Do Blogs Go In Quotes

what was fang going to do BLOG about max throwing herself into space so she wouldn't have to kiss him again? NO instead he smashed his fist against the cave wall then grimaced at the pain and stupidity seeing his bloodied knuckles

You are a terrible liar. You do want this. Just as badly as I do.” My mouth opened, but no words came out. “You want this as badly as you want to go to ALA this winter.” Now my jaw was on the floor. “You don’t even know what ALA is!” “American Library Association midwinter event,” he said, grinning proudly. “Saw you obsessing over it on your blog before you got sick. I’m pretty sure you said you’d give up your firstborn child to go.” Yeah, I kind of did say that. Daemon eyes flashed. “Anyway, back to the whole you wanting me part.” I shook my head, dumbfounded. “You do want me.” Taking a deep breath, I struggled with my temper… and my amusement. “You are way too confident.” “I’m confident enough to wager a bet.” “You can’t be serious.” He grinned. “I bet that by New Year’s Day, you will have admitted that you’re madly, deeply, and irrevocably—” “Wow. Want to throw another adverb out there?” My cheeks were burning. “How about irresistibly?” I rolled my eyes and muttered, “I’m surprised you know what an adverb is.” “Stop distracting me, Kitten. Back to my bet—by New Year’s Day, you’ll have admitted that you’re madly, deeply, irrevocably, and irresistibly in love with me.” Stunned, I choked on my laugh. “And that you dream about me.” He released my arm and folded his, cocking an eyebrow. “I bet you’ll even admit that. Probably even show me your notebook with my name circled in hearts—” “Oh, for the love of God…” Daemon winked. “It’s on.

I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go.

It may not feel too classy, begging just to eat But you know who does that? Lassie, and she always gets a treat So you wonder what your part is Because you're homeless and depressed But home is where the heart is So your real home's in your chest Everyone's a hero in their own way Everyone's got villains they must face They're not as cool as mine But folks you know it's fine to know your place Everyone's a hero in their own way In their own not-that-heroic way So I thank my girlfriend Penny Yeah, we totally had sex She showed me there's so many different muscles I can flex There's the deltoids of compassion, There's the abs of being kind It's not enough to bash in heads You've got to bash in minds Everyone's a hero in their own way Everyone's got something they can do Get up go out and fly Especially that guy, he smells like poo Everyone's a hero in their own way You and you and mostly me and you I'm poverty's new sheriff And I'm bashing in the slums A hero doesn't care if you're a bunch of scary alcoholic bums Everybody! Everyone's a hero in their own way Everyone can blaze a hero's trail Don't worry if it's hard If you're not a friggin 'tard you will prevail Everyone's a hero in their own way Everyone's a hero in their...

The thing about being an unstoppable force is that you can really only enjoy the experience of being one when you have something to bash yourself against. You need to have things trying to stop you so that you can get a better sense of how fast you are going as you smash through them. And whenever I was inside the dinosaur costume, that is the only thing I wanted to do.

From Jess: FANG. I've commented your blog with my questions for THREE YEARS. You answer other people's STUPID questions but not MINE. YOU REALLY ASKED FOR IT, BUDDY. I'm just gonna comment with this until you answer at least one of my questions. DO YOU HAVE A JAMAICAN ACCENT? No, Mon DO YOU MOLT? Gross. WHAT'S YOUR STAR SIGN? Dont know. "Angel what's my star sign?" She says Scorpio. HAVE YOU TOLD JEB I LOVE HIM YET? No. DOES NOT HAVING A POWER MAKE YOU ANGRY? Well, that's not really true... DO YOU KNOW HOW TO DO THE SOULJA BOY? Can you see me doing the Soulja Boy? DOES IGGY KNOW HOW TO DO THE SOULJA BOY? Gazzy does. DO YOU USE HAIR PRODUCTS? No. Again,no. DO YOU USE PRODUCTS ON YOUR FEATHERS? I don't know that they make bird kid feather products yet. WHAT'S YOU FAVORITE MOVIE? There are a bunch WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE SONG? I don't have favorites. They're too polarizing. WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE SMELL? Max, when she showers. DO THESE QUESTIONS MAKE YOU ANGRY? Not really. IF I CAME UP TO YOU IN A STREET AND HUGGED YOU, WOULD YOU KILL ME? You might get kicked. But I'm used to people wanting me dead, so. DO YOU SECRETLY WANT TO BE HUGGED? Doesn't everybody? ARE YOU GOING EMO 'CAUSE ANGEL IS STEALING EVERYONE'S POWERS (INCLUDING YOURS)? Not the emo thing again. WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE FOOD? Anything hot and delicious and brought to me by Iggy. WHAT DID YOU HAVE FOR BREAKFAST THIS MORNING? Three eggs, over easy. Bacon. More Bacon. Toast. DID YOU EVEN HAVE BREAKFAST THIS MORNING? See above. DID YOU DIE INSIDE WHEN MAX CHOSE ARI OVER YOU? Dudes don't die inside. DO YOU LIKE MAX? Duh. DO YOU LIKE ME? I think you're funny. DOES IGGY LIKE ME? Sure DO YOU WRITE DEPRESSING POETRY? No. IS IT ABOUT MAX? Ahh. No. IS IT ABOUT ARI? Why do you assume I write depressing poetry? IS IT ABOUT JEB? Ahh. ARE YOU GOING TO BLOCK THIS COMMENT? Clearly, no. WHAT ARE YOU WEARING? A Dirty Projectors T-shirt. Jeans. DO YOU WEAR BOXERS OR BRIEFS? No freaking comment. DO YOU FIND THIS COMMENT PERSONAL? Could I not find that comment personal? DO YOU WEAR SUNGLASSES? Yes, cheap ones. DO YOU WEAR YOUR SUNGLASSES AT NIGHT? That would make it hard to see. DO YOU SMOKE APPLES, LIKE US? Huh? DO YOU PREFER BLONDES OR BRUNETTES? Whatever. DO YOU LIKE VAMPIRES OR WEREWOLVES? Fanged creatures rock. ARE YOU GAY AND JUST PRETENDING TO BE STRAIGHT BY KISSING LISSA? Uhh... WERE YOU EXPERIMENING WITH YOUR SEXUALITY? Uhh... WOULD YOU TELL US IF YOU WERE GAY? Yes. DO YOU SECRETLY LIKE IT WHEN PEOPLE CALL YOU EMO? No. ARE YOU EMO? Whatever. DO YOU LIKE EGGS? Yes. I had them for breakfast. DO YOU LIKE EATING THINGS? I love eating. I list it as a hobby. DO YOU SECRETLY THINK YOU'RE THE SEXIEST PERSON IN THE WHOLE WORLD? Do you secretly think I'm the sexiest person in the whole world? DO YOU EVER HAVE DIRTY THOUGHTS ABOUT MAX? Eeek! HAS ENGEL EVER READ YOUR MIND WHEN YOU WERE HAVING DIRTY THOUGHT ABOUT MAX AND GONE "OMG" AND YOU WERE LIKE "D:"? hahahahahahahahahahah DO YOU LIKE SPONGEBOB? He's okay, I guess. DO YOU EVER HAVE DIRTY THOUGHT ABOUT SPONGEBOB? Definitely CAN YOU COOK? Iggy cooks. DO YOU LIKE TO COOK? I like to eat. ARE YOU, LIKE, A HOUSEWIFE? How on earth could I be like a housewife? DO YOU SECRETLY HAVE INNER TURMOIL? Isn't it obvious? DO YOU WANT TO BE UNDA DA SEA? I'm unda da stars. DO YOU THINK IT'S NOT TOO LATE, IT'S NEVER TOO LATE? Sure. WHERE DID YOU LEARN TO PLAY POKER? TV. DO YOU HAVE A GOOD POKER FACE? Totally. OF COURSE YOU HAVE A GOOD POKER FACE. DOES IGGY HAVE A GOOD POKER FACE? Yes. CAN HE EVEN PLAY POKER? Iggy beats me sometimes. DO YOU LIKE POKING PEOPLE HARD? Not really. ARE YOU FANGALICIOUS? I could never be as fangalicious as you'd want me to be. Fly on, Fang

And as for going into a bookstore and not finding a book suitable for your 13-year-old...maybe you should do some research before you go in? And I'm being serious here. There are a bunch of great blogs that will tell you the content of books. Reading Teen is one of them, and I've seen others, and I love what they do because they make YA books feel safe to protective parents. There are plenty of YA books that celebrate joy and beauty. Now, I would argue that many of them are also the "dark" books to which the article refers, and that saying they aren't suggests a pretty inattentive reader...but that's neither here nor there. I'm not trying to bicker with the careful parents. I'm just saying: do some research and you'll be surprised what you find. So, that's what I'm going to say about it.

