Entries from February 2008 ↓

I’m starting to focus more on getting new readers for this blog, and I’ve run into the same wall that new bloggers often run into. It goes about like this:

In order to get traffic, you have to be start getting links and readers. But to get links and readers, you have to have traffic.

It’s as messed up as trying to get loans from banks: if you actually need the money, they won’t give it to you; but if you’ve already got the money, then you don’t need them to give it to you.

rssHugger may help out with this problem. Like most social bookmarking sites, they have a registry where you add your blog and list what it discusses. Helpful, but nothing new there.

They also have a Top100 list that shows how many people have viewed your site using their service. That one is a bit more helpful with gathering the snowball traffic. Blogs at the top of the list get more views because people want to know what’s going on at the blog, and since they’re getting more views, they’re getting ranked better. The same snowball effect, except this time it’s working for new bloggers rather than against them.

rssHugger comes in two versions: a paid version (for $20) or a version that you get for reviewing their site on your blog. Both versions are the same, except one costs time and the other money. You’ve probably figured out by now that I’m doing the review.

If you’re needing some more readers, or would just like to try out a new service, head on over to rssHuggerand give them a look-over. Help out rssHugger, and let them help you out.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Aristotelian ethics here lately…partly due to me teaching it a few weeks ago but even more so due to me thinking about personal development issues. The concept “flourish” has become the predominant concept that’s began to infuse most of my thinking about GTD, personal development, and life, in general. The word actually is on the tail end of one of my recent posts, and I’ve had to stall some of the other posts that I have on the burner to get out what I mean by flourish and why I think it’s a great framework to understand what we are all after, anyways. To get that off the ground, though, I’ll have to briefly explain Aristotle.

Aristotelian Ethics…in Ten Minutes

To get the basics of Aristotelian Ethics, you have to understand three basic things: What Eudaimonia is, What Virtue is, and That We Become Better Persons Through Practice.

1. Eudaimonia

Eudaimonia is Greek and translates literally to “having good demons.” Many authors translate it as happiness, but I don’t think that’s the best translation and way to understand it. “Well-being” and “flourishing” are closer to what he means, and I think of the two, “flourishing” captures the full range of the way he uses the word. And someone who is flourishing is living The Good Life.

According to Aristotle, all humans seek to flourish. It’s the proper and desired end of all of our actions. Flourishing, however, is a functional definition. And to understand something’s function, you have to understand its nature.

There are four different aspects to human nature, and Aristotle is often quoted as saying “Man is a political creature.” There’s actually more to it than most attributions give him, for “political” is often misunderstood. A better attribution is the following: Human beings are social, rational animals.

Two of the aspects of our natures come from being thetype of thing we are…that is, we are animals. The other two come from the type of animals we are. So, a breakdown is in order:

1. We are animals.


Animals have two components:

1. They are physical.

As physical beings, we require nourishment, exercise, rest, and all the other things that it takes to keep our bodies functioning properly.

2. They are emotional.
   What separates animals from plants, according to Aristotle, is that animals have wants, desires, urges, and reactions. We perceive something in the world that we want and we have the power of volition to get it; likewise, we have the power to avoid the things we don’t want. For humans, these wants can get pretty complex, but at rock bottom we all have (emotional) needs and wants that spring from rather basic sources.
2. We are social.


We must live and function in particular societies. “No man is an island,” and we are the type of being that does well only in social settings. Our social nature stacks on top of our emotional nature, such that we have wants and needs that we would not have were we not social creatures. For example, if we were the type of creature that flourished as hermits, the need for trust and friendly cooperation would not be nearly so pressing.


3. We are rational.


We are creative, expressive, knowledge-seeking, and able to obey reason. We might not always obey reason and we may sometimes not want to exercise our minds, but a large part of our existence relates to us being rational animals.

You can’t truly flourish if you’re not flourishing in one of these aspects. This is played out in our everyday lives when you see people who are so emotionally stunted that they can’t function well in society…or who are so obese that they can’t enjoy life…or who are so socially inept that they can’t fit into the type of society that would develop their intelligence. The list goes on and on.

The different aspects of our natures are tiered in the way that they are presented above, so that the physical is below the social which is below the rational. This may sound familiar to some of you familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy because it’s in effect the same thing. Only it took Maslow 2500 years to verify what Aristotle had said all along.

With an understanding of flourishing in hand, discussing virtue becomes easy.

On Virtue

• What is a virtue?

A virtue is a trait of character that enables a person to flourish.

