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Authenticity

GIRLS

by Sarah on MARCH 12, 2013 in SPIRITUALITY

I don’t know how
I got it in my head
If it was something I heard
Or something I read
Or all the glossy pictures
In the magazines
That convinced me
I had to be
So pretty
And perfect
So happy that
My cheeks hurt
Well screw that
Cause I’ve learned
The most important thing
I get to be me
Regardless of my company
I won’t change a thing
To make you think
That I’m more
Than what you see
I choose
Transparency
Authenticity
And embracing
Creativity
If you’ve got a freak flag?
I say fly it
If you’re different?
Then don’t hide it
The world’s got enough
People
Putting on a show
It’s too exhausting
And soul-sucking
Pretending to be
Something you’re not
If you were born
Awkward or skinny?
Own it
Then move on
Look inside yourself
And cultivate
Kindness
Love
And peace
Fill your mind
With knowledge
Seek out similarities
Anyone can be cynical
Just like gossip it’s
A short-term fix
An attempt to create
A bond with someone
And avoid discovering
What your true purpose is
So be bold
And brave
And wave your freak flag
Mine is fucking huge
And don’t waste time
Trying to be pretty
Or perfect
Whatever you do

The answer to my question why people spend time looking out over mountains.....

Thanks Peter Harris for forwarding these words of Robb Sagendorph.

ART

New Linkedin Connection Map

Linkedin now offers a service to generate connection maps - it's quite interesting

Outside the Box

Want more visitors to your blog? Use this simple five-letter word. By: Dennis Bailey

Everybody wants to get more website traffic and more visitors to their blog, right? Want to know an easy way to do it?

It's a simple five-letter word, but I'm not going to use it here. Why? Because when I used it in an earlier blog post, along with a picture of a certain person who also shall remain nameless, my blog exploded with thousands of hits in a single day, nearly 10,000 visits in less than a month. If I use these words again, I'm afraid I'll get the same result – people all over the world who are eagerly searching for those words or phrases will end up on my site, clogging my daily metrics. And for reasons I'll get into I'd just as soon avoid this.

Forgive me for being circumspect, but here's what happened. There's this big story going on in Maine right now involving – I don't even want to use the word. A woman has been arrested who supposedly operated a certain kind of dance studio (the five-letter word that rhymes with "roomba") but in reality offered something entirely different to her paying clients, something more intimate and illicit. Are you with me?

So a controversy has ensued, not only over the woman's arrest and her, ahem, "business partner," but also the clients who frequented her establishment. The police have been slowly releasing the names of the customers, every other week, and they've been showing up in local newspapers.

So, since I offer crisis management services, I wrote a simple blog post about the predicament these gentlemen find themselves in and speculated about whether there is anything that could be done to mitigate the publicity and their embarrassment. (Short answer: not much.) I included a somewhat exotic picture of the woman on my blog and her name in the caption.

Then the fun started. Visits to my blog exploded, going from a few dozen per day to over 1,000. Everybody it seemed was searching for information (and pictures) about this case, from all over the world. She's become an Internet sensation. Her photos are all over the web. There's even a site dedicated to the case with a countdown clock for when the next list of gentleman callers are due to be released.

It's getting out of hand. Lots of people are interested in this case, to an almost creepy degree. How do I know? Well, it isn't hard to check the IP address to see who's landing on my site and what pages they're looking at. Many of the IP addresses are company names presumably where the viewer works, or should be working instead of cruising the internet for sexy photos.

Here's just a sampling of some of the businesses whose employees, for one reason or another, are apparently "researching" this case:

• Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield
• Cisco Systems, Inc.
• Penn State College of Medicine
• The Proctor and Gamble Company
• Oregon State System of Higher Education
• US House of Representatives
• General Motors Corporation
• Central Intelligence Agency
• The Hertz Corporation
• Northrop Grumman Corp.
• Microsoft Corp.
• Homeland Security

And these are just a few of the US firms landing on my site. There are many more from countries all around the world. (And I've left out some of the local businesses and law firms to spare them the embarrassment. You know who you are. Stop it.)

Now, I should be happy that all these big-name companies are coming to my blog, right? They're at least discovering my firm and what I do (besides posting pictures of nekked women). Attracting viewers by being topical and controversial is certainly a way for a blog to go viral. There's actually a name for it – it's called "newsjacking," piggybacking on a hot news item by writing a blog post or press release that generates a spike in the number of viewers.
The problem is, so far at least, all this attention hasn't resulted in a single "quality lead," the whole purpose of a business blog. Despite all the brand name companies coming to my site, they're here for the pictures, not to do business with Savvy. The number of monthly visitors to my blog has certainly increased, but the conversion rate is next to nothing.
So that's the moral of this story. If all you want to do is increase your website traffic and bring in lots of new visitors, use that simple five letter word or print the woman's name in question and her picture. But be careful what you wish for. And you better hurry. With all the other websites and blogs popping up devoted to this topic, it's getting crowded out there, which is why I think that my website traffic is slowing falling back to normal.
And sometimes normal is good.

make it happen

socialnetworking4creatives: Social networking for creative peopleOk I'm no...

socialnetworking4creatives:
Social networking for creative people


Ok I'm no...: Social networking for creative people Ok I'm not amazing with the internet and I've got loads to learn but over the las...

Is this the Age of Mass Intelligence

I preferred one of the letters about this article than the article at www.moreintelligentlife.com/story/age-mass-intelligence/

Stop Procrastinating and Start Something

7 Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Start Something

by PATRICK on MARCH 8, 2013

“Secret of Adulthood: Don’t worry about finishing, worry about starting. Over and over and over.” – Gretchen Rubin author of The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

I would say it is common knowledge that the hardest part of accomplishing something often is just starting that item. But can that really be common knowledge? If we all knew that we accomplish more if we just started something, wouldn’t we be more likely to just start? However, the truth is that many dreams, goals, or even daily tasks never get realized or completed because we didn’t start them.

If I looked at a list of things I want or need to accomplish in the near future, that list would include very important items like prepare a certain fee bill for my day job, begin a meditation habit, complete the Couch to 5k program, call my insurance company about a claim I need to file, think of more blog topics, etc. The first four of those I keep putting off, not starting on any of them. The last one, well, I work on that one every day. Then there are just the simple day-to-day things that you couldn’t almost start and finish in one fell swoop, like putting away an item of clutter or throwing something away, where if you just started you would almost certainly be finished.

Why is it so hard to start something in the first place? According to Dr. Piers Steel, author of The Procrastination Equation: How to Stop Putting Things Off and Start Getting Stuff Done, it is human nature – we are wired to procrastinate. He explains that theory quite well in the book. You or I could easily look at most of the people around us or even perhaps within ourselves and come to the conclusion that people must be wired to procrastinate, as it seems like nearly everyone does. In fact, Dr. Steel suggests that approximately 95% of people procrastinate. Wow!

But is there a difference between procrastinating and just not starting something? I would argue that there is. I think that procrastinating occurs in the face of something that we have to do. If you think back to the list of things that I want or need to do, the fee bill is something I have to do if I want paid for my time. Why I am putting it off? Because it is tedious and almost mind-numbing to prepare and it isn’t urgent. However, I would rather be done with it. What about starting a mediation habit? That is something I want to do (I could argue that I need to do it to realize all of the benefits, but for now I will call it a want). It is easier to make up excuses, such as lack of time or choosing to do other things, because I can put it off indefinitely, not just until a later time. I think that the difference there is important in dealing with how to tackle these each problem.

Some Ways to Start Something.

1. Start small. Leo Babauta of Zen Habits suggests starting a new habit small, as little as two minutes per day. This is a good strategy because anyone can find such a small amount of time and build on it. This works for physical items like building endurance and will work for productivity and non-physical items for the same reason. This is the strategy that I will be using to start that mediation routine – this weekend!

2. Just do it. This is easier said than done, otherwise we wouldn’t be discussing how to start something. However, the most effective way to move forward is by taking the first step, even if you are not prepared or don’t know where you are going.

This blog was born that way. I know that I wanted to start a blog to share my thoughts and experiences and connect with like-minded people. I had been buying up domain names for awhile to have the correct one for the “right idea”. Well, the “right idea” never seemed to come (or, probably more accurately, the elusive “right time” never came). Recently I read Be a Free Range Human: Escape the 9-5, Create a Life You Love and Still Pay the Bills by Marianne Cantwell, which was very good. In that book, the author suggests starting a “Play Project” and just jumping in to that project. This blog was my Play Project, and I am so glad that I started it, but it took that first step to get going (even before writing this post I was dragging my feet, but I took the first step and it is my longest and most thorough post yet).

3. Set a deadline and schedule it. Put it on your calendar and make it happen. Even if you put off starting until closer to your deadline, if you are committed to starting by that deadline, you likely will do so. That is how this particular post came about. I had been brainstorming ideas for my next post, but had a deadline of Friday to write and publish that post. Here it is Friday, I started to write and soon you will be reading this. Knowing myself, I may have waited until the weekend and then been caught up with other obligations, but I scheduled that I needed to do this post and followed through.

A Couple Steps to Deal With Procrastination.

“Know the true value of time; snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination: never put off til tomorrow what you can do today.” – Lord Chesterfield

1. Commit to doing it today. To-do lists work for some people, and for others they become an insurmountable list of things that will never get done. If a standard to-do list works for you, well you probably aren’t reading this. If it doesn’t, cut the list down. This is not an original strategy, but it works. Put 3-5 things on your list each morning that you need to get done that day. These should be items that you know you would be the most likely to put off, which coincidentally would also be the items you would more like to get behind you. That fee bill is on my list today. By keeping the list manageable, you are more likely to accomplish those tasks because you are making them a priority.

2. Find someone to hold you accountable. If you are finding yourself procrastinating too often, ask a friend or partner to hold you accountable. Tell them what you want to accomplish on a given day and report back later with what you actually accomplished. Better yet, share to-do lists and make a competition around who can finish more items off of his or her list.

This works with starting something too, but I didn’t want to discuss it in both places. One of the main purposes of this blog is to discover how to live better and have others learn and share with me. Some items that I post about are items that a new step for me (i.e., unplugging). It helps me to know that I put my commitment out there. It helped me follow through on the National Day of Unplugging and it will help me tomorrow when I start small and meditate for two minutes.

3. Partner with technology. You probably have a smartphone. Use it to for motivation and to be more accountable. I personally use, and enjoy, Carrot, but there are others available. Remember, just don’t get caught up in too much screen time.

4. If it takes less than X minutes, do it now. Do you walk past that clutter you keep meaning to put away, or sometimes ignore something you knocked over? I’ve been known to do both as well as ignore other seemingly trivial things that could be addressed very quickly. Well if takes less than a minute or two, just address it immediately. There are multiple variations of this rule (1, 2, 5, etc. minutes), but I left it blank above because you should do what works for you. I like the one-minute rule a lot and find that when I remind myself to follow it I get a lot more little things done.

 What about you? Do you have trouble with starting things? procrastinating? Why? What do you do to get around those issues?

Twit

Infographic: A Funny & Useful Guide For Decoding ‘Twitter Language’

By Loke Shi Ying, 07 Mar 2013

COMMENT SHAREShare on facebookShare on twitterShare on pinterest_share

181

Advertising news website ADZAG.CO has created a Twictionary—a hilarious guide to Twitter jargons for the average social media marketer.

Whether to make fun of stereotypes found on Twitter, or just mirroring common tweeting habits, the Twictionary has a rather comprehensive list of Twitter-related word—including words like Dweet, Tantrum, Tweet Cred, Tweetup, and Twypo, just to name a few.

View the the infographic below:

 

Design wank

Fight Design Jargon: No More 'Adaptive Executions' and 'Brand Articulations'

Ah, jargon. Sometimes it means something, but there's usually a clearer and simpler way to say it. Here's a Tumblr with a few gems from the design industry.

Continue to designjargonbullshit.com

A Pretty Stained Glass Window Made Of Instagram Pictures

A Pretty Stained Glass Window Made Of Instagram Pictures

A Social Network For Book Lovers, Lets You Trade Books With Others

A Social Network For Book Lovers, Lets You Trade Books With Others

New ‘Subway Libraries’ Encourages Commuters To Read On-The-Go

New ‘Subway Libraries’ Encourages Commuters To Read On-The-Go

creative