Link Love 6/1/12

2012 June 1

by Cordelia

[Every Friday, I share my favorite reads from around the blogosphere over the past week. Enjoy!]

Want less, will more
Wants are fleeting desires. They’re inactionable and indecisive.

Wills, on the other hand, are intentional decisions. They’re filtered and committed.

“I want a new job that fulfills me” is much less deliberate than “I will inspire and enable millions to boldly unleash their full potential through my work by May 2013.”

By making a small shift in the way we talk to ourselves, the intention changes, our energy shifts, and the focus becomes making it happen.

In a world of infinite wants, our challenge is to filter and choose the few wills that are worth pursuing. So every time you catch yourself saying “I want…” I encourage you to filter it through how much you actually want it and whether or not you will commit.
~Amber Rae at Hey, Amber Rae

5 Hard Truths You’re Afraid to Admit
Truth #1. You are settling somewhere in your life. It could be your relationship with your partner, friendships, your job, the effort you put into parenting, the amount of money you make or anything else. Somewhere in your life you said, “This is good enough” when deep down you know it’s not…
~Andrea Owen at Your Kick-Ass Life

Make Good Art
When I’m working on projects from my heart, the money may or may not come. Be that as it may, I have never regretted a single moment I spent on work that matters. But the few times I’ve gone into something only for the money, I’ve been miserable almost the whole way through.

You have to make a living; that much is given. The challenge is always to find a way to fit the money into the art, and not the other way around. Whether you use it to make your living or not, your work – your art – can be a beautiful thing. It can inspire. It can help. It can change lives. Quite possibly it can change the world.
~Nate St. Pierre

*Cordelia note: Be sure to check out Nate’s awesome new project, Mixup (the web). It’s gonna be epic, and may possibly be featuring yours truly at some point!

The Surfer’s Story (and why it should be your story)
As you notice the wave is about to break, you push up with your hands, popping up to stand.

What happens next?

To the surfer, what happens next is up to him or her.

There are many things that go into the success of riding each wave.

The surfer’s ability to predict the wave as a “good” one.

The surfer’s skill.

The surfer’s capability to deal with uncertainty.

But there’s one thing the surfer always understands.

That no matter what, whether this wave turns out to be a dud, or he or she falls – there will always be another wave.
~Eric Lunsford at Coffee & Warm Showers

How To Use Your Father, Your Friends, And Your Parrot To Your Advantage
When you want to reach a goal, tell everyone you know about your plans.

I refuse to let my father, my Facebook friends, or my fans down.

For you it might be your sassy girlfriends or your parrot. Actually, that’s an awesome idea since, you know, parrots repeat everything.

You’d be all like, “Hey Parrot, I’m going to run 5 miles.”

And then you’d forget about it and invite your bestie over to eat cupcakes and watch a RomCom instead.

But your parrot would be all, “I’m going to run 5 miles.”

And your friend would look at you and be like, “Pshht, you lied to your parrot. I’m never talking to you again.”

So, of course, you’d run the stupid 5 miles to avoid such an embarrassing scenario in the future.
~Courtney Johnston at The Rule Breaker’s Club

4 Things We Hate About Job Descriptions (and how to make them better!)
Physical Requirements:

Ability to work at a computer workstation for periods up to 4 hours at a time and for up to 8 hours per day for up to five consecutive days
Ability to speak on the telephone for a total of up to 3 hours per day
Ability to sit for up to 3 hours without breaks at meetings
Ability to perform repetitive movements, such as typing, filing, and the use of commonly used office machines and supplies

Depressing.

….As in the example above, physical requirements can be very rigid and soul-sucking. Who looks at that list and says, “Sign me up! I can’t wait to sit for 3-hour meetings without being allowed a potty break.” Now, granted, there are deeper corporate culture problems here that are red flags. We have to ask, why would a non-profit organization (which this was) restrict their employees’ movements, breaks, and methods of working to such a degree?
~Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson at Culture RX

Lessons From A Non-Mom
Pictures are fine in moderation, which I understand is a relative term. However, just think about how many pictures you would like to me send you of either my fake indoor tree or my mom’s dog and use that as a baseline. And as for ultrasound photos, just don’t. While it’s a miracle and lovely for you, to those of us who aren’t carrying that little lima bean inside our uterus, it looks like an alien. They all do.
~guest post by Abby Heugel of Abby Has Issues at Scary Mommy

*Cordelia note: I can so relate to this.

Like my style? It can be yours--literally! Check out the services I offer here: Bloggity-Blogging Goodness for Hire

http://www.abbyhasissues.com/ Abby

Again, I am honored to be included, even if it’s only because I pissed off a bunch of moms on that Facebook page with that post We have our decisions and our dogs/cats and a strong sense of self, along with a strong sense of this blogging community. That’s good enough for me
- http://www.cordeliacallsitquits.com Cordelia
  
  Me too.
  
  Don’t let the haters get you down. People who don’t want/aren’t turned into blubbering fools at the site of a baby are often viewed as mean-spirited, selfish pariahs.
  
  But you know what I say to that?
  
  I do whatever I want every day, sleep 8 full hours a night, can leave the house whenever I want, and feel no gaping hole of emptiness deep within my soul.
  
  To each his own. I thought your post was brilliant.
  
  And I will always remember a comment I got to *my* “I’m not having kids” post: A woman wrote that she’d always longed to be a mother, that being a mother meant the world to her and that her kids made her life complete. Then she said that, all that said, there were still moments when she absolutely couldn’t take it and wanted to leave her kids somewhere for a little while to get some peace and quiet. Her advice to me: if she felt that way, loving being a mom as much as she did, then NO ONE who wasn’t interested in that whole scene should ever be pressured into it. I loved that comment.