• The Doctrine of the Mean

This is a key phrase to understand Aristotle. Consider the virtue of bravery, for example. An excess of bravery leads people to do really stupid things; the example I normally use is the frat-brat who’ll jump of the fraternity house just to prove how brave he is. It’s not brave; it’s rash. On the other hand, people who have a deficiency of bravery are cowards; they won’t put their ass on the line for anything. The virtue of bravery lies somewhere in between the deficiency of bravery (cowardliness) and the excess of bravery (rashness).
So it is with all of the different virtues: the virtuous trait is that which is between the deficiency of that trait and the excess of that trait.


• What are the specific virtues?

The Virtues
Vice (Deficiency)	Virtue (Mean)	Vice (Excess)
Cowardliness	Bravery	Rashness
Insensibility	Temperance	Intemperance
Stinginess	Generosity	Extravagance
Self-deprecation	Truthfulness (Modesty)	Boastfulness
Boorishness	Wittiness	Buffoonery
Quarrelsomeness	Friendliness	Flattery
Melancholiness	Spiritedness	Boisterousness
Not Responsive to Shame	Conscientiousness	Overly Responsive to Shame
Envious	Indignant	Spiteful
Unkindliness	Benevolence	Over-kindliness
Slothful	Industriousness	Over-industriousness


I’ll not discuss all of the virtues, but some are worth a quick discussion:

• Temperance


This one has to do with calming one’s bodily passions and desires. Always acting on your physical passions and desires will not lead to flourishing. However, always denying your physical passions and desires is also denying component of your nature and will also not lead to flourishing.


• Wittiness


Many people don’t think this should be on the list, but when you think about it, it makes perfect sense. People naturally want to be around people who are funny and who lighten the mood. We tend to avoid grumps, and buffoons, though initially fun, grow old after a while. So, having the virtue of wittiness enables us to flourish in the social aspect of our lives. The analysis of friendliness is much the same.


• Spiritedness


The insight here is that you should be passionate about things in the right circumstances. There are situations where anger is the appropriate, virtuous response, and if you’re never able to become angry, you’re deficient in spirit, and if you’re always angry, you’ve got an excess of anger. This trait is the emotional analogue of temperance.


• Indignant


Aristotle discusses indignity as a virtue in the sense that he thinks we should be upset if people do well undeservedly. For example, if someone wins because she cheated, the proper, virtuous response is to be upset or angry. On the other hand, some people are so envious that they are angry when anyone does well, and some people are so spiteful that they delight in other people’s misfortunes. The proper, virtuous trait is to be delighted when other people do well because they deserve it.


• Benevolence


How can one have benevolence in excess? Isn’t it always a good thing? Nope. If we get an excess of benevolence, we can’t see that sometimes to do the right thing you can’t help someone. Do you know a drama queen that always calls to talk to you when they’re going through their crises? The proper response is to, at a certain point, recognize that you can’t help them (in reality they don’t want it) and walk away. However, never helping anyone is a defect and should be avoided as well. (Some confuse this with generosity. That one has to do with how you handle your resources.)

• How are all of the virtues related?


What links all of the virtues is phronesis, a Greek word best translated as “practical wisdom.” It’s not quite intelligence, although it is a rational trait…it’s more like knowing what the mean is in the particular circumstance you’re in. How does one know what to do in a particular circumstance?…

We become more virtuous through education and habit.

If we’re lucky, we’re brought up in an environment where the adults around us teach us how to be virtuous. There are two ways that they can do this.

The first way is just by training us to have habits that enable us to flourish. For example, they may instill in us the tendency to exercise or to play sports. They may also instill in us the habit of sharing, being friendly, brave, and all the other virtues. In other words, they make it part of our innate character; they are training us how to be.

The second way normally follows the first. After we reach a certain age of maturity, they can start to teach us why it’s good to have the habits that they’ve been inculcating. Children don’t understand flourishing, but adolescents and adults can. They’re honing our practical wisdom at this stage, since they are teaching us in what circumstances we ought to do certain actions. They are in effect teaching us why we ought to be the type of person we are.

Of course, the best way for them to teach us to be virtuous is to exhibit virtue in their characters. If we ever wonder what we should do in a certain situation, then finding the answer is as easy as finding a virtuous person and asking her what she would do. And how do we know who a virtuous person is? We just look for someone who’s flourishing.

