Entries Tagged 'Philosophy' ↓

Are you feeling down today? Want to know how to save time? He’s in a dark mood today. I’m trying to get more done.

All of the sentences above involve the use of metaphors. “The essence of metaphors,” Lakoff and Johnson argued in Metaphors We Live By, “is understanding one kind of thing in terms of another.”

(Sidebar: The Metaphors We Live By was one of the most influential books I read as an undergrad. It’s a mind-blowing read that’s well worth the time and money. Use the link above to grab yours from Amazon.)

Many of us don’t realize the power of metaphor even though our thinking is inherently metaphorical. For one thing, humans are generally very visual creatures, which is precisely why visual aids to goal setting help motivate us to actualize our goals.

But the more fundamental point about metaphors is that they have a powerful effect on our behavior. Since our behavior is partly determined by how we think about things, changing metaphors can have a powerful effect of changing behavior. Another important fact to remember is that metaphors do their work below the cognitive level - we don’t think about the associations, yet we act on those associations.

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Friends and flourishing are like cookies and milk: the addition of the one makes the other so much better. But friends and flourishing are unlike cookies and milk in that you can’t have one without the other.

“Friends,” Aristotle says, “are our second selves.” They help define who we are and improve our character. They are, he says, the highest external good.

All friendships are not created equal, though. We have this somewhat strange phrase that we apply to those friends of the highest caliber: best friends. I say it’s strange because it’s not uncommon for us to identify multiple friends as best friends.

But why it makes complete sense is because we aren’t really ranking friends like we do restaurants. What we are describing is the type of relationship we have with our best friends that’s different than the type of relationship we have with the other people we interact with.
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One of the things I love about approaching the weekend is that it is a time to relax, step back, and think about things. I read something that stood out to me and I wanted to share it and my thoughts about it with you:

Fame or integrity: which is more important?
Money or happiness: which is more valuable?
Success or failure: which is more destructive.

If you look to others for fulfillment,
you will never be fulfilled.
If your happiness depends on money,
you will never be happy with yourself.

Be content with what you have;
rejoice in the way things are.
When you realize there is nothing lacking,
the whole world belongs to you.

–Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Thoughts:

It’s easy to lose track of why we are doing our daily activities. Are we doing it because we want to be famous and win the respect of others, or are we doing it because it’s an expression of who we are? Living our lives by the esteem of others makes us their prisoners; our happiness ebbs and flows with their whims and fancies.

Money without happiness is just another way to be empty. Money enables us to buy things and live comfortable lives, but questing for money for its on sake leads to unhappiness.

Sometimes our success destroys who we are. We forget our friends, our values, and our purpose - there are few ways to more thoroughly destroy oneself. But failure often times reminds us who we are and what we have; is our fear of failure thus warranted?

When we are content with what we have, we do not quest for things we don’t need. Rejoice in what you have and the value you bring to the world, and you will fill satisfied.

I don’t proclaim that I’m a master of any of these things. I’m just a signpost to wisdom that I sometimes grasp and sometimes don’t. So simple a statement, so powerful a message.

(This selection came from Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Tao Te Ching (Amazon, $7.96). It’s a great, short book that can be read in an hour, yet it takes a lifetime to understand and practice. I highly recommend it.)

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Photo Credit: Erroba

Dustin @Lifehack has pointed out that the model for personal productivity that I proposed yesterday seems to be an academic model. While I see where he’s coming from, I think there’s a much larger question to consider: is the Internet and its knowledgeworking minions killing the role of academia?

(Introductory Sidebar: I will be using “the Internet” as shorthand for all of the stuff that goes on on the Internet. Also, “institution” will be used in the sociological sense, as in “structures and mechanisms of social order and cooperation governing the behavior of a set of individuals” (definition from Wikipedia).)

Perhaps it seems hyperbolic, but I’m starting to think more and more that it’s the case. Think about some of the historical roles of the academic institution in society:

It allowed a place for the free discussion of ideas

The Universities in the past were the one place where scholars could discuss ideas without (too much) fear of State or Church intrusion, coercion, or punishment. Not surprisingly, many of the arguments that were used to advocate freedom of speech and association were arguments started from scholars at Universities who didn’t want State or Church “oversight” into their research.

