge.

 
 

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