At a certain point, though, we become responsible for our own characters. It is at that point that we begin to actively, intentionally hone our characters. We continue to improve our physical body, our emotional state, our ability to live with others, and our minds. We continue to reinforce good habits, acquire more knowledge, help those around us, and find peace with ourselves.

We have the knowledge, we have the habits, and we have the understanding that the good life is up to us. The end state: we flourish.

[Sidebar: the metaphor that I often use to explain Aristotle’s ideas is that of planting a tree. A tree planted in bad conditions will not flourish, just as a child brought up in a bad environment will not flourish. Just planting the tree in the right conditions, however, will not necessarily lead to the tree’s flourishing; to help it flourish, you’ll need to prune it and tend to it properly (just as we train children). At a certain point, though, you won’t need to prune the tree. It will have the structure and setting such that it can flourish on its own. Just provide it the nutrients it needs and the tree will continue to grow and flourish. The metaphor translates quite well for human development.

If you understand and remember the points just mentioned above, you can talk meaningfully about Aristotelian ethics. The real reason I’ve discussed Aristotelian ethics, though, is that it will likely infuse a lot of my writing about GTD, personal development, productivity, and creativity. It’s an excellent framework to think about how to flourish in all of the important areas of your life.

One of my projects got stalled Tuesday, so while I was waiting on the reviewers to get back to me (turned out they never did and I could have been done much sooner), I started pushing the ball forward on the Basement Project (The Wife and I have been finishing our basement for some time now.) I wish I could say that I was being good and GTD and was working on tasks as I had time available, but the reality of it is that the guest/storage/music room had reached a tipping point. The cumulative effect of a) one of our demon cats scratching up the exposed, leant-against-the-wall-bed and b) the Rock Band box not having a home caused so much dissonance with me that I couldn’t procrastinate and play the guitar.

I’ll not talk much about the cat scratching the bed, except to comment that she has created yet another item that we cannot sale in our upcoming garage sale.(!#$%!) Really, the more depressing thing is the fact that the closet in the guest/storage/music room had reached its max capacity of empty boxes.

See, I have a thing about boxes. Ever since I noticed that computers that sold on Ebay with their boxes intact got 5%-10% more on their sale value, I’ve kept the boxes that the computers come in. But I’ve expanded it to any electronics that I might sale on Ebay, since those items get more with their original boxes. So that’s about two-thirds of the stack.

The other third of the stack is boxes that I keep for hauling fragile electronics around during our not-so-impending move. Speakers, amps, microphones, etc. all do not fare well being tossed in the back of a UHaul or a random box in the back of the car with cats sleeping on them.

I’m getting to the point of wondering whether this obsession with keeping boxes is worth it.

• For starters, I have to keep them somewhere, which means that the extra storage room that The Wife and I have worked so hard to create is just filled up with boxes.
• Secondly, I have to move them around. I spent an hour or so messing with empty boxes, so, assuming that my time is worth $20 per hour, it cost me $20. I’ve had to mess with the boxes numerous times, so in reality I’m at least up to $60 of work on them. How much do new boxes cost, anyway?
• Lastly, the fact that they’re there is somewhat irritating. “Why you got all them boxes?” “Just cuz…”

What scares me is my dad is a junker and keeps everything, and with that in mind, the Wife and I routinely go through our house to get rid of stuff, and we try to make an active effort not to acquire the stuff, but overconsumption is included with American citizenship, so it’s a fight.
(Sidebar: When I say he keeps everything, I really mean it. He still has every vehicle that he’s bought since 1960 because he’s “fixin’ ta” get them running. One time we went hunting and ran across some insulators off of some powerlines that the power company left on the ground; we went back to get the shopping cart that he had found and (painfully!) decided to leave behind and began loading up the insulators because they were expensive. Imagine a three-wheeled, creaky, rusted shopping cart full of friggin’ outdated insulators being pushed through an Arkansas forest by a scrawny twelve-year-old and you get a brief glimpse of the extremity of my dad’s junker neurosis.)

When all’s said and done, I know these damned boxes will at most affect the sales price of those items by $200. And I know I’m going to lug and monkey around with them for the next 18 months. But I still just can’t let them go.
Sigh

Joel over at Lifehack gives a bit longer survey of good leadership traits. It seemed to me that he hit all of the major points I talked about in yesterday’s post, sans the picture with the stooge in glasses.

Apparently leadership is on the hive brain.