It allowed a place where people could receive advanced education above the basics of that required for citizenship.

A heavy portion of the educational model adopted by States focused solely on making competent workers and citizens. What many people don’t realize is that States have done this not for the sake of the citizens being educated, but for the continuance of the State. (I’ll stay away from the rathole of the state of American education today.)

Universities and college’s provided a place where people could go beyond basic arithmetic and writing and learn science, math, literature, and most of the other stuff we still learn today. It’s important to realize the first universities were private, meaning that the State at the time was not in the business of higher education.

It served as society’s evaluator of who had knowledge and who didn’t.

The idea of academic degrees is modeled off the way tradesmen are certified. The main point is that society needed a way to determine and document who had sufficient knowledge to teach or do certain subjects, and Universities leveraged their credibility and evaluated the ability of their students to fulfill those roles.

It employed people whose jobs were not to produce things but rather to produce ideas.

The rise of the academic institution created yet another class (the clergy and aristocrats were the others) of people whose role in society excluded them from manual labor. This is a critical function, since you can’t really do a lot of theorizing, writing, and such while you’re out in the fields chasing goats.

The rise of the Internet and knowledgeworkers seriously threatens this historical role. I’ll show this point by point:

It allows a place for the free discussion of ideas.

Free speech is nowhere more prevalent than on the ‘Net (okay, outside of China). Furthermore, the old academic model required people to be in the same spatio-temporal location, whereas the Internet now allows for asynchronous communication, collaberation, and idea dispersal.

It allows a place where people could receive advanced education above the basics of that required for citizenship

It’s probably not an understatement to say that anyone able to teach themselves can become competent in any body of knowledge if they spent enough time doing research online. This will become even more true as knowledgeworkers continue to create informative, accurate content and as the search engines continually get better at finding that content. This seriously threatens academia, since a) the information is free, and b) the academic institution has claimed a monopoly on knowledge since the Middle Ages. What happens to any institution that attempts to have a monopoly on a resource that people can get elsewhere for free?

It serves as society’s evaluator of who has knowledge and who doesn’t.

The Internet hasn’t quite managed to do this one yet (perhaps because certain institutions want to have a monopoly on that privilege?). Internet experts, however, do currently have the power to be recognized as such, and will often be funded by academic institutions to teach classes in the subjects they are experts in, but there’s simply not much of a model for the Internet that can separate popularity from knowledgeable expertise. (Sidebar:I’d rather have Merlin Mann teach a course in Productivity Theory over most profs I know and have seen anyday; likewise for Steve Pavlina in Internet Commerce)

I think it’ll be a long time for there to be any real advances made here, and if they are they’ll probably piggyback on academic models. Think about how many academic institutions that we currently have that are going the online route and how poorly they are being received as legitimate academic institutions.

It employs people whose jobs are not to produce things but rather to produce ideas.

Successful websites and blogs generate enough income that people are now quitting their full-time jobs. If the experts are right that anyone can potentially make money online, then we have another institution and class of people (besides politicians, clergy, and academics) that are exempt from manual (marketplace) labor.

The real question is whether the Internet is competing with the Academic institution or whether it’s simply supplementing or replicating the roles of the academic institution. I think it’s pretty clear that it’s competing, especially as more and more would-be scholars bail from academia to become (you guessed it) knowledgeworkers.

So what?

If I’m anywhere close to right, Dustin’s insight that the model I’ve proposed seems to be an academic model is partially right. But that’s only because many of the same functions of academia are being either replicated or taken over by the Internet. It would be no surprise, then, that knowledgeworkers would need to ask themselves the same types of questions that academics must ask themselves.

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I commented (again) on Dustin’s article Personal Productivity in the 21st Century over at Lifehack. His question was regarding whether there is another model for personal productivity systems besides “cranking widgets”.

I replied:

I think we have a working model and it’s just difficult to quantize.? The model I have in mind is something like ?Did I add value to the knowledge currently available?? It?s quite inchoate at the moment, but there are a few ways we can evaluate that answer:

1. Did I increase the amount of knowledge we currently have?
2. Did I correct a problem with the knowledge we currently have?
3. Did I explore the open logical space and demarcate dead possibilities so that others either don’t follow or at least know what they’re getting into?
4. Did I come up with a novel or better way to understand the knowledge we currently have?

There are obviously many more ways to specify how we have added value to the knowledge we currently have, but maybe this is the way to go.

Disclaimer: I made some minor editorial changes to this quote.
The reason I’ve brought this up is not because I want to double my exposure. The real reason is because I’m insanely interested in this issue and I’d like to blog, comment, and think about it some more.

Anyone else interested in this?? Do you think there’s another model besides the ones currently on the table?? If you’re interested, please comment and extend the discussion.

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This is part two of a three part series on the Identification and Removal of Leeches. This part covers productivity leeches: those people who constant drain your productive time.

How to Identify and Remove A Productivity Leech

Description: Productivity leeches are people drain your productive time. They commonly poke their head in your office while they are “on break” or are otherwise unproductive and interrupt you while you are not on break or are otherwise productive.

1. Recognize that you have a leech on you

It’s sometimes hard to recognize that you have a productivity leech because your coworkers are often sounding boards for your ideas or issues. The way to determine whether you have a productivity leech is to ask whether you ever get anything of value from them or to ask whether your meetings are productive. If you never get anything from the exchange with the person or your meetings are never productive, then odds are you have a productivity leech.

2. Find out where it’s located

Productivity leeches attach themselves either physically or virtually. They attach themselves physically by squatting in your otherwise productive space and draining your attention from whatever you are working on. They attach themselves virtually by monopolizing mediums of productive exchange (email, IM, or phone) and distracting you from whatever you actually should be working on.


3. Calmly and methodically remove the leech from your work areas or work times.

If the productivity leech is attached physically, set up roadblocks that make it harder for them to “pop-in.” Here are some possible techniques to do this:

• Wear headphones, even if you aren’t listening to music. Face your work area away from the door, and ignore them if they just “poke in.” Generally, people who have an agenda will make their presence known, but people looking to leech will find an easier host to leech from.
• Set open door hours for people to talk pop in and talk to you, but otherwise keep your office door shut. Let the colleagues that aren’t leeches know that they can just pop in, but have a pretty high barrier to entry to keep the leeches at bay.
• Arrange the furniture in your office such that it’s awkward to sit in unless you remove some obstacles. Leave papers, coats, or boxes that are easy to move in the prime locations in your office. Remove the boxes for everyone but the leeches, so that they have to sit facing the sun, sit awkwardly, or in general have difficulty comfortably nesting in your space.

If the productivity leech is attached virtually, your task is much easier. Turn your cellphone off or put it on silent and screen your calls (but make sure you program important numbers so that the people you need to answer can get through). Have your profiles show “offline” for IM, if you must keep it on, and only talk to those who you know aren’t leeches. Only check email a few times a day, and don’t spend much time dealing with those who you know are leeches.

If you approach the productivity leech the wrong way, it may regurgitate on you and make you look like a general ass. It may also go out of the way to mess up your productivity by sending people your way, playing loud music, talking outside of your office intentionally, or spamming you with email and calls. The key thing to remember is that these people are looking to waste their time, so they have nothing to lose by harassing you, but you have a lot to lose by being harassed.

4. Once the leech is detached from you, get rid of it immediately, as it will try to reattach itself.

The leech will continue to attempt to attach itself to you, since it may think that your deal about being productive is only because of some unique pressing deadline. Build systemic strategies that reinforce your work area or times as leech-free zones.

Notes:

• A productivity leech will feed on you for as long as it can or until it absolutely has to get back to work. At that point, it will return to its work or go home, as it has wasted as much time as it can until the next day.
• The relatively small amount of time drained by a productivity leech will not cause you to far too far behind. You will adjust and accomplish what you need to after you rearrange some of your other tasks. The aggregate effect of many productivity leeches may drain you of all of your productive time and may cause career frustration. Note that this type of leech carries with it a strain of vampirism, such that entire departments or management teams become productivity leeches.
• Productivity leeches require a relatively productive, efficient person on their team to support them, as they generally do not produce enough to justify their paycheck. They are generally found lurking by the water cooler, the break room, or the smoking spot.
• Productivity leeches are incredibly perceptive at finding out who the workers and slackers are and may gravitate toward the slackers. Stay productive and avoid them until the management figures out they hurt the bottom line and replaces them with goal-driven temp workers or until you get promoted and can either get rid of them or find out what they bring to the table and harness that.

The concluding part of this series covers The Identification and Removal of Financial Leeches. Stay tuned!

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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.

[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.

(Abstract: This post discusses the three different types of digital residents and how the way we orient ourselves to the digital world has a dramatic impact on how we interact with each other and how we live our lives.)

I was at a military ball last weekend and MG Robert Bailey was the guest speaker. His discussion centered on the different types of digital residents and how we must focus on recruiting, retaining, and employing the newest generation of Americans. I’ll discuss the themes he brought out and flesh out the ideas and implications a bit more.

First, imagine two separate land masses separated by a river. On the one side of the river, we have the analog continent. The people who live on this side of the divide are predominantly older and grew up before many of the technological developments that are now part of the fabric of our society, such as calculators, televisions, computers, microwaves, etc (Yes, there are some still alive, and they likely aren’t reading this blog, anyway). Personal interactions between the residents on this side of the divide are primarily physical and fixed in simultaneous space time; when people from this side of the divide visit, they do so in (physical) person in the same (physical) room. Their way of life is defined by physical mediums–i.e. writing checks, spending cash, writing letters, standing in line, etc.

On the opposite side of the divide is the digital continent. The people who live on this side of the divide are predominantly younger (than, say, twenty-five) and grew up after the invention of the modern digital way of life; they are so young, in fact, that many of them cannot remember cassette tapes, VCRs, TVs that have antennas, and landline phones. Personal interactions between the residents on this side of the divide are primarily non-physical and often are not contemporaneous; they “meet” people in chat rooms, converse through text messaging, identify themselves by avatars, and may never (physically) meet their closest friends. Their way of life is defined by digital mediums; they don’t write checks and spend cash (they have debit cards, credit cards, and Bill Pay), they reserve their place in line by searching for the restaurant on their cell phones and calling ahead, they send emails discussing their feelings with their friends, and they may even blog about some of the most intimate details of their personal lives online.

The river that divides the continents is the digital divide. It is the axis of analysis and explanation that we use to manipulate and understand the world. It’s critical to understand that the American way of life is always moving towards the digital continent away from the analog continent.

The people who live on the analog continent are digital transients (sidebar: MG Bailey calls them digital illegal immigrants, but I’m not fond of that metaphor). They come over to the digital continent if they have to, and when their tasks are done, they leave and go back to the comfort of the physical. To them, “friends” are those you know and spend time with in person, and the idea of calling someone who you’ve never seen or met a friend is just a mis-application of the word. These are the people who call up their children to find something on the “World Wide Web” (hint: if someone refers to the Internet as the World Wide Web, it’s a good bet that s/he is a digital transient) and spend more time trying to explain what they’re looking for than it takes their children to find it. They mistrust online shopping and have one credit card that they keep for emergencies. Knowledge, to a digital transient, is collected and retained; their information intake is far more limited, but what they do learn they encode and remember inside their heads.

In between the digital transients and the last category of digital residents are the “digital immigrants.” These are the people who grew up along with modern technology and have to sit down and learn how to use the new devices as part of their lives. They are in many ways similar to the last category of digital residents, but what separates them is that the digital immigrants have to process and think about new devices and, like the digital transients, are much more likely to resist learning and changing with the technological wave they find themselves on. They must see a manifest problem that a technological device solves before they will adopt it and spend the time it takes to learn to use it.

The “digital natives” are those that know no other world than the digital continent. They learn, adapt, and change not because they have to but because it’s just part of them; they embrace change and new technology not out of principle but rather because changing and learning is almost a reflex. These are the people who can code webpages without knowing how or where they learned to do it, pick up camera phones and iPods and use them without ever looking at a manual or help page, and can master complicated video games in hours rather than days. They often times are eluded by the simplest habits and hacks from the analog side (such as swinging a hammer or airing up the tires on their car) but can find and have the nearest mechanic come look at their car in seconds. Knowledge, to a digital native, is not collected and retained but rather shared and disseminated; they also are prone to think of knowledge as something that is searchable rather than rememberable.

Human perception is largely scripted by metaphors; we orient ourselves to our world not by what’s actually around us but by how we think about those things around us. Understanding that other people may orient themselves to the digital world differently can help smooth over tensions and help build meaningful relationships for both parties. Expecting digital transients to understand the importance of “virtual” friends from within the perspective of a digital native is a lost cause; someone has to be able to translate the worldview from the one side to the other (digital immigrants are often very good at this). Likewise, explaining to digital natives why digital transients do not have a need for email accounts from within the natives’ worldview is also destined for failure.

What we have to realize is that one side of the divide is not innately better than the other; they are just different ways of orienting oneself to the world. One size does not fit all when it comes to worldviews; to help each other flourish, we must think about the setting in which we flourish. We must, however, remember the Aristotelian insight: humans are social, spirited, physical, and rational animals. Our environments and settings change; our natures do not.

Most of our conflicts come not from malice but rather from miscommunication. The problem of the digital divide exacerbates our failures to communicate by making it not only an issue of what we say but also how we say it, i.e. what medium we communicate through. Think about those around you and what type of digital resident they are and how that affects your interactions.

The other night a student asked me, “don’t you ever get tired of dealing with stuff that doesn’t have answers?” This question deserves some consideration.

The first thing you might think is that just because we don’t know the answer doesn’t mean that there’s not an answer. Another way to say it is that though it’s not clear there is an answer, it’s also not clear that there’s not one. Sometimes just recognizing that there’s not an easy answer improves our thinking about the question.

The second thing we may think is just because we don’t know the answer doesn’t mean we can’t know what the answer couldn’t be. The history of ideas informs us that we’ve often come to some of our most brilliant insights by shutting the door on ways the world couldn’t be. Questions such as our spatio-temporal place in the universe improved considerably once we figured out that we couldn’t be the center of the universe. Knowing that closes the door on those options and makes us focus harder on the hypotheses that are still on the table.

Of course, we may think we know the answer, but the healthiest position, about anything and especially the most important things, is that we don’t know if we’re right but make the jump anyways. We can’t spend our entire life withholding belief in the substantive questions that plague us…we have to fix the ship while we’re at sail, as it were. Of course, we don’t get this on the cheap, and we have an obligation to consider our position in the cognitive landscape as we jump and while we’re falling. Kierkegaard’s true insight was that genuineness comes not from being so absolutely sure that we don’t consider the possibility of us being wrong, but rather from being sure while granting that we could be wrong. That uncertainty–that recognition that, though we leap with all we are, we could be wrong–is what separates the humanity within us from the mere machines that we use in our lives.

Imagine the world in which, for any emotional heartache, there’s one and only one song that soothes it; for every scrape, there’s a particular bandaid and a particular way to apply that bandaid; for every desire, there’s one and only way know to fulfill it; one way to express an idea as complicated and important as love.

For my lot, I’ll take the world of experimentation, of trial and error, of my own way to show the Wife that I love her. So, don’t I ever get tired of dealing with stuff that doesn’t have answers? Sometimes, but, at the end of the day, I’d rather live in a world like our own that leaves the important stuff open than a world in which we all have the answers.

(The philosopher in me is cringing at the opaqueness of this post. It needs tightened, streamlined, and linked together better. This one comes more from the poet in me. Begone, you philosophical spectre!)