[Every Friday, I share my favorite reads from around the blogosphere over the past week. Enjoy!]
Would You Read the Story of Your Own Life?
We often imagine pictures of our future – snapshots of who we’d love to become in a perfect world.
So tell me,
Are your current actions leading you through the story that you’d love to tell?
~Courtney Johnston at The Rule Breaker’s Club
How to be a rock star.
It’s easy. Here’s all it takes.
Spend more time practicing your dream than you do promoting your dream.
That’s it.
~Jon Acuff
ATTN: Stop Putting Off Your Great Work
Almost daily, no matter how hard you try, this happens like clockwork:
You sit down to do that important work you want to do. You know, the dream that’s going to change your life. That project that’s going to change everything.
It’s your magnum opus. It’s your legacy work. It’s you: blazing a new trail, setting a new trend.
And then, something happens… email strikes. Then Twitter. Facebook. Google Plus. Your iPhone. The Dog needs you. The dishes are dirty and the sink’s piled up.
So your great work gets put on hold. Sits on the sidelines like a second team player, waiting for another day. It gets filed away in the attic of your mind for later.
Well, I have a question for you:
How often does later ever come?
~Jonathan Mead at Illuminated Mind
Field Report: The Science of Building Your Adventure Tolerance
It starts with awareness. Your “lizard brain”—the part that wants to keep you alive—will tell you to avoid risk. That’s handy when you’re deciding whether or not to wrestle a polar bear, but sometimes the lizard brain (LB) gets over-protective.
The key is to trick it by starting small. Pushing through a few Tweaks helps the LB shake the comforts of repetition. This makes it more optimistic about the chance to Attempt something unusual. When this leads to joy, the LB will realize it’s been a skeptic and that maybe those things it hasn’t been willing to Confront are more attainable than they once seemed.
~guest post by Lisa Mazzocco of Chase Your Unicorn at Advanced Riskology
No One Can Tell You Everything is Going to be Okay
Instead of asking whether bad things will happen if you make a change, ask how capable you are to deal with those events should they occur.
~Jennifer Gresham at Everyday Bright
Living a Balanced Life
I live a full life. I work full-time, I volunteer, I’m a member in more than one professional organization, I’m a blogger, a wife and furkid parent. When I tell people I blog about work-life balance this often sparks a stream of questions about how I do it all. The truth is I don’t do it all, I just live the best life I know how.
~Chrysta Bairre at Live Love Work
Word Search Vol. 3
You never fail to amaze me. Between some of the brilliant blog posts that urge me to think in new ways, the comics that make me laugh and the sports scores that keep me updated, I don’t know what I would do without you in my life.
However, I have to point out that most of you are weirdos. Well, at least those of you who found my blog through a variety of confounding search terms, with only a small set of examples below.
I’ve shared some of those gems a couple of times in the past, but they just keep coming and the few I included below (unedited) are too good to keep to myself.
So People of the Interwebs, thank you for providing me with not only a chuckle at the fact someone landed here by searching “elderly squirrels with no verbal filter,” but also for making me feel like my issues pale in comparison to whoever searched for “busier than a cucumber in a women’s prison.”
Sincerely,
Abby
~Abby Heugel of Abby Has Issues
Related Posts:
Chances are that over the past week, you probably heard it from someone. My husband heard it from a coworker, but not before learning from me that it was all the doings of my good friend Nate St. Pierre. To which my husband’s coworker replied, “Wow, your wife actually knows that guy?”
That’s right, world. I roll high in the blogosphere. And my friends roll even higher.
Because last week, said good friend Nate St. Pierre scammed the entire internet. And some rather large outlets of the national news media. Largely for the fun of it.
The Hoax
If you’re not familiar with the story, last Tuesday Nate published a little post about a random day’s ramblings that eventually led him to the Lincoln Museum, where he was amazed to discover that Abraham Lincoln filed a patent application for something very much like Facebook way back in 1845.