Throughout my military career, I’ve run into many different kinds of leaders. It’s hard to really specify what exactly makes a good leader, but I have a very quick saying that helps me gauge them:

“Some leaders you want to sit at the dinner table with, but you wouldn’t want to go to war with them.
Some leaders you want to go to war with, but you wouldn’t want to sit down and eat with them.
The ideal situation is when you both would want to sit down and eat with them and you would want to go to war with them.
Life just sucks when you neither want to sit down and eat with your leaders nor want to go to war with them.”

It’s pretty simple, really, but it captures the important pieces. See, some people are just really nice, you get along with them, they’re fun to be around–but they don’t possess either the character to lead in hard times or the ability to get the job done. You might like to see them when you hit home base, but you don’t want them making decisions that impact the lives of you and your troops.

The second category is a bit tougher. Maybe they rub you the wrong way. Maybe they don’t have a sense of humor. Maybe they’re just assholes. But, and the important but when it comes to life or death situations, you know that when it’s time to mount up and fight the fight, they’ll get you and your troops through it. You may not like ‘em, but they get you home in one piece. And that makes all the difference.

The third category of leader is what you want. They’ll get you home and make life easier while you’re away. What many people don’t get is that a large majority of how bad your life will be while you’re at war depends on the personality and competency of the leaders above you. Being away from home and having people actively trying to kill you is always bad, but it’s worse when your superiors are a bunch of robotic numbnuts (the last category).

Of course, there’s a lot of translation of these qualities outside of the military existence; combat and the pressures of military existence only magnify the commonalities of the human experience. You see this eat play when there’s that somewhat pitiable manager who everybody likes but who everybody knows probably shouldn’t be in the position he’s in. Then there’s that manager who people really don’t like to hang out with and who’s generally avoided but manages to have a successful department no matter what else is going on; you may not want to chill with him after work, but you’re glad you’re in his successful department. Thirdly, there’s what I like to call the “Kool-Aid manager;” just add people, and somehow she makes a successful team without trying to do it. Every organization–military, civilian, religious, or other–is looking for those type of people. And almost everyone has experienced the last category; they make life harder for you and they’re incompetent.

I’m fortunate that a good few of my current superiors in the Guard are of the ideal type; my morale, and the morale of my troops, has been much higher recently. It’s hard to relate to my academic superiors as “superiors” in that same way since it’s a much looser type of structure, but even still, they’re competent, understanding, and generally try to improve my position, so I’m fortunate to have them, as well.

What type of boss do you have?

photo credit: redjar
Yesterday, The Wife and I went ice skating. Now, being poor and from the South, I never learned to ice skate as a kid, and this was something like the third time I’ve been. Needless to say, I looked like a very large, uncoordinated oaf sliding on marbles. After we had been skating for about an hour, my wife noticed that I had worked up a nice sweat, like I had been running for an hour. Because I had been running for an hour.

She said “You’re making it way hard than it needs to be; stop fighting it.” And it dawned on me–that’s what we do in life, generally: We fight things we shouldn’t and it makes our life harder.

7 Things We Fight That Makes Life Harder

Love

Some of us are lucky enough to meet people that we’re really compatible with and who make us happy. Unfortunately, some of us aren’t able to let ourselves love those people, and we instead push them away. We’re afraid to commit ourselves to that one person, afraid that they’ll reject us, worried that there may be somebody better out there, afraid that the timings’ not right…in short, we come up with a long list of reasons to fight the natural inclination to love and be loved. And life is harder without someone to snuggle up to at the end of the day.

Making new friends

Similar to the first. Again, we come up with a long list of reasons: they’re co-workers, he’s too hot, they’re artsy, she eats at Taco Bell, he wears Birkenstocks with socks…all belying the fact that we enjoy their company and we feel better around them.

Waking Up

The alarm clock goes off. We slap the snooze button. It goes off again. We slap snooze the snooze button. Rinse and repeat, until we’re just on time to be running really behind. Most of us know as we’re assaulting our electronic timepieces that we’ll be happier if we get up, but we still use the alarm clock as a dummy to perfect our pimp technique. And we spend the rest of the day running behind. (Need help with this one?: consider reading this.)

Working

Ever dread going to work only to figure out that once you’re there, it’s not as bad as you made it? That’s almost every day for me. Honestly, I have all different types of work that I do, but I sometimes dread doing the work that I actually enjoy. Life would be a whole lot easier if we just sat down and did our daily tasks. It’s really as simple as this:

• If you’re a writer, write. (Ever heard of bricklayers’ block?)
• If you’re a musician, play.
• If you’re a songwriter, write songs.
• If you’re a coder, code.
• If you’re a blogger, blog.
• If you’re a philosopher, flip burgers.

