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In this vlog, I raise a counter-intuitive problem: there are cases in which knowing your craft well changes people’s perspectives about what you’re doing. What’s also interesting is that our evaluations change depending on which craft is under consideration.
In case you’re curious, I know people switch conclusions because of the way they’ve done them in conversations. This isn’t idle speculation.
So, here are three cases I’d like you to consider:
Does it matter if I know exactly how to craft useful, relevant, and interesting content?
Does it matter if I know exactly how to create content that leverages the power of social media?
Does it matter if I know exactly how to create offers and sales pages that get you to buy stuff from me?
If your answers change, think about why they change. What are the important differences between each case that changes your evaluations? (Before you answer about the third, please watch the short video.)
Really, this isn’t about me as much is it as about the crafts in question and our assumptions about people’s motives.
It’s dawning on me how much I love September precisely because we’re all getting back into the swing of things. It’s a great month to reassess your goals for the rest of the year. You’ve got four full months yet – what major milestones would you like to have in your rearview at the beginning of 2011?
Tired of waiting on me to update these planners? You can get the whole year’s worth right now by grabbing the Premium Planners. They’re currently discounted 50%. If you’d rather wait, that’s cool – these free planners will be available around the beginning of the month every month.
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Mark’s personal video challenge got me thinking about why I’ve been scared to get into the habit of video blogging, so I decided to share it with you – in an impromptu video. I haven’t done any meta-blogging, -writing, or -sharing this week, so there you go.
Another thing I failed to mention in the video is the grammar mistakes that I make while video blogging. I’m apparently comfortable enough to do it off the cuff, but uncomfortable enough that I misspeak every other sentence.
One last thing: video blogging also brings up the “no one cares” in me before I share the videos. Especially when they’re meta-vlogs.
So, watch the video if you’d like to know why I’m scared to get rolling with video. Or came back when I have something more rigorous, clean, edited, and written to share. :p
I sent out a newsletter last week that has been especially resonant for some people. I thought I’d share it here in case it’s something you need to read, too. (If you’d like to join the newsletter, you can do so by signing up by using the form at the top of the sidebar.)
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When things get a bit overwhelming, busy, or a hair too crazy, it’s easy to spend a lot of time, energy, and attention worrying about the situation rather then doing something about it. What inevitably happens, though, is that as soon as we get around to addressing the situation, we either fix the problem, it fixes itself, or we recognize that it was never really a problem in the first place.
And here’s the irony: we often spend more time, energy, and attention on worrying about the situation than we do on addressing the situation because we don’t recognize that actively avoiding it is still actively working on it.
What I’d like you to do is to take one thing you’ve been worrying or thinking about and see what you need to work through it.
Is it that you need…
clarity around what to do?
to connect with the reason why it’s important?
more specific bits of information to make a decision about it?
some focused time to work through it?
the permission to let it go?
Rather than running around the ship worrying about what will happen, grab the helm and get it through the storm.
p.s. It’s okay to run around the ship for a bit, just as it’s okay to let it coast. The point is to know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.
One thing that often trips people up when they start thinking about what they want is that they often don’t think about the difference between something being instrumentally valuable and it being intrinsically valuable. Yes, this is a distinction that a philosopher would make, but it can make a huge difference in how we choose our path to happiness.
When something is intrinsically valuable, it is valuable independently of anything else. When something is instrumentally valuable, it is only valuable because it gets you something else. Take the difference between true happiness and money; the latter is only valuable because it gets you other things, whereas true happiness is valuable on its own.
One way to distinguish between the two is to notice when there’s a because or in order to relationship in the things you want. Whenever you spot this type of relationships in ideas, the thing you want because it gets you something else is the thing that is instrumentally valuable, and it’s pretty normal to have a nested chain of instrumentally valuable goals before you get to an intrinsic one. [Intrigued? Read more...]
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I was on a call for the Havi’s Kitchen Table yesterday and someone mentioned that systems gave them the hives. I gave a longer discussion about this yesterday, but I’ve been thinking about it for a bit [...]
Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Cath Duncan from Agile Living and The Bottom-line Bookclub
Every project is also a change on some level. The phenomenon of change within individuals and bigger systems has been studied widely and it’s been found that change isn’t as chaotic and random as it often feels. There appears [...]
Editors Note: This is a guest post by Tara Sophia Mohr of Wise Living.
A lot happened to you yesterday, I know.
There were the estimated 3000 advertisements you were exposed to.
There were all the tweets and emails.
There was all that you saw while staring out the car window or standing at the bus station.
There were the [...]
Should you allow comments on your blog?
I get asked this question a few times a month, but most recently, Kelly Livesay asked it via Twitter and wrote about blog commenting and your community. Every once in a while some influential blogger closes the comments on her blog and it causes a stir, and this time [...]
On a particularly frustrating day on an excessively screwed-up mission, I got some bad news from higher headquarters that we needed to change routes and go back through the potentially IED-laden roads we just came through. The way I got handed the information was so casual that it stung – it was clear that the [...]