Turns out Lincoln envisioned a format to create a Gazette for every town in America. In each Gazette, each resident of the town would get their own page on which they could write about their work, their family, and various other personal details. Moreover, each resident could designate whether his page would be publicly accessible or could only be read by certain friends and family. (Apparently some Gazette overseer would have to be appointed to keep track of who got access to which pages.) In other words: an antiquated version of Facebook.
Nate wrote this all much more compellingly than I am in this quick summary. He described how a lazy day of wandering led him to uncover a series of clues involving P.T. Barnum and Abe Lincoln, which he decided to pursue for curiosity’s sake—ultimately leading him to the dusty, “Appointment Needed” back room of the Lincoln Museum, where a researcher all too eager to have someone to talk to helped him gather together the final clues that lead to Lincoln’s intriguing patent application (which apparently no researcher, historian, or casual Lincoln fan had ever before realized was an early incarnation of the idea for Facebook).
The kicker of ultimate kickers? Honest Abe’s application was denied. Burn!
You can read Nate’s hilarious report on how the internet (and national media!) bit hard for his hoax in his followup post here. There’s also an extremely interesting glimpse into how he went about constructing a proper hoax, which totally made me want to try propagating one of my own.
But the long and short of it is, as Nate himself said in summary “amazing content sells.”
That’s all it comes down to. You don’t need a huge “platform.” You just need to do something that people can’t help but take notice of.
The Genius (& the Lesson for Us Lot)
Nate is by no means a historical scholar. Nor was he a blogosphere legend along the lines of Ash Ambirge or Seth Godin. (Although he is now for his fantabulous stunt.) He’s done a ton of cool things like founding the Love Drop and Love Bomb campaigns, but his personal blog wasn’t exactly on the radar of media moguls like CNN or The Washington Post.
So, how did he create an overnight internet sensation that even the media big dogs started salivating over?
Herein lies the genius—and the lesson for any of us woe-is-me’ing over the fact that little ol’ us will never get big-time recognition:
- He was incredibly smart and deliberate. Nate knew just the elements he needed to incorporate to pull the hoax off and ultimately get the laugh he was aiming for.
- He crafted his piece like an artist. He made sure every step of the story and every dropped clue had just the right amount of intrigue to keep people suspending their disbelief—and just the right amount of far-fetchedness that, in hindsight, they’d be smacking their heads wondering why they didn’t see the joke from the beginning.
- He gave it a shot. How far this thing actually spread was way beyond his anticipation: 16,000 Facebook likes and 104,463 unique page views in 36 hours (including a 2 hour server crash from the huge influx of traffic). He was just hoping to have a little fun and see if he could draw in some extra readers for the upcoming announcement of his blog consulting services. Instead, it took on a life of its own, and he found himself in the surreal position of having created a breaking news story that wasn’t even real news.
What can we learn from this, kiddies? (And I include myself in that address.)
It doesn’t matter how “big” you are or how many followers you have or whether you’re A- or B- or D-list. What matters is that you write unique, clever, pick-up-able shit, and then you hit publish.
Nate sat down one night feeling frustrated over the lack of original posts in the blogosphere, and over the course of 5 hours, he crafted an ingenious hoax that had the internet wondering—then laughing—for several days. He didn’t stop to think if it would fly; he didn’t second-guess his impulse. He moved with stealth, precision, and (dare I say? Nate, tell me if this crosses the line) balls—and then he sat back and waited to see what would happen. And his hard work + guts paid off.
What “Far-Fetched” Scheme Have YOU Been Sitting On?
It doesn’t have to be a hoax.
It doesn’t even have to be “far-fetched” (except in that little lizard part of your brain that thinks all your dreams are far-fetched).
Maybe you’re thinking of writing a paid ebook for your blog.
Maybe you’re thinking of starting a blog.
Maybe you’re thinking of breaking free from your nightly Dancing with the Stars view-a-thons and taking the first steps on that business you’ve always wanted to start.