Why do so many of us “smart people” ride the short bus on this one?

Creativity

Somewhere between puberty and adulthood we “forget” how to be creative (I blame junior high). We become pragmatic and start to think that all ideas have to produce something. We fear that our ideas will be stupid. We worry what others will think about our ideas. Again, we come up with a whole list of ways to stifle ourselves and deny part of our nature. For a more extended discussion of this, check this out. The irony here is that we fight being creative only to complain about not being creative.

Anger

My wife is really prone to this one. I’ll do something stupid or inconsiderate (usually repeatedly and without me being aware of it) and said stupidity will get her angry with me. But, after she’s already angry with me, she’ll make herself stay mad at me, despite the fact that we’ve already talked about it and I’ve already both apologized profusely and massaged her feet. Part of her really wants to not be mad, and the other part wants to stay mad so that I don’t get off so easy. After a while, she realizes that she’s fighting much harder to stay mad at me rather than just letting it go.

Usually, the energy that we spend staying angry with people is wasted. Sometimes we have legitimate reasons to stay angry with people, but most of the time we fight letting it go, even though we’d be happier by doing so.

Family

In my experience, fighting with family gets you nowhere and generally makes life harder. I’m not talking about kids fighting over the TV; rather, I’m talking about adults that continually spat with their sibs and parents. The bottomline on this one is this: you’re either going to spend time with them or you’re not. If you decide you’re going to spend time with them, then, at a certain point, it’s best just to let it go, since it’s not likely that you’ll get anywhere and you’ll still be sitting there at Thanksgiving passing rolls to them. If you’re not going to spend time with them, then it’s best not to argue with them about it, since there’s really no point.

There’s a weird paradox here: we don’t really fight with and try to change our friends because we recognize that they’re their own persons and you can’t change people after a certain age. Yet we somehow think that we can change family members, even though they’re their own persons and you can’t change people after a certain age.

If you’re fighting with family, ask yourself whether, at the end of the day, you’re going to be sitting at the dinner table with them during the holidays. If you are, then best to stop fighting about it and move on. If you’re not, then best to stop fighting about it and move on. Yes, I recognize that I repeated myself at least twice on that one, but people get stuck on this one and make their life way harder than it needs to be.

If you’ve got the type of family that never fights about stuff, then (a) are you all being honest with each other?, and (b) can I come over during the holidays?

My ice skating experience would have been far less exhausting, and probably more enjoyable, had I stopped fighting the ice and actually skated, rather than ice running. And life is much easier, and more enjoyable, if we stop fighting the things we shouldn’t.
photo credit: redjar

Some bloggers spend a long time writing into the void when they first get their site up and going. They forget that people aren’t searching for them; rather, they’re searching for content. And it’s hard to get your content read at the beginning because, realistically, other bloggers who are more established are already saying what you’re trying to say.

So, beginning bloggers write, and write, and write, and it seems like their work is just going into the dark void. Until the day when people start reading their blog. Even better, they start commenting on their blog.

This blog has just passed a few milestones on this front. I’ve had three commenters post here in the last few days, all important to me for different reasons:

• Michelle, author of the wildly creative and hilarious Bloggrrl, commented on 10 Tips to Help You Fail at Monetizing Your Blog. I’ve followed Michelle’s blog for quite some time and consider her a senior, successful blogger, so to have someone I read everyday write back with a positive comment means a lot. Thanks, Michelle!
• Lucia from Pandora responded to Three Reasons Why I Like Pandora and thanked me for writing it. Sure, it only took her a few seconds, and she probably just backtraced my post, but it’s still nice when people reciprocate. On an additional note, it shows that somewhere, somehow my posts are starting to be noticed by the almighty Google. Thanks for the note, Lucia!
• Garuchel wrote a short comment saying “Very Nice, Thanks.” Now, the reason I don’t list his website is that it seems to be spam and have gotten through Akismet. So Garuchel, if you’re a real person, thanks for the comment. If not, then thanks for getting me all excited for nothing. That’ll teach me to get a big head!

I’ve checked feedburner and noticed that I have 6 subscribers, which means that there are five other people potentially interested in what I’m writing about (I subscribe to my own RSS to QC it). I appreciate your interest, too, and appreciate the time you’ve invested in reading this blog; please drop me a line about what you’re interested in reading so that this blog becomes more of a discussion than a spouting.

Thanks for shedding some light into the darkness and letting me know that I’m not just writing into the void.