A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: "What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?" In the same way, we never thought to ask, "How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?

She was so upset about a blog that maybe a total of six people read yet had no compassion for her granddaughters who had suffered the physical and emotional pains of sexual abuse and whose lives were changed forever. The two cannot even be compared, yet when someone is in denial about what happened, they cannot perceive what is true. It seemed too hard for her to let her mind go there and believe her grandson could do such terrible things.

I’m a firm believer that most people who do great things are doing them for the first time. Returning to my theory of hiring, I’d rather have someone all fired up to do something for the first time than someone who’s done it before and isn’t that excited to do it again. You rarely go wrong giving someone who is high potential the shot.

Spoiler alert. Nobody is going to read your autobiography disguised as a space vampire and minotaur romance. You and every other half-wit out there with a nearby Starbucks and a laptop is writing the same bile. What you’re really doing is inadvertently live-blogging the story of human mediocrity,

If you’re watching Netflix every time it’s time for you to do X, that’s a hiding place. You’re afraid to face the fear of imperfection that comes along with every endeavor, so you’re hiding from it by doing something that requires no skill. You might write a bad sentence on your blog, but no one’s going to critique the way you watch TV. “I

I have a folder that’s labeled “The Folder of 24.” Inside it are letters from twenty-four people who were actively in the process of planning their suicide, but who stopped and got help—not because of what I wrote on my blog, but because of the amazing response from the community of people who read it and said, “Me too.” They were saved by the people who wrote about losing their mother or father or child to suicide and how they’d do anything to go back and convince them not to believe the lies mental illness tells you. They were saved by the people who offered up encouragement and songs and lyrics and poems and talismans and mantras that worked for them and that might work for a stranger in need. There are twenty-four people alive today who are still here because people were brave enough to talk about their struggles, or compassionate enough to convince others of their worth, or who simply said, “I don’t understand your illness, but I know that the world is better with you in it.

I've always felt like my calling was to inspire people. And not with famed, epic accomplishments, but with imperfection, struggles and humanity. I want people to read my stories and books and blogs, and look at my life and say, "She should have had nothing going for her. Meager means, questionable looks, no apparent safety nets and an absence of impressive letters after her name. But she followed her bliss anyway. If she can do it, I can do it. I'm not giving up.

There are moments like this when I allow myself to see the beauty I’d always foreclosed to myself. Part of me thinks that my ability to see it when I do is inseparable from the pain I feel, and when I think that, the pain suddenly isn’t so bad. The sun’s going to come up in the morning. I really don’t like myself a lot of the time, but sometimes I look back at the words I’ve written on my blog and elsewhere and I kind of smile at my own bullshit. I’ll grow up, and then I will come back to them again. It’s fine. I will be fine. There is a spastic firelight in everything. The trick is knowing where to find it.

Somebody’s going to be reading, right? Wrong. They’re FBing. “Doing a Number Two. Maybe I shouldn’t have had those chilli peppers. Hope y’all having a good day! —Coming from a toilet not far from you. xxxx

...while epic fantasy is based on the fairy tale of the just war, that’s not one you’ll find in Grimm or Disney, and most will never recognize the shape of it. I think the fantasy genre pitches its tent in the medieval campground for the very reason that we even bother to write stories about things that never happened in the first place: because it says something subtle and true about our own world, something it is difficult to say straight out, with a straight face. Something you need tools to say, you need cheat codes for the human brain--a candy princess or a sugar-coated unicorn to wash down the sour taste of how bad things can really get. See, I think our culture has a slash running through the middle of it, too. Past/Future, Conservative/Liberal, Online/Offline. Virgin/Whore. And yes: Classical/Medieval. I think we’re torn between the Classical Narrative of Self and the Medieval Narrative of Self, between the choice of Achilles and Keep Calm and Carry On. The Classical internal monologue goes like this: do anything, anything, only don’t be forgotten. Yes, this one sacrificed his daughter on a slab at Aulis, that one married his mother and tore out his eyes, and oh that guy ate his kids in a pie. But you remember their names, don’t you? So it’s all good in the end. Give a Greek soul a choice between a short life full of glory and a name echoing down the halls of time and a long, gentle life full of children and a quiet sort of virtue, and he’ll always go down in flames. That’s what the Iliad is all about, and the Odyssey too. When you get to Hades, you gotta have a story to tell, because the rest of eternity is just forgetting and hoping some mortal shows up on a quest and lets you drink blood from a bowl so you can remember who you were for one hour. And every bit of cultural narrative in America says that we are all Odysseus, we are all Agamemnon, all Atreus, all Achilles. That we as a nation made that choice and chose glory and personal valor, and woe betide any inconvenient “other people” who get in our way. We tell the tales around the campfire of men who came from nothing to run dotcom empires, of a million dollars made overnight, of an actress marrying a prince from Monaco, of athletes and stars and artists and cowboys and gangsters and bootleggers and talk show hosts who hitched up their bootstraps and bent the world to their will. Whose names you all know. And we say: that can be each and every one of us and if it isn’t, it’s your fault. You didn’t have the excellence for it. You didn’t work hard enough. The story wasn’t about you, and the only good stories are the kind that have big, unignorable, undeniable heroes.

What exactly are you going to be doing that’s going to be so time and labor intensive? You’ll be studying your topic, researching your platforms, drafting your blog posts, doing whatever it takes to become the foremost expert and personal brand in your field. But most of all, you will be creating a community.

Och, lass. Yer going to have to not do that.” Faolán exhaled. “Creeping up on a man is a dangerous thing, and I confess I’m jumpier than most. Yer feet are soft as a cat’s.” “I wasn’t creeping anywhere, I was going to make coffee and this is my house, I’ll creep anywhere I like,” Colleen muttered with a petulant scowl. “But I wasn’t creeping.

We all kind of hate each other in this minute, me most of all because I taught them the word bitch and I yell so they yell and Edward missed another brawl so they'll like him more today and he's better anyway and whatever lust for combat my daughters have comes straight from me and I thought I was going to be a good mom like Michelle Constable or Tammy Stedman and I'm not and according to a parenting blog I saw, yelling is as bad as corporal punishment and particularly destructive to self-esteem so oh my God, what am I doing?

I do not go to church. I don’t go to Christian church or Jew church or any other church. I don’t go to church at all. Not ever. A perfect Sunday for me is spent drinking green tea while reading the Sunday New York Times. Yikes! Why don’t I just turn in my Al-Qaeda membership form and call it a day? As if that wasn’t bad enough, not only do I not go to church: I don’t believe in God. How can I say the Pledge of Allegiance if I don’t believe in God? How can I spend our American currency which pledges “In God We Trust?” How can I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, so help me God? Answer: I can’t. It’s a real problem. Don’t get me wrong – I’d like to believe in God. I wish I did, especially if He was the kind of God that thought America was #1. But I don’t, which to many people is the same as not believing in America. Up until recently, I thought those people were lunatics.

Do not confuse location with direction. Location is where you are, direction is where you are going.

I got a book deal, I told Neil grumpily. I’m going to write a book about the TED talk. And all the…other stuff I couldn’t fit into twelve minutes. He was writing at the kitchen table and looked up with delight. Of course you did. They’re paying me an actual advance, I said. I can pay you back now. That’s wonderful, my clever wife. I told you it would all work out. But I’ve never written a book. How could they pay me to write a book? I don’t know how to write a book. You’re the writer. You’re hopeless, my darling, he said. I glared at him. Just write the book, Amanda. Do what I do: finish your tour, go away somewhere, and write it all down in one sitting. They’ll get you an editor. You’re a songwriter. You blog. A book is just…longer. You’ll have fun. Fine, I’ll write it, I said, crossing my arms. And I’m putting EVERYTHING in it. And then everyone will know what an asshole I truly am for having a best-selling novelist husband who covered my ass while I waited for the check to clear while writing the ridiculous self-absorbed nonfiction book about how you should be able to take help from everybody. You realize you’re a walking contradiction, right? he asked. So? I contain multitudes. Can’t you just let me cling to my own misery? He looked at me. Sure, darling. If that’s what you want. I stood there, fuming. He sighed. I love you, miserable wife. Would you like to go out to dinner to maybe celebrate your book deal? NO! I DON’T WANT TO CELEBRATE. IT’S ALL MEANINGLESS! DON’T YOU SEE? I give up, he said, and walked out of the room. GOOD! I shouted after him. YOU SHOULD GIVE UP! THIS IS A HOPELESS FUCKING SITUATION! I AM A TOTALLY WORTHLESS FRAUD AND THIS BOOK DEAL PROVES IT. Darling, he called from the other room, are you maybe expecting your period? NO. MAYBE. I DON’T KNOW! DON’T EVEN FUCKING ASK ME THAT. GOD. Just checking, he said. I got my period a few days later. I really hate him sometimes.

David hadn’t considered that there would be a post-op period. This was the first time a loved one had been operated on by an ancient Atlantean ship. He would have to do a blog post about it afterward—for everyone out there who might go through the same thing. His grin widened.

Do you know why people hate the dentist? Visit this blog to get the detailed report on dentist and why people hate to go their nearest dentist. A study published in health affairs found people are more likely to forego dental health because of cost than any other type of health care.

The singular they has a rich history in English, and as I learned on one blog, it is more important to be respectful than to be right. I was caught up in the rules of grammar instead of the function of language. Thank you for educating me, and I hope that you’ll keep letting me know when I need to catch up to speed. And I’m going to do my best so that you won’t have to.

Asking a writer why they like to write {in the theoretical sense of the question} is like asking a person why they breathe. For me, writing is a natural reflex to the beauty, the events, and the people I see around me. As Anais Nin put it, "We write to taste life twice." I live and then I write. The one transfers to the other, for me, in a gentle, necessary way. As prosaic as it sounds, I believe I process by writing. Part of the way I deal with stressful situations, catty people, or great joy or great trials in my own life is by conjuring it onto paper in some way; a journal entry, a blog post, my writing notebook, or my latest story. While I am a fair conversationalist, my real forte is expressing myself in words on paper. If I leave it all chasing round my head like rabbits in a warren, I'm apt to become a bug-bear to live with and my family would not thank me. Some people need counselors. Some people need long, drawn-out phone-calls with a trusted friend. Some people need to go out for a run. I need to get away to a quiet, lonesome corner--preferably on the front steps at gloaming with the North Star trembling against the darkening blue. I need to set my pen fiercely against the page {for at such moments I must be writing--not typing.} and I need to convert the stress or excitement or happiness into something to be shared with another person. The beauty of the relationship between reading and writing is its give-and-take dynamic. For years I gathered and read every book in the near vicinity and absorbed tale upon tale, story upon story, adventures and sagas and dramas and classics. I fed my fancy, my tastes, and my ideas upon good books and thus those aspects of myself grew up to be none too shabby. When I began to employ my fancy, tastes, and ideas in writing my own books, the dawning of a strange and wonderful idea tinged the horizon of thought with blush-rose colors: If I persisted and worked hard and poured myself into the craft, I could create one of those books. One of the heart-books that foster a love of reading and even writing in another person somewhere. I could have a hand in forming another person's mind. A great responsibility and a great privilege that, and one I would love to be a party to. Books can change a person. I am a firm believer in that. I cannot tell you how many sentiments or noble ideas or parts of my own personality are woven from threads of things I've read over the years. I hoard quotations and shadows of quotations and general impressions of books like a tzar of Russia hoards his icy treasures. They make up a large part of who I am. I think it's worth saying again: books can change a person. For better or for worse. As a writer it's my two-edged gift to be able to slay or heal where I will. It's my responsibility to wield that weapon aright and do only good with my words. Or only purposeful cutting. I am not set against the surgeon's method of butchery--the nicking of a person's spirit, the rubbing in of a salty, stinging salve, and the ultimate healing-over of that wound that makes for a healthier person in the end. It's the bitter herbs that heal the best, so now and again you might be called upon to write something with more cayenne than honey about it. But the end must be good. We cannot let the Light fade from our words.

How to Pick Your Niche So if your topic on YouTube is so important, how do you pick a topic? Passion, Expertise and Money! There’s a lot of advice on picking a topic whether you’re starting a YouTube channel, a blog or even a business. It can all be boiled down to those three words. What do you enjoy talking about, what’s your passion? You’re going to be doing a lot of research, writing and talking about this topic. It might be a while before you make any real money for that paycheck motivation. You better enjoy talking about it. Besides that, people will sense your passion for the material and that enthusiasm will be contagious.

I’m sure you’re stuck on something right now—it’s page 332, you can’t go any further, but you know you should finish the book. So what do you do? You give up reading books for a while. For me, giving up reading was a tragedy. I grew up on books, then I switched to blogs, then I switched to Twitter and Facebook, and I realized I wasn’t actually learning anything. I was just taking little dopamine snacks all day long. I was getting my little 140-character burst of dopamine. I would Tweet, then look to see who retweeted my Tweet. It’s a fun and wonderful thing, but it’s a game I was playing. I realized I had to go back to reading books. [6]

The buzz about Google these days is that it's like America itself: still the biggest game in town, but inevitably and irrevocably on the decline. Both are superpowers with unmatched resources, but both are faced with fast-growing rivals, and both will eventually be eclipsed. For America, that rival is China. For Google, it's Facebook. (This is all from tech-gossip blogs, so take it with a grain of salt. They also say a startup called MonkeyMoney is going to be huge next year.) But here's the difference: staring down the inevitable, America pays defense contractors to build aircraft carriers. Google pays brilliant programmers to do whatever they want.

Because if you make me do that, I will make a stink that you'll never get off your shiny suits. I will sue the network. I will sue the studio. I will sue each one of you personally. I will send our beloved sponsors blogs that claim you' - she pointed to the white man and the black man - 'enjoy having monkey sex on the office furniture while she' - now she pointed to the Asian woman - 'likes to watch and spank herself. Is it true? Well, it will be in a blog. Several blogs, in fact. Then I'll go to other computers and add comments, stuff like Montague likes it rough or with toy or small farm animals. Get PETA on your ass. Then I'll send those blogs to your families. Do you get the drift?

it strikes me that the writers most deeply concerned with the state of literary fiction and its biases against women could do a lot worse than trying to coin some terms of their own: to name the archetypes they wish to invert or criticise and thereby open up the discussion. If authors can be thought of as magicians in any sense, then the root of our power has always rested with words: choosing them, arranging them and – most powerfully – inventing them. Sexism won’t go away overnight, and nor will literary bias. But until then, if we’re determined to invest ourselves in bringing about those changes, it only makes sense to arm ourselves with a language that we, and not our enemies, have chosen. May 14, 2011 Blog post