Whatever it is, however ridiculous and unlikely it seems, just remember this:
In five hours, on a whim, someone created an elaborate prank that made lots (and lots) of people believe for a while that Lincoln had one up on Mark Zuckerberg. You could just as easily do it yourself.
Content is king. Guts are king. Cleverness is king.
You got those, you can go far, baby…
Related Posts:
So I write all around the blogosphere, but often as a contributor I tone down my snark to a more “professional” level. (I still keep it, mind you, or else it wouldn’t be me, but I use it strategically). For this week’s Lifehack post, I decided to try something different and let the snark have full reign. The result was a tongue-in-cheek, parody Public Service Announcement that I had an absolute blast writing.
(I also found great amusement from the reader who apparently missed the parody factor and tweeted: “sanctimonious, condescending, ‘you’re too thick to acomplish rudimentary though yourself’, blog of the day.” (Thank you, @rfrst, for my morning laugh. By the by, “accomplish” contains two Cs and “thought” ends in a T.)
Anywhoo, here’s the post:
Public Service Announcement: Your Phone DOES Shut Off (And So Do These Other Things)
As always with Lifehack posts, please leave comments over at the Lifehack post itself. I only link to my Lifehack posts here if they’re directly related to CCIQ-type stuff, so if you want to be sure to catch my other lifehacking tips (not to mention great tips from my fellow contributors), make sure to subscribe to Lifehack.
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[Every Friday, I share my favorite reads from around the blogosphere over the past week. Enjoy!]
Everything You Don’t Have
So quit bitching about everything you don’t have. *wags finger at self in a menacing manner* Because when you spend your time bitching about everything you don’t have, what you’re really doing is giving every ounce of energy to one assholian little thing:
excuses.
So shut it already. Don’t bitch to me about what you don’t have. You’re not entitled to anything and if you look around and don’t see it, go get it.
~Erika Napoletano at Redhead Writing
Snakes don’t think your dream is too weird. Neither to rats.
His dream job is to breed rats for snake owners. I didn’t get a chance to talk with him. But if you try to tell me that might be his day job, and not his dream job, I will giggle. Nobody on the planet says, “Right after school, I had to go into the rat breeding factory for snakes. I didn’t want to, but my daddy was a rat breeder, and his daddy was a rat breeder. It’s just a day job.”
That guy loves breeding rats for snake owners.
That’s super weird. But, at the same time, it’s awesome.
He’s living out his dream. Maybe 99% of the cars on the road see that and think, “That’s so weird!” But if you’re a snake owner, you’re thrilled that the owner of Rat-a-Do was brave enough to pursue his dream. You can’t believe your good fortune that Rat-A-Do lives near you, as opposed to whatever it is that snake owners without access to Rat-A-Do have to do to acquire loads of rats.
~Jon Acuff
Need Some Tough Love? Read This Now
Don’t you dare say it’s hard. Beating cancer is hard. Chemotherapy is hard.
Disarming land mines is hard. Running into a burning building is hard.
I bet whatever you are doing isn’t that hard.
No one is going to sympathize with you when you say, “Losing weight (or insert whatever you’re working on) is so hard.”
Come on! That. Is. Not. Hard.
Sitting in front of your computer, with the AC on and a cup of coffee next to you is not hard.
What you may think is hard is finding the time or just getting the work done. You’re not going to get any sympathy for not having enough time, when your one hundred Pinterest boards look perfectly neat.
It’s not hard to cut out the distractions if you’re really serious about it. If you still have too many, it’s cause you don’t want it bad enough. You just don’t care enough to make changes.
~Benny Hsu at Get Busy Living
Flexing Your Get-Up-And-Go Muscle
When you push yourself to work on an important challenge, you’re flexing your get-up-and-go muscle. You’re proving to yourself that you have what it takes to carry out something great.
When you do it on a regular basis, you prove that you have the stamina to keep working until the job is done. This is when things start to feel easy. Doing challenging work becomes normal.
When I ran my first marathon, the training schedule was torture. I’d never run more than 10 miles before. But an internal drive to finish kept me going. Now, running 26 miles is just another Sunday morning for me.