Scott over at Lifehack recently wrote about the rituals and how they help maximize time. There are two rituals that I think are especially important: waking up and working.

• The Wake Up Ritual

Few things make as much of an impact on the day as when and how you wake up. Fighting with the alarm clock, not drinking caffeine, and not eating breakfast are a sure way to hamper the productivity for the day.

Whatever your full ritual is, get up when the alarm clock first goes off, drink some caffeine (if you’re one of those souls that have mastered existence without caffeine, I admire you), and eat breakfast. Do this everyday and you will program your body and mind to follow-up the routine with high-yield work periods.

• The Work Ritual

The single most effective way to set yourself up for success during working is to define at the end of the work day what you’ll do the next day. This serves three purposes:

First, it serves to give you some perspective on what you’ve accomplished during the work day. It may have seemed that you didn’t get anything done, but when you review what you’ve done, you’ll often see that that’s not the case. If you truly didn’t get anything done, then take a minute and try to figure out why. What contributing agents were there that kept you from being productive?

Second, it makes you plan your work into actionable steps for the next day. It also gives a psychological “stake in the ground” to return to that may do some motivational work in the morning.

Third, you don’t have to figure out what you’re supposed to be doing first thing in the morning when your energy and motivation is usually the lowest. It’s hard to get to work in the morning when you both don’t want to and don’t really have a clear idea of what you need to be doing. With a plan in place, you can just follow the steps you’ve set up for yourself until (a) you get motivated to work or (b) you’ve done all the work you needed to do for the day.

Combining these two rituals is a powerful way to boost yourself into a productive mode. There’s a takeaway point to remember here: you’re creating habits and rituals even if you don’t intend to. Doing the same thing day in and day out programs your body and mind to continue to do those same things; you can either harness this fact and create rituals and habits that help you flourish, or you can leave it to chance.

I was stumbling recently and came across Pandora, a website that streams free music and analyzes, groups, and sorts the music based upon the song’s attributes. I absolutely love it. Here’s why:

It’s free

Who doesn’t like free music? ‘Nuff said.

It helps you find new music without you having listening to crap

I love finding and supporting new artists; I hate listening to the crap that comes on the radio from artists that I’d rather see used during governmental attempts to get people to leave the compound.
There’s actually two ways you can use this to find music:

• Find new music by focusing on artists you know and love.

  Most of us have a few staple artists that we listen to day in and out. I do the best I can to not listen to the same people over and over again, but I only have so much music, and I don’t want to listen to the aforementioned crap. Plug these artist into Pandora, and you get to listen to something different that has very similar musical qualities to the music you already love.

  Find new music by focusing on an artist or genre you kind of like but are unfamiliar with.

  New to blues but kind of dig Muddy Waters? Type in “Muddy Waters” into Pandora and see what comes up. You’ll likely expand your musical universe considerably by doing this, even if you only succeed in figuring out that you don’t like particular artists.

You can help become part of the musical research, cataloging, and exploration

While you’re listening to songs, you can tell Pandora whether you like or don’t like songs. Doing this helps the project refine their analyses so that their categorizing becomes better. So, while you’re listening and blogging away, you can give back to someone else’s project. It’s like helping medical research without signing all those forms and pesky side effects.

There’s a free version supported by ads and a paid version for $36. I’m going to give it a few weeks of listening before I pay, but I have no doubt that I’ll end up dropping down the dough since it’s such a good service. Head over to Pandora and give it a try.

[Abstract: This post provides tips to help you fail at monetizing your blog. It could also be seen as a list of things for you not to do if you want to succeed at blogging, but I have very little experience with that, so I'm sticking to what I know.)

I really wish I had the experience to tell you how to succeed at monetizing your blog. There are many different approaches to succeeding, all well documented and explained by Steve Pavlina and Darren Rowse, to name a few bloggers. However, I can give you tips on how to fail at monetizing your blog, seeing as I’ve done a pretty decent job on that front. What follows, in no particular order, is my Top Ten Tips to Help You Fail at Monetizing Your blog.

Pick a crappy domain name

Maybe not the best tip, but a pretty good one, is to pick a crappy domain name and theme. Yes, domain names and themes can be easily separated, but generally non-eponymous domain names are chosen due to their themes. For a good example of a bad domain name, consider this blog’s name: www.academicppd.com. It tells the reader almost no information about what it’s about, unless the reader knows that PPD stands for “Personal Productivity and Development.” For a reader to find and remember this site, they’d have to already be looking for it or already know what PPD stands for–given that I’ve got three readers, with two of them being my wife and my mom, it’s not likely that they’ll be looking for me. (Sadly, this domain name is the second that I’ve chosen, with the first being www.lifemanagementforacademics.com–perhaps I didn’t do such a great job at failing on the first go-round so I needed to do it again.)

Picking a crappy domain name is a good way to set yourself up for failure, so if that’s your goal, put that on the ToDo List.

Write posts no one cares about

I knew off the bat that writing about philosophy would not be the thing to do if I wanted to monetize this blog. After all, no one cares, and hence no reads, about philosophy. But, I thought, people care about time management and productivity! And, what’s more, academics should care about time management, given how pressed for time we are.

It took a while to dawn on me that academics generally don’t care about time management, and those few that do already read other sites that are better established than this one. Given that the site is pitched to academics, everyone else has a tendency to run off, assuming that the content doesn’t apply to them. Those brave few that do stay are then subjected to many forms of textual torture (see the next Tips #4 and #6), so that if they were inclined to stay in read, they quickly meet their threshold of pain and move on.

So, while some of my content can be pretty good, it turns out that no one cares to read it (due to my excellent domain name picking ability). To make matters worse, I often write posts such as The Three DIfferent Types of Digital Residents and On the Uncertainty of Life, which almost no one cares about.

Continually writing about stuff that no one cares about is an excellent opportunity to waste your time at monetizing your blog. So, next time your gut tells you that you’re writing about something that no one cares about it, and if you instead regard your blog as intellectual masturbation and you’re not afraid of masturbating too much, then, by all means, pay no heed to it and keep right on a-writing.

Write about many different topics without a good reason for doing it

The best blogs spend time developing a certain niche of topics and then continue to post content related to that niche. Their readers know what to expect when reading a new post, and often find their blogs by wanting to know more about something related to that niche.

To ensure that you fail, buck that mold and write about all sorts of topics. If something comes to you, write and post it! Be damned before you think about whether the particular post fits in with your theme or whether it’s something your readers would find the content valuable.

As you’ve probably guessed, I can point you to excellent examples of this without you ever having to leave this blog. I’ve written about music, personal finance, time management, philosophy (see Tip #2), rest, writing, blogging, and whatever else came to me. I figure it’s like a box of Crackerjacks, and the anticipation is figuring out what random prize you’ll get. Everyone loves surprises, but follow this tip and there’ll be no surprise when your attempt to monetize your blog fails.

Write long posts rather than splitting them up

Time is short, and people who spend time surfing the web are especially stingy with their time. Sure, you may think that getting out your entire idea in one posts makes the most logical sense–but your readers have to wade through a lot of words to figure that out. While no one likes to read a paragraph post and have to wait the next day to read the next paragraph, just a few more like to read long posts when those posts can be byte-sized and swallowed in multiple sittings.

For excellent examples on how to write really long posts, consider reading these two gems:Buying And Choosing an Instrument and The Three DIfferent Types of Digital Residents. Note that the second post violates this tip, Tip #2, and Tip #6; triple failure points! Granted, I don’t think it could have been split up easily, but it still probably never should have been written if I were looking to monetize this blog.

Splitting up long posts not only makes your posts more surfer-friendly, but also increases your post frequency, both of which tend to make more successful blogs. But that’s not your goal, so write away, my failure bound friend!

Fill your writing with bad grammar and typos

Sure, writing on the internet is different than submitting academic papers (as I’ve quite often failed to remember). There is, however, a general agreement that internet content still has to have acceptably well-structured sentences and contain relatively few typos and misspelled words. While there are very few people that are going to get picky about the rules of English writing, horribly bad writing is enough to irritate and frustrate the most charitable of readers.

(Sidebar: Leetspeak is becoming more and more accepted on the internet as an acceptable mode of writing. Generally, dropping in a few words from leetspeak does not annoy most readers. However, reading a post that looks as if it was written through text messages or video games can be very frustrating for a reader that came to your site looking for information.)

Your writing abilities are wicked, however, as your many B-’s from your 10th grade composition teacher demonstrates. You don’t need a spell checker, and subject-verb agreement is one of those hokey problems of the past. Taking the time to reread your writing is just too much to demand, and you know that what comes out the first time is write, because, well, you pwn and those that think otherwise are just snooty.

Go ahead, disregard the accepted rules of Internet writing and do your own thing. The reader will eventually figure out what you’re saying, and they’ll be all too happy with you and will reward you with many clicks on your ads. You’re not trying to make money off of your blog anyways, so who cares if people can’t figure out what you’re trying to say?

Write in a way that isn’t web friendly

Websurfers and bloggers, as I’ve already alluded to, are stingy with their time. In general, they want to get as much content from you in as little time as possible. They have become used to people helping them read their content by making the content scannable.

Most blogs and web content in general is full of bullets, emphasized words, and bolded words to point the reader to important points and to keep them moving along. But, remember, you’re not wanting to follow this successful trend–you’re wanting to go your own way and do your own thing. Go ahead, omit the bullets and other techniques, and confound your readers in massive mire of words. They’re sure to stick around and return to visit, because, after all, everyone likes a challenge, right?

I’ve already referred you to some other examples of posts written in a web-unfriendly manner, but look to the previous posts in case you need a deeper case study.

Write infrequently

Should you gain readers who aren’t legally and financially related to you, you’ll want to defy the common trends about writing somewhat frequently and on a somewhat regular schedule. I mean, if they’ve already taken the time to read some of your stuff, they’ll wait until you decide to write something else and come back and read it, right?

You’ll get bonus points if you spread your posts out between a few months and then write a post everyday, only to take a few more months off. For a great example of this, I’ll point you to none other than this very blog (surprise!). Notice the lack of posting for about six months and then the relatively high frequency as of late.

Spend a lot of time fidgeting with the site layout and features rather than making good content

It has been proven over and over again that, on the web, Content is King. The best bloggers focus on content and allow their content to do the work for them. Their readers return, day in and day out, because they know that they’ll be reading good content along the lines of something their interested in (see the tip above.)

You’re not going to go this route though, because you want your site to bling, baby. It just has to be this particular color…and what does that plug-in do…and, ooh, this new blogging software just came out…and maybe you need a forum…and, gee, what song do you need to be played in the background…and what does your logo need to look like? Nevermind that you only have two posts, with one of them being your Hey World! post. Posts can come later, but style…now’s the only time to work on that.

Whereas most successful bloggers endeavor provide the cake (content) for their readers, you don’t want to be successful, so just keep on working on that icing.

Don’t take yourself and your content seriously

People who are successful at monetizing their blogs have a business-minded perspective. They approach their content, their layout, their themes, and their whole blogging effort as a serious way to bring in revenue. For them, blogging is not an idle past-time–it is a day-to-day endeavor that requires scheduling, planning, and execution.

Not only do they take their blogs seriously, they take themselves seriously. They are writing to provide informative, quality content to their readers from the voice of a serious, experienced, and credible writer. This translates through to their writing and content, and readers continue to return to their site, and continue to develop trust, because they believe the writer is a serious, experienced person on the topic they are interested in.

You, on the other hand, don’t want to succeed at blogging, so you write with a half-ass approached and disregard the persona you are projecting. Whereas they’re branding themselves as a source of information, you will be brand yourself as someone who is flippantly creating content for purposes unknown to anyone including yourself. Your approach to blogging needs to be quite casual–write when something hits you when you have free time.

In short, leave it to your readers to figure out why they should take you and your blog seriously and you’re well along on the road to failure.

Make your readers fight around your ads or monetization schemes

Most readers get frustrated quickly when they hit a blog and have to jump through the hurdles of ads to read the content on the site. Bouncing ads, ads that flicker, make noise, cause pop-ups, and all the other things that they do do those things for the purpose of distracting the readers’ attention. What they’re distracting the attention from is the content of the site, which is why the reader showed up at the site in the first place.

You, however, have the reader figured out. Rather than coming to your site for quality content, you know that they really came to your website to click on ads. Surely they’re tired of reading posts that require little effort and instead need to do some visual gymnastics–their eyes need to jump here, zig-zag there, avoid this spot–like you’ve set up a visual obstacle course with the goal being to make it to the end of the post and remember anything you’ve read.

The single best way to do this is make ads stick to the center of your content so that the reader has to read around the ads. Remember, what you want them to remember about your blog is having to fight around your ads, so next time their eyes need a work-out, they’ll come by and visit you.

I could go back and fix some of the bad posts that I referenced, but my goal throughout this post is to give you excellent examples to copy in your own endeavor to fail at monetizing your blog. Please, if you view this post and want to help your friends succeed at failing to monetize their blogs, shoot them the link to this post. Conversely, if your friends need a checkup to see how their blog stacks up, let them know that I’ve got a checklist for them to go down.