5 PM CHRIS TAKES THE STAGE Announces that before the African lady, there will be a surprise talk, a mind-bender, he promises, on brain-computer interface. People snap out of their truffle-and-bacon haze. Chris introduces Elgin Branch from… wait for it… Microsoft Research. Research is the only half-decent group at MS, but really? Microsoft? Audience deflating. Energy dissipating. 5:45 PM HOLY CRAP Disregard snarkiness of 5 PM post. Give me a second… I’m going to need some time… 7 PM SAMANTHA 2 Thanks for your patience. This talk won’t post on the TED website for a month. In the meantime, let me try to do it justice. Big shout-out to my blogging pal TEDGRRRL for letting me transcribe her phone video. 5 PM Branch puts on headset. On the big screen:

the challenges of our day-to-day existence are sustained reminders that our life of faith simply must have its center somewhere other than in our ability to hold it together in our minds. Life is a pounding surf that wears away our rock-solid certainty. The surf always wins. Slowly but surely. Eventually. It may be best to ride the waves rather than resist them. What are your one or two biggest obstacles to staying Christian? What are those roadblocks you keep running into? What are those issues that won’t go away and make you wonder why you keep on believing at all? These are questions I asked on a survey I gave on my blog in the summer of 2013. Nothing fancy. I just asked some questions and waited to see what would happen. In the days to come, I was overwhelmed with comments and e-mails from readers, many anonymous, with bracingly honest answers often expressed through the tears of relentless and unnerving personal suffering. I didn’t do a statistical analysis (who has the time, plus I don’t know how), but the responses fell into five categories.         1.        The Bible portrays God as violent, reactive, vengeful, bloodthirsty, immoral, mean, and petty.         2.        The Bible and science collide on too many things to think that the Bible has anything to say to us today about the big questions of life.         3.        In the face of injustice and heinous suffering in the world, God seems disinterested or perhaps unable to do anything about it.         4.        In our ever-shrinking world, it is very difficult to hold on to any notion that Christianity is the only path to God.         5.        Christians treat each other so badly and in such harmful ways that it calls into question the validity of Christianity—or even whether God exists. These five categories struck me as exactly right—at least, they match up with my experience. And I’d bet good money they resonate with a lot of us. All five categories have one big thing in common: “Faith in God no longer makes sense to me.” Understanding, correct thinking, knowing what you believe—these were once true of their faith, but no longer are. Because life happened. A faith that promises to provide firm answers and relieve our doubt is a faith that will not hold up to the challenges and tragedies of life. Only deep trust can hold up.

Our faith is a person; the gospel that we have to preach is a person; and go wherever we may, we have something solid and tangible to preach, for our gospel is a person. If you had asked the twelve Apostles in their day, ‘What do you believe in?’ they would not have stopped to go round about with a long sermon, but they would have pointed to their Master and they would have said, ‘We believe him.’ ‘But what are your doctrines?’ ‘There they stand incarnate.’ ‘But what is your practice?’ ‘There stands our practice. He is our example.’ ‘What then do you believe?’ Hear the glorious answer of the Apostle Paul, ‘We preach Christ crucified.’ Our creed, our body of divinity, our whole theology is summed up in the person of Christ Jesus." (Ray Ortlund blog, Christ Is Deeper Still)

Paul Theroux on Blogging, Travel Writing, and Three Cups of Tea Speaking of books that contain an element of travel, Greg Mortenson's bestseller about Central Asia was in the news recently. Were you surprised by the allegations that Three Cups of Tea contained fabrications? No, I wasn't. One of the things The Tao of Travel shows is how unforthcoming most travel writers are, how most travelers are. They don't tell you who they were traveling with, and they're not very reliable about things that happened to them. For example, everyone loved John Steinbeck's book Travels With Charley. Turns out he didn't travel alone, his wife kept meeting him, yet she was never mentioned in the book. Steinbeck didn't go to all the places he mentioned, nor did he meet all the people he said he met. In other words, Travels With Charley is fiction, or at least half-fiction. As for Three Cups of Tea, I think that philanthropists and humanitarians are even less forthcoming about what they do. I guess this guy did build a couple of schools in Afghanistan, but a self-promoting humanitarian is not someone I have a great deal of trust or belief in. I lived for six years in Africa and I've been to Africa numerous times since then. People build schools for their own reasons—not to improve a country. The people I've known who've done great things of that type—you know, building hospitals, running schools—are very humble people. They give their lives to the project. Missionaries get a bad rap, but I've known missionaries in Africa who were very self-sacrificing and humble and who did great things. They ran schools, hospitals, libraries; they helped people. Some wrote dictionaries and translated languages that hadn't been written down. I saw a lot of missionaries in Africa that were doing that, and you would never know their names; they came and did their work, and now they're buried there. Are there travel books out there that feel especially honest to you? Many of the books I quote in The Tao of Travel feel honest. One of them, really the most heartfelt, is Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi. Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard is a very honest book. Jan Morris has written numerous books, and you can take what she says to the bank. But there are some that just don't feel right. Bruce Chatwin never rang true to me. Bill Bryson said that he would take a couple of people and make them into one composite character. Well, that's what novelists do. If you're a travel writer you have to stick to the facts.

I love analogies! Let’s have one. Imagine that you dearly love, absolutely crave, a particular kind of food. There are some places in town that do this particular cuisine just amazingly. Lots of people who are into this kind of food hold these restaurants in high regard. But let’s say, at every single one of these places, every now and then throughout the meal, at random moments, the waiter comes over and punches any women at the table right in the face. And people of color and/or LGBT folks as well! Now, most of the white straight cis guys who eat there, they have no problem–after all, the waiter isn’t punching them in the face, and the non-white, non-cis, non-straight, non-guys who love this cuisine keep coming back so it can’t be that bad, can it? Hell, half the time the white straight cis guys don’t even see it, because it’s always been like that and it just seems like part of the dining experience. Granted, some white straight cis guys have noticed and will talk about how they don’t like it and they wish it would stop. Every now and then, you go through a meal without the waiter punching you in the face–they just give you a small slap, or come over and sort of make a feint and then tell you they could have messed you up bad. Which, you know, that’s better, right? Kind of? Now. Somebody gets the idea to open a restaurant where everything is exactly as delicious as the other places–but the waiters won’t punch you in the face. Not even once, not even a little bit. Women and POC and LGBT and various combinations thereof flock to this place, and praise it to the skies. And then some white, straight, cis dude–one of the ones who’s on record as publicly disapproving of punching diners in the face, who has expressed the wish that it would stop (maybe even been very indignant on this topic in a blog post or two) says, “Sure, but it’s not anything really important or significant. It’s getting all blown out of proportion. The food is exactly the same! In fact, some of it is awfully retro. You’re just all relieved cause you’re not getting punched in the face, but it’s not really a significant development in this city’s culinary scene. Why couldn’t they have actually advanced the state of food preparation? Huh? Now that would have been worth getting excited about.” Think about that. Seriously, think. Let me tell you, being able to enjoy my delicious supper without being punched in the face is a pretty serious advancement. And only the folks who don’t get routinely assaulted when they try to eat could think otherwise.