Behind your own get-up-and-go muscle is an intense desire. It’s a drive to achieve some sort of vision you see for yourself.
~Tyler Tervooren at Advanced Riskology
Today Is Always the Most Important Day
I want you to make today count.
Because it is the only day you can act on.
Because you don’t know how many more you have.
And because…
“Today always beats tomorrow. There is no competition.”
~Craig Jarrow at Time Management Ninja
21 Things You Could Do In Just 5 Minutes
Want more time in your day?
I can’t help you there.
We all get the same amount each day.
But, you can make more of the time you have.
You can be more productive. Not letting life’s little moments slip by.
The few minutes before a meeting. The short time waiting for something or someone.
“5 minutes is more than enough time to get a small task done.
And small tasks add up to big productivity.”
Don’t underestimate the power to make the most of even five minutes.
You can get something done or even just enjoy being where you are.
~Craig Jarrow at Time Management Ninja
Paper, Plastic, Perspective
As she continued to clumsily bag up my stuff, we continued our conversation about how it doesn’t take much to be nice, how just taking the time to smile can make all the difference in the world.
This stuck with me.
There are moments when I focus on the bitchy woman instead of the smiling cashier, when the one negative thing out of my day will serve as the catalyst for a downward spiral.
I’m getting better with that externally, but I admit that I often see things that happen to other people through some sort of filter that inexplicably doesn’t apply to me. Anything positive is deflected when directed my way, but anything negative—real or perceived—is often absorbed and dwelled on in moments of doubt.
When I’m stuck in my head for whatever reason, I become blind to the simple things that could help pull me out, or at the very least, make me smile.
Not cool, Abby, not cool.
~Abby Heugel at Abby Has Issues
Related Posts:
(In which I use an innocent moment of small talk to launch into a small rant about aspirations.)
A while back, I did a survey asking you guys what you wanted to see more of at CCIQ. One of the overwhelming votes was for more personal anecdotes from my day to day life. I agree. I love getting to know the people behind my favorite blogs—their daily doings, their weird habits, the odd things that happen to them. (Check out Abby Has Issues for an excellent example of someone who mines her daily life to provide hilarity for others.)
So, today’s post stems from something that happened recently in my day to day life, with a glimpse into the way my brain often reacts violently to things that remind of The Way Things Are, even when those things are in and of themselves quite innocent. Enjoy. (You asked for it!)
Our House…Is a Very, Very, Very Broken House
The husband and I have been experiencing the joys of home ownership over the past week—specifically, the joys of owning a pre-war home where most of the fixtures are either the originals or were jerry-rigged by some inept nephew of the old woman who previously lived in this house since its construction.
First, a bit of the pipe under our kitchen sink started leaking. Then the replacement of said leaky bit led us to realize something wasn’t kosher with our current piping setup. (This after several trips back and forth to the friendly corner hardware store, where I quickly got on a first-name basis with the manager, who must have felt sorry for me as I tried to ask about “that screwy piece” and “you know, the big one that you turn?”) So, the DIY was put on hold and a real plumber scheduled for next week to help unravel another part of our wonky house’s makeup. (Until which the dogs give me confused looks as I wash dishes in the bathtub.)
Then we realized the leaking had slowly seeped down to our kitchen floor. This is more trouble than you may realize as some genius back in the day decided to cover our entire kitchen floor with indoor/outdoor carpeting. Yes, you heard right. Carpeting in the kitchen. Carpeting that retains a memory of every milkshake we’ve ever spilled and every “accident” our psychotic former dog Bob Barker had before we finally realized he had issues too deep-seated for us to rectify. Carpeting that, once leaked on undetected for a while, proceeds to spread the water by the magic of capillary action until half the floor is sopping wet and can’t be dried even after a week of towels and big floor fans. Lord knows what it’s doing to the floorboards. I’m not going to look until we get it replaced shortly (with real kitchen flooring) since, as the husband so aptly put it, our house is largely held together by gum and toothpicks. There are many, many things about its mysteries I’m happy not knowing right now.
In the meantime, a large gaping hole that was once my left flowerbed waits in front of my house to be turned into a patio foundation. A larger pile of dirt excavated for the foundation waits in the other flowerbed, which eventually will be a rock garden. Neither of these things will be happening until we’ve paid for the plumbing and the new floor first, so perhaps I was prematurely ambitious when I announced at the beginning of the week that I was finally going to realize my gardening Quit and revamp my landscaping like a DIY dynamo. More likely, my curb appeal will consist of a small grave-like hole and a large pile of dirt until the middle of the summer when we’ve built our funds back up again. I still say this looks infinitely better than the weed garden that graced our front lawn for the past several years.
But, this isn’t a spiel about why you should never, ever buy a house. (Although we’ve said many a time now that our first home should have been a condo). This is actually background for one innocent, totally inoffensive comment I heard last week that made me irrationally frustrated.
‘Cause I’m Cordelia, and that’s how I do.
The Scandalous Thing That Jim Said
I was checking out during one of my many visits to Jim (my hardware store mentor) when he struck up some friendly chit chat about the unending hassles of home ownership.
Side note: I find it disturbing how people bond over the frustrations of owning a home. I made several friends in the aisles of the hardware store over comments like “You touch one thing and then everything else breaks” and “It never ends, does it?” I find this disturbing much the same way I find it exasperating when parents bond over How Incredibly Tired They Are. We enjoy camaraderie in our misery, and this bothers me because of the unspoken understanding that this misery is our inescapable lot in life and it’s a badge of honor to suffer merrily through it. But that’s another extreme reaction for another post…
At any rate, after having the usual Homeowner’s Woes talk, Jim gave me a smile and said, “But that’s really one of the last big things, isn’t it?”
When I looked at him in puzzlement, he went on, “You know…Getting married, having kids, buying a house…For most people, those are the big 3. I mean, unless you’re going to go into outer space or something, but who does that? So it’s worth the work you put into it…”
Now, I heart Jim. He is my BFF and savior after this past week. But that statement made my eyeball twitch. And here’s why:
Life Wasn’t Meant to Be a Checklist (Especially a Predetermined One)
My very first post on this blog was about how I hate The Game of Life—the idea that everyone’s lives run according to the same master checklist, and your only purpose is to collect the standard items, do the standard tasks, and hopefully make it to the end with some money in your pocket.
And I think the reason Jim’s friendly statement irked me so was because it tapped into that same mentality. While getting married, having kids, and buying a house are most people’s “big 3,” what really got to me was his chuckling addendum, “Unless you’re going to go into outer space or something, because who does that?”
Because people do go into outer space.
They also pay down their debt, walk across the country, and do all sorts of wacky impossible things that would make the “average” person think “Yeah, right. Who does that?”
For most people, the standard big 3 things really are their biggest goals for their lives. Those are the things conversation revolves around when you catch up with old high school or college friends. Those are the things we update our relatives on at family reunions. Those are the things that most people have in common in the unfolding of their lives, and I get that. I don’t mean to belittle the importance of any of those things—if you love your spouse, house, and kids, that’s awesome.
But that doesn’t mean you have to be an astronaut to aim for something different or additional.
That doesn’t mean you have to collect those 3 things, or even one of one of those things, to make your life happy or valid. It doesn’t mean you can’t have 5 things, or 10, or just 1 really big thing that isn’t on the list that makes you so ridiculously happy you can’t stand it.
What Are Your Big Things? (That’s What She Said)
I know mine: Husband, dogs, writing. Those are the things that make me the happiest, that my life would be sorely missing if I didn’t have. Everything else is nice, but non-essential.
What about you? You’ve got a piece of construction paper in front you and a marker in your hand, and you have 5 minutes to write down the things you absolutely want in your life. Your checklist. What are they?
And, more importantly, are you going after them?
(NOT 