While explaining to someone what I do, I got this oft-repeated comment:
“You’re so lucky to be doing something like that, not many people get the chance to do something different.”
That’s just not true, and here’s why: our whole lives are spent making choices. From when you’re struggling to get up in the morning (drowsy or not, you’re making a choice to hit the snooze button) to when you’re deciding between checking what’s on the TV or hitting the bed early, you’re making choices in your life.
Please give what you can to help your country. You can get started with this Flood Relief effort.
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.
If you’re a Muslim, why do you fast?
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:
Racking my brain for ideas. The outlandish. The otherwordly. The impossible. Even the unthinkable.
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.
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?
This is a three-part feature written to cover different angles of Procrastination and how to stop / prevent it.
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.
Yesterday I talked about competence and excellence – it’s a theme you’ll be hearing a lot in the next dozen or so articles from me. The basic idea is that “good enough” is never satisfactory – to be successful and to keep moving forward, you have to give it your best shot every single time.
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.
When faced with blogger’s block, the only way to beat it is to buckle down, force yourself to write and push through the rough patches (actions produce motivation). However when you run out of ideas (or if your ideas aren’t clear enough), then here’s an effective technique to focus your mind and let your blog post write itself.
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:
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.
When we talk about ‘creating’ better blogs, there’s an underlying assumption that it’s only the blog that needs improving.
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.
As social media marketers, one of the most common questions we get about linkbaiting and social media promotion is this:
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.