New Rule: Democrats must get in touch with their inner asshole. I refer to the case of Van Jones, the man the Obama administration hired to find jobs for Americans in the new green industries. Seems like a smart thing to do in a recession, but Van Jones got fired because he got caught on tape saying Republicans are assholes. And they call it news! Now, I know I'm supposed to be all reinjected with yes-we-can-fever after the big health-care speech, and it was a great speech--when Black Elvis gets jiggy with his teleprompter, there is none better. But here's the thing: Muhammad Ali also had a way with words, but it helped enormously that he could also punch guys in the face. It bothers me that Obama didn't say a word in defense of Jones and basically fired him when Glenn Beck told him to. Just like dropped "end-of-life counseling" from health-care reform because Sarah Palin said it meant "death panels" on her Facebook page. Crazy morons make up things for Obama to do, and he does it. Same thing with the speech to schools this week, where the president attempted merely to tell children to work hard and wash their hands, and Cracker Nation reacted as if he was trying to hire the Black Panthers to hand out grenades in homeroom. Of course, the White House immediately capitulated. "No students will be forced to view the speech" a White House spokesperson assured a panicked nation. Isn't that like admitting that the president might be doing something unseemly? What a bunch of cowards. If the White House had any balls, they'd say, "He's giving a speech on the importance of staying in school, and if you jackasses don't show it to every damn kid, we're cutting off your federal education funding tomorrow." The Democrats just never learn: Americans don't really care which side of an issue you're on as long as you don't act like pussies When Van Jones called the Republicans assholes, he was paying them a compliment. He was talking about how they can get things done even when they're in the minority, as opposed to the Democrats , who can't seem to get anything done even when they control both houses of Congress, the presidency, and Bruce Springsteen. I love Obama's civility, his desire to work with his enemies; it's positively Christlike. In college, he was probably the guy at the dorm parties who made sure the stoners shared their pot with the jocks. But we don't need that guy now. We need an asshole. Mr. President, there are some people who are never going to like you. That's why they voted for the old guy and Carrie's mom. You're not going to win them over. Stand up for the seventy percent of Americans who aren't crazy. And speaking of that seventy percent, when are we going to actually show up in all this? Tomorrow Glenn Beck's army of zombie retirees descending on Washington. It's the Million Moron March, although they won't get a million, of course, because many will be confused and drive to Washington state--but they will make news. Because people who take to the streets always do. They're at the town hall screaming at the congressman; we're on the couch screaming at the TV. Especially in this age of Twitters and blogs and Snuggies, it's a statement to just leave the house. But leave the house we must, because this is our last best shot for a long time to get the sort of serious health-care reform that would make the United States the envy of several African nations.

One day Spinner, the woman who runs PR tells me, “I like that idea, but I’m not sure that it’s one-plus-one-equals-three enough.” What does any of this nutty horseshit actually mean? I have no idea. I’m just amazed that hundreds of people can gobble up this malarkey and repeat it, with straight faces. I’m equally amazed by the high regard in which HubSpot people hold themselves. They use the word awesome incessantly, usually to describe themselves or each other. That’s awesome! You’re awesome! No, you’re awesome for saying that I’m awesome! They pepper their communication with exclamation points, often in clusters, like this!!! They are constantly sending around emails praising someone who is totally crushing it and doing something awesome and being a total team player!!! These emails are cc’d to everyone in the department. The protocol seems to be for every recipient to issue his or her own reply-to-all email joining in on the cheer, writing things like “You go, girl!!” and “Go, HubSpot, go!!!!” and “Ashley for president!!!” Every day my inbox fills up with these little orgasmic spasms of praise. At first I ignore them, but then I feel like a grump and decide I should join in the fun. I start writing things like, “Jan is the best!!! Her can-do attitude and big smile cheer me up every morning!!!!!!!” (Jan is the grumpy woman who runs the blog; she scowls a lot.) Sometimes I just write something with lots of exclamation points, like, “Woo-hoo!!!!!!! Congratulations!!!!!!! You totally rock!!!!!!!!!!!!” Eventually someone suspects that I am taking the piss, and I am told to cut that shit out.

Driscoll preached a sermon called “Sex: A Study of the Good Bits of Song of Solomon,” which he followed up with a sermon series and an e-book, Porn-again Christian (2008). For Driscoll, the “good bits” amounted to a veritable sex manual. Translating from the Hebrew, he discovered that the woman in the passage was asking for manual stimulation of her clitoris. He assured women that if they thought they were “being dirty,” chances are their husbands were pretty happy. He issued the pronouncement that “all men are breast men. . . . It’s biblical,” as was a wife performing oral sex on her husband. Hearing an “Amen” from the men in his audience, he urged the ladies present to serve their husbands, to “love them well,” with oral sex. He advised one woman to go home and perform oral sex on her husband in Jesus’ name to get him to come to church. Handing out religious tracts was one thing, but there was a better way to bring about Christian revival. 13 Driscoll reveled in his ability to shock people, but it was a series of anonymous blog posts on his church’s online discussion board that laid bare the extent of his misogyny. In 2006, inspired by Braveheart, Driscoll adopted the pseudonym “William Wallace II” to express his unfiltered views. “I love to fight. It’s good to fight. Fighting is what we used to do before we all became pussified,” before America became a “pussified nation.” In that vein, he offered a scathing critique of the earlier iteration of the evangelical men’s movement, of the “pussified James Dobson knock-off crying Promise Keeping homoerotic worship . . .” where men hugged and cried “like damn junior high girls watching Dawson’s Creek.” Real men should steer clear. 14 For Driscoll, the problem went all the way back to the biblical Adam, a man who plunged humanity headlong into “hell/ feminism” by listening to his wife, “who thought Satan was a good theologian.” Failing to exercise “his delegated authority as king of the planet,” Adam was cursed, and “every man since has been pussified.” The result was a nation of men raised “by bitter penis envying burned feministed single mothers who make sure that Johnny grows up to be a very nice woman who sits down to pee.” Women served certain purposes, and not others. In one of his more infamous missives, Driscoll talked of God creating women to serve as penis “homes” for lonely penises. When a woman posted on the church’s discussion board, his response was swift: “I . . . do not answer to women. So, your questions will be ignored.” 15

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Maybe you have already been writing, but never considered a book before. What you have contributed to websites, discussion groups, blogs and membership communities can lead to books. These are great places to flesh out ideas, get reader feedback, and sometimes even catch the attention of an agent, publisher or larger audience. If anything, a well branded presence on the internet positions you in a way where you have the opportunity to become the authority or expert. Do not let any of what you have written online go to waste. Make files and collect all of your information because you may have enough content already written to fill two books!

We grow up going to school, where you get a gold star, you get the A-plus," she says. "At work you're constantly being evaluated. Then you become a homemaker and suddenly nobody is giving you feedback. Suddenly no one is paying attention to what you're doing. Blogging is a way to get this validation from other people. You put up a recipe and people go, 'Hey, that's a great photograph.'" Clearly blogs can give emotional value to housework. But if a blogger is actually making money from a blog, even a little bit of money, it cane make the blog even more validating.

Typical of the form is an item from the Wall Street Journal’s Washington Wire blog of June 24, 2013: The Social Security Administration’s inspector general on Monday said the agency improperly paid $31 million in benefits to 1,546 Americans believed to be deceased. And potentially making matters worse for the agency, the inspector general said the Social Security Administration had death certificate information on each person filed in the government database, suggesting it should have known the Americans had died and halted payments. Why do we allow this kind of thing to persist? The answer is simple—eliminating waste has a cost, just as getting to the airport early has a cost. Enforcement and vigilance are worthy goals, but eliminating all the waste, just like eliminating even the slightest chance of missing a plane, carries a cost that outweighs the benefit. As blogger (and former mathlete) Nicholas Beaudrot observed, that $31 million represents .004% of the benefits disbursed annually by the SSA. In other words, the agency is already extremely good at knowing who’s alive and who’s no more. Getting even better at that distinction, in order to eliminate those last few mistakes, might be expensive. If we’re going to count utils, we shouldn’t be asking, “Why are we wasting the taxpayer’s money?,” but “What’s the right amount of the taxpayer’s money to be wasting?” To paraphrase Stigler: if your government isn’t wasteful, you’re spending too much time fighting government waste.

You don’t need another motivational quote laid over a picture of a mountain. Think about what happens every time you go on a motivational image or video binge. You jump from image to image, releasing a little more dopamine with each click (like an addict). Then you get to a point maybe an hour later and realize that all the motivation did was kill time. Now you’re exhausted and have no energy to do anything else. A much better way to inspire yourself is to take action. Work on your project. Take the first step towards starting a new habit. Write the first paragraph of a blog post. Do something! The only information that stays inspiring in the long-run is the information that we apply. Knowledge is not power, it’s frustration. Applied knowledge is power. When your default is action, inspiration builds on itself.

Get Noticed In Cyber Space With SEO Do you own a website or blog and want to get the most out of it by increasing your traffic without spending a dime? Then you should look into the world of search engine optimization! Search engine optimization gets more people to your site for free. Read on to learn how you, too, can do this! When designing your site for SEO, make sure to include relevant keywords in the title tag. Since these words will show up as the title to your page, it is the single most important place to put the relevant keywords. However, make sure your title tag is no more than six to seven words in length. Using flash files is not a good idea for search engine optimization. Be aware of using flash as it can be very slow to load, and users will get frustrated. In addition, search engine spiders will not read keywords that are found in flash files. When marketing a product online, make sure your site is as useable and accessible as possible. If your website has problems with the code or can't be viewed by certain browsers, you will lose visitors and therefore sales. Very few people will go to the trouble of switching browsers just to use your site. When optimizing your website, be sure to optimize your description meta tag as well. Some experts believe that keyword meta tags are nearly worthless today, as search engines no longer use them, but that descriptions will usually show up under your page title on the results page, and they are also involved in the indexing process. With search engine optimization, your blog or website can get way more traffic by appearing early on lists of search results for terms related to your business. Apply these easy, free, and effective techniques to maximize your traffic and use that traffic to maximize your profits. Why wait? Start now! Use these tips for successful SEO of any business online and try visit holisticmade.com

Scale yourself. Go beyond what you can do and what you know. Look at your content machine and make it work nonstop, seamlessly, and at scale with or without you.

You have to tell him at some point. It’s like a Band-Aid—you should just rip it off. If you don’t, it’ll haunt you forever. Or he’ll find out from someone else, which is worse.” Mom comes in then with a tray of tea for all of us. “I couldn’t have put it any better myself, Beth.” “What?” I ask, almost spilling the hot tea onto my precious laptop. “Beth’s right. You need to just ’fess up and take things from there.” She blows on her tea, calm as a spring breeze. “I knew it had to have something to do with a boy. You never get sick. A broken leg or a concussion I would’ve believed, but not a virus. And I could tell by your demeanor that this was a sickness of the heart, not the body.” “There you go again with your romance novel logic.” I shake my head. She points a scolding finger at me. “Don’t discount romance novels. What do you think that stuff you write for your blog is? You call it ‘fanfic’ but it could absolutely be categorized as romance. Love, finding that other person who understands you, is a part of everyone’s life. Some of the most beautiful and poignant words I’ve ever read have been in romance novels.” “Okay, first off,” Beth says, “we’ll talk about your fanfiction another time. Secondly, your mom is totally right. ’Fess up already.

Life-paralysis refers to all of the opportunities we miss because we’re too afraid to put anything out in the world that could be imperfect. It’s also all of the dreams that we don’t follow because of our deep fear of failing, making mistakes, and disappointing others. It’s terrifying to risk when you’re a perfectionist; your self-worth is on the line. I put these three insights together to craft a definition of perfectionism (because you know how much I love to get words wrapped around my struggles!). It’s long, but man has it helped me! It’s also the “most requested” definition on my blog. Perfectionism is a self-destructive and addictive belief system that fuels this primary thought: If I look perfect, live perfectly, and do everything perfectly, I can avoid or minimize the painful feelings of shame, judgment, and blame. Perfectionism is self-destructive simply because there is no such thing as perfect. Perfection is an unattainable goal. Additionally, perfectionism is more about perception—we want to be perceived as perfect. Again, this is unattainable—there is no way to control perception, regardless of how much time and energy we spend trying. Perfectionism is addictive because when we invariably do experience shame, judgment, and blame, we often believe it’s because we weren’t perfect enough. So rather than questioning the faulty logic of perfectionism, we become even more entrenched in our quest to live, look, and do everything just right. Feeling shamed, judged, and blamed (and the fear of these feelings) are realities of the human experience. Perfectionism actually increases the odds that we’ll experience these painful emotions and often leads to self-blame: It’s my fault. I’m feeling this way because “I’m not good enough.” To overcome perfectionism, we need to be able to acknowledge our vulnerabilities to the universal experiences of shame, judgment, and blame; develop shame resilience; and practice self-compassion. When we become more loving and compassionate with ourselves and we begin to practice shame resilience, we can embrace our imperfections. It is in the process of embracing our imperfections that we find our truest gifts: courage, compassion, and connection.

Here are a few different types of emails you can send: Common FAQs – An email that answers repeat questions you get from readers and subscribers Affiliate case study – An email that details the results from taking a course or using a tool that you’re an affiliate for Teaser to an existing post – An email that links to pillar or cornerstone pieces on your blog Tools and resources – An email that shares your favorite tool collection The Start Here – An email that links to your most important resources Break the myths – An email that lays out myths that your subscribers may think are true Behind the scenes – An email that gives an insiders’ peek into what’s going on with your business Personal story – An email that gives an insiders’ peek into your struggles or backstory One-click survey – An email that asks a simple question to segment subscribers or allows them to choose their own email journey Survey or How can I help you? – An email asking for responses or providing an offer to help Postpurchase welcome email – An email sent immediately after purchase to buyers of your offer Unexpected incentive email – A simple cheat sheet, guide, or PDF that subscribers were not expecting Favorite thing – A collection of your favorite books/blogs/stock photo sites, etc. I have used every one of these emails in my email marketing mix. Doing so breaks up the monotony of sending the same style of email each week, and each of these emails feeds your marketing goals differently as well.

The same applies to other venues; without the written word, book publishers, magazines, blogs, and game designers have nothing to do and would swiftly go out of business. Everything starts with the word, and they know it.

Frame control creates power and power attracts. BY JOSH (JETSET) KING MADRID WHAT DO KANYE WEST AND ELON MUSK HAVE IN COMMON? When you put the two together, there may be few similarities, but I believe one trait they share is the ability to control their frame, also known as frame control. Frame control is a little-known underlying phenomenon that may be one of the reasons they are so influential and successful despite the controversy. Nonetheless, they maintain their status as some of our culture's most powerful figures. The power of how we frame our personal realities is referred to as frame control. A frame is a tool that you can use to package your power, authority, strength, information, and status. Standing firm in your beliefs can persuade and influence. I first discovered frame control in 2016 after coming across the book Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff. I was hooked instantly. I was a freshman in college at UC Irvine at the time and was earning a few thousand dollars a month in my online business. In just a few short months after applying the concept of frame control in my life and business, everything changed — I started dating the girl of my dreams, cleared my first $27,000 in one month and dropped out of college to go all in on my business. Since then, I've read every book, watched every video, and studied every expert-written blog I can find on the subject. This eventually led me to obtain NLP and neuro-marketing certifications, both of which explain the underlying psychology of how our brains frame social interactions and provide techniques for controlling these frames in oneself and others in order to become more likable, influential, and lead a better life overall. Frame control is about establishing your own authority, but it isn't just some self-help nonsense. It is about true and verified beliefs. The glass half-empty or half-full frame is a popular analogy. If you believe the glass is half-empty, that is exactly what it will be. But someone with a half-full frame can come in and convince you to change your belief, simply by backing it up with the logic of “an empty glass of water would always be empty, but having water in an empty glass makes it half-full.” Positioning your view as the one that counts does take some practice because you first have to believe in yourself. You won’t be able to convince anyone of your authority if you are not authentic or if you don’t actually believe in what you’re trying to sell. Whether they realize it or not, public figures are likely to engage in frame control. When you're in the spotlight, you have to stay focused on the type of person you want the rest of the world to see you as. Tom Cruise, for example, is an example of frame control because of his ability to maintain dominance in media situations. In a well-known BBC interview, Tom Cruise assertively puts the interviewer in his place when he steps out of line and begins probing into his personal life. Cruise doesn't do it disrespectfully, which is how he maintains his own dominance, but he does it in such a way that the interviewer is held accountable. How Frame Control Positions the User as Influential or Powerful Turning toward someone who is dominant or who seems to know what they are doing is a natural occurrence. Generally speaking, we are hard-wired to trust people who believe in themselves and when they are put on a world stage, the effects of it can be almost bewildering. We often view comedians as mere entertainers, but in fact, many of them are experts in frame control. They challenge your views by making you laugh. Whether you want to accept their frame or not, the moment you laugh, your own frame has been shaken and theirs have taken over.

The higher you rise, the greater your desire for becoming loved and admired.” “Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.” “Remember to be yourself; you don’t need anyone’s approval or appreciation otherwise.” “Some people are so busy looking in the mirror they forget to look at what is around them.” “What comes around goes around and more often than not comes right back at you.” “Good karma will always come back to those who give off positive energy and spread kindness and love. The only person that can truly make a difference in your life is you – start by becoming aware of when narcissism rears its ugly head. “If you do good, you will be rewarded. If you do bad, you will suffer the consequences. That’s what karma is all about.” “Karma has no deadline; be aware that your actions today will always come back to haunt you tomorrow.” “The universe always pays back; you cannot escape from the effects of Karma!” “Good karma requires no explanation and bad karma requires no excuse.” “Karma has a way of returning your secrets in unexpected ways. Be careful who knows them and how they’re shared… or not shared at all!” Selfishness brings misery, whereas kindness brings joy and peace built upon a strong foundation of karma that eventually leads to success.” “In life, we reap what we have sown so it’s best to sow good deeds so one can reap their sweet rewards later on in life through karmic justice!” “Karma has no menu; you get served what you deserve.” “The universe is not punishing you; it’s teaching you.” “Be careful with your words. Once they are said, they can be only forgiven, not forgotten.” “Everything that happens to us happens for a reason and the only viable response we can give is to learn from it and move on.” “By hating someone else, we set ourselves up as judge; we take upon ourselves the powers of Karma: to reward or punish with justice.” “No matter how much suffering you go through, you will never earn the right to be cruel.” If life gives you lemons and all that jazz remember one thing: Everything eventually becomes something else and nobody ever truly knows what the future holds. “Karma is a powerful force that doesn’t forget anyone who has wronged or hurt you.” “You will reap what you sow and what goes around comes around in due time.” “One day the pain and suffering you caused others will come back to you tenfold” “Put kindness out into the world and it will come back to reward you in unexpected ways.

Simple Fast Funnels may be the new kid on the block when it comes to a complete bumper to bumper CRM system, but it’s a force to be reckoned with! Business owners are switching over right and left and I’m going to outline 10 of the best features of Simple Fast Funnels so you can see what all the buzz is about! Funnel builder: Simple Fast Funnels has easy intuitive software so you can build your own landing pages, funnels, websites, sales pages etc. No developer needed, everything included and simple to use Email Software: Instead of paying hundreds or thousands per month to send emails, this software does it for you! You can have your entire email list automated or send emails on the fly, whatever fits the bill for you, they’ve got you covered and it’s so easy to track your email results so you can modify and make improvements as you go. Online Membership Area: Now, for no additional fees that lot’s of CRM software likes to charge, you can build glorious membership areas for your clients. You can control timing on video releases, give access for certain time periods upset packages… whatever your business looks like, if you can dream it, you can build it in the membership area. Survey and quiz generator: Ramp up your lead capture game to grow your customer list! One of the best ways to get leads is to get your customers talking about themselves. Not only do people love to take surveys and quizzes, but it can help you gather information about your clients to serve them better and grow your sales! SMS Marketing Software: If you’re not messaging your customers, you’re missing out, and if you are messaging your customers you’re probably over paying. Amazing automated intuitive SMS marketing can make your life much easier and allow you to reach your customers in more ways. Being where your customers are more present is always good for business. Simple Fast Funnels helps you get the cheapest SMS rates around and it automatically integrates into the system for your unified messages. Appointment booking: Another expensive thing you used to have to pay for and try to get to work properly with your website AND look decent is also built right in. Now, without leaving Simple Fast Funnels, you’re able to capture the lead, follow up with the lead all over the place, engage with them, build trust, book appointments, schedule calls and even send them automated text reminders. E com Purchases: Directly on your website, you’ll be able to take payments. No more invoices sent from other platforms, everything buttoned up nice and clean. Unified messaging: From now on, whether a client emails, texts, calls etc, it all shows up in one place at your end. This might not seem like a big deal, but it’s a HUGE pain to have to follow customers about and keep track of conversations. Now you see all your communication with customers in a neat little area. Blogs: Blogs these days can really help your marketing efforts across the board, and of course your blogs will be a perfect fit in your simple fast funnel account. Analytics: Data tracking when you’re dealing with features on various platforms is a nightmare. If you capture a lead on a Word press landing page, send it an email software like Keep, mail chimp or whatever, send them to a new website to schedule calls and another to make purchases… How could you possibly expect to get good customer data? Hosting all of your “business” in one location makes tracking flawless. The more customers you have the more data you need to be efficient. Cheers to making it easy. All that software and that’s just the top 10, guys there’s more. Simplefastfunnels.com also lets you have a 2 week free trial. Don’t take anyone word for anything. Go try it for yourself.

1995: The Hollywood Squares becomes incredibly dull and ratings plummet during the years after special guests Jacques Lemaire and Lou Lamoriello develop a strategy that involves never doing anything except going for the block.

According to John Shook, “‘Go see, ask why, show respect’ is the way we turn the philosophy of scientific empiricism into actual behavior.” It’s an expression he originally learned from Fujio Cho (past president and chairman of Toyota). In an LEI blog, Shook went on to say, “We go observe what is really happening (at the Gemba where the work takes place), while showing respect for the people involved, especially the people who do the real value-creating work of the business.

novelty. I’m definitely in the familiarity camp. I love to reread my favorite books and to watch movies over and over. I eat the same foods, more or less, every day. I like returning to places I’ve visited before. Other people thrive on doing new things. For familiarity lovers, a habit becomes easier as it becomes familiar. When I felt intimidated by the library when I started law school, I made myself walk through it a few times each day until I felt comfortable enough to work there. When I started blogging, my unfamiliarity with the mechanics of posting made me dread it. But I forced myself to post every day so that the foreign became familiar, and the difficult became automatic. Novelty lovers may embrace habits more readily when they seem less … habit-like. A guy told me, “I feel stale when I go to work every day and see the same faces all the time, so once a week I work in a different satellite office, to shake thing up.” In

Never have I seen so many young, privileged, people trying so hard to be happy. There are countless articles written about it, blogs named for it, workshops attending to it. Who ever said we’re supposed to be happy all the time, anyway? We’re not. And the pressure to do so might be what’s making us unhappy to begin with. It’s OK if you’re not completely content with your life twenty-four hours a day. Can you imagine what a boring person you’d be if you were? Going through shit storms, feeling uninspired, hating the way you look and having guilt over not accomplishing enough are just some of the things that make you interesting, relatable and human. Not to mention, if you’re reading this, then you have internet access and if you have internet access, it stands to reason that you have a computer, which makes me think you probably have a place to live, with electricity and plenty of food to eat and clean clothes to wear, which are all things that an enormous amount of people living on the planet today do not have. This is not to say that people shouldn’t strive to better their positions in life, however it seems like so many of us are no longer content with a regular amount of happy, yet dead-set on being maniacally jubilant, all of the time.

For pretty much my whole life, I thought I was living to better myself, to create the best life possible. About a year ago, that mindset changed. I now believe I’m here to create the best world possible. This shift from me to everyone is what altered my entire understanding of passion, and my purpose. Ben Horowitz is one of my digital mentors (meaning I follow his blog). I find him very insightful. Whenever he says (or writes about) anything, I inevitably start nodding my head until my neck is sore. Here’s an excerpt from the commencement speech he gave at Columbia, his alma mater: “Following your passion is a very me centered view of the world, and as you go through life, what you’ll find is that what you take out of the world over time—be it…money, cars, stuff, accolades—is much less important than what you put into the world. And so my recommendation would be to follow your contribution. Find the thing that you’re great at, put that into the world, contribute to others, help the world be better. That is the thing to follow." Most of the time, if you follow your contribution, it’s either already a passion, or likely to become one. Doing something you’re good at is intoxicating, as is contributing to the world. Writing and launching The Connection Algorithm was a full year of hard work. It was the result of countless hours of reflection, deeply philosophical thinking, and brutal honesty. Throughout the entire process, I felt driven, passionate, and motivated. At first, I thought this was because I was doing it on my own. But I’ve come to realize it was something else—something far more profound. Shortly after the book was released, I began receiving emails from people who had read the book and been deeply impacted by it. A highschooler in Miami. An entrepreneur in Amsterdam. A small business owner in the midwest. People were also leaving reviews on Amazon—people I didn’t know, saying the book helped them live a better life. And on my Kindle, I could see passages that people were highlighting. People weren’t just reading my book, they were taking notes on useful things to remember. The craft of writing has been unbelievably fulfilling for me. And so I’m continuing the pursuit. My motivation is no longer to make a buck, or “win at life.” Rather, I’m working to improve the world. I think of myself as an inventor, creating a new piece of art for the world to discover. When you make the world better, you get rewarded. So find your craft, and then determine the best contribution you can make with it.

We often try to make it complicated. We say things like, “I don’t even know where to start” or, “I just don’t have the time” or, “I’m afraid to do it the wrong way,” when it comes to hard work and putting in effort. But our desire to complicate it is all too often just a cover for laziness or fear. Hustle is not hard. If you write your blog every day, at the end of the year you will have more readers than when you started. If you get up early and work on your dream two hours more than somebody else, your dream will progress faster. If you want to go to Colorado, you might have to work double shifts. Sometimes

Consider, for instance, Jill Hubbard Bowman, an intellectual property (IP) attorney in Austin, Texas, who publishes a legal blog, IP Law for Startups, iplawforstartups.com, and an inspiring career website for young women, lookilulu.com. Jill Hubbard Bowman: Unexpected Twists and Turns I had a dream to be a trial attorney who would fight big legal battles and win. And then my dream was derailed by a twin pregnancy that almost killed me. Literally. It was a shock and awe pregnancy. It caused the death, destruction, and rebirth of my identity and legal career. I was working as an intellectual property litigation attorney for a large law firm in Chicago when a pregnancy with twins caused my heart to fail. After fifteen years of infertility, the twin pregnancy was an unexpected surprise. Heart failure because of the pregnancy was an even bigger shock. The toll on my legal career was even more unexpected. Although I was fortunate to survive without a heart transplant, I eventually realized that I needed a career transplant. As my heart function recovered, I valiantly tried to cling to my career dream and do the hard work I loved. But the long hours and travel necessary for trial work were too much for my physical self. I was exhausted with chronic chest pain, two clinging toddlers, and a disgruntled husband. I was tired of being tired. My law firm was exceptionally supportive but I didn’t have the stamina to keep all of the pieces of my life together. Overwhelmed, I let go of my original dream. I backed down, retrenched, and regrouped. I took a year off from legal work to rest, recover, spend time with my toddlers, and open myself to new possibilities.

is it really a blog if you post once it 7 years????? I hate it when an author becomes a franchise, they get sidetracked with side projects that make them feel like they are being productive. When they are not. I don't care about games. I don't care about comic books. I don't care about little shit short stories you put in other people's books. Books in the series you have already hook me on are the only thing that matters. Codex, nothing since 2009! Harry Dresden, no books in over 2 YEARS! I knew it when he started the Codex that it would mean less Dresden books, he was just not that productive to begin with, he only did 1 Dresden book a year. And now a third series, The Cinder Spires, a steampunk series, which I loved. I have I ready giving up on the Codex, no new books since 2009, I forget what the hell's going on, I am not buying any more of them. I wish the author would just end the Dresden series (if he can't do a book but every couple years), tie up the loose ends and let us off the hook. Put us out of our misery.

In my two memos to Bojia I explained that there is no set formula for writing a column, no class you attend, and that everyone does it differently to some degree. But there were some general guidelines I could offer. When you are a reporter, your focus is on digging up facts to explain the visible and the complex and to unearth and expose the impenetrable and the hidden—wherever that takes you. You are there to inform, without fear or favor. Straight news often has enormous influence, but it’s always in direct proportion to how much it informs, exposes, and explains. Opinion writing is different. When you are a columnist, or a blogger in Bojia’s case, your purpose is to influence or provoke a reaction and not just to inform—to argue for a certain perspective so compellingly that you persuade your readers to think or feel differently or more strongly or afresh about an issue. That is why, I explained to Bojia, as a columnist, “I am either in the heating business or the lighting business.” Every column or blog has to either turn on a lightbulb in your reader’s head—illuminate an issue in a way that will inspire them to look at it anew—or stoke an emotion in your reader’s heart that prompts them to feel or act more intensely or differently about an issue. The ideal column does both. But how do you go about generating heat or light? Where do opinions come from? I am sure every opinion writer would offer a different answer. My short one is that a column idea can spring from anywhere: a newspaper headline that strikes you as odd, a simple gesture by a stranger, the moving speech of a leader, the naïve question of a child, the cruelty of a school shooter, the wrenching tale of a refugee.

if the idea of blogging or tweeting makes you run screaming for the hills, I have some good news: you don’t have to do it. Indeed, the most effective marketing, and the kind that will actually help you get sales going right now, doesn’t involve any of that stuff.

Daniel was a little slow getting out of the locker room afterward and was one of the last guys to head to the parking lot. He was nearly to his car when he saw Stacy emerge from the edge of the woods. “Hey,” she said. “Hey.” She hugged her books to her chest. “I don’t know if we ever officially met. I’m Stacy.” She was waiting for you. She wanted to talk to you! “I’m Baniel Dyers—Daniel. I’m Daniel Byers.” Oh, you are such an idiot! A glimmer of a smile. “I know who you are.” “I know you too.” “Really?” “Uh-huh.” “How?” “I’ve seen you around.” “Oh.” A long pause. “So.” “So,” he replied lamely. “Well, it’s good to meet you. Officially.” “Good to meet you too.” He had the sense that she would reach out to shake his hand, but instead she stared down at the ground between them for a moment, then back at him. “You played good against Spring Hill.” “You were there?” A slight eye roll. “Of course I was there.” “Not everyone comes to the games.” “I do.” “Me too.” Dude, that was the stupidest thing ever to say! “Of course you do,” she said lightly. He felt like he wanted to hide somewhere—anywhere—but when she spoke again she just did so matter-of-factly and not the least bit in a way to make him feel more put on the spot. “Um, I just wanted to wish you luck on the game. I mean, the one tomorrow night.” “Thanks.” She waited. Ask her to the dance on Saturday—at least get her number. “Um . . .” He repositioned his feet. “Say, I was wondering . . .” “Yes?” “About the game.” No, not the game, the dance— “Yes?” He took a deep breath. “So, I was . . .” Go on! “Um . . . So maybe I’ll see you there. At the game.” “Oh. Sure. So, good luck,” she repeated. “Right.” Ask her for her number. But he didn’t. And then she was saying good-bye and he was fumbling out a reply. “See you around, Stacy.” “See you around, Baniel,” she replied good-naturedly. As she stepped away he opened his mouth to call her back, but nothing came out. And then she was gone. But at least he’d talked to her. You can’t be expected to ask a girl out or get her number the first time you officially meet her, can you? Um, yeah. He climbed into his car and leaned his forehead against the steering wheel. Man, you sounded like a moron! Well, talk to her tomorrow. You can still ask her. The dance was Saturday night, but at least that gave him one more day. Before starting the car, he saw a text from Kyle asking what he was up to tonight, and he texted back that he was going to be at home finishing up his homework and then head to bed early to get a good night’s sleep before game day. He didn’t bring up anything about the conversation with Stacy. It would have only made him more embarrassed if Kyle knew how he’d failed to sound like even a halfway intelligent human being talking with her. Imagine that. Daniel Byers not knowing how to talk to a girl. What else is new? That night back in his bedroom, it took him a while to write his second blog entry, the one he was going to have to read in front of Teach’s class tomorrow. Without Kyle there to help him, he felt like a guy stuck on a boat in the middle of the ocean with no idea which direction to row toward land. Eventually he got something out, this time about hoping to send the vultures away, but it wasn’t nearly as good as if he’d had Kyle brainstorming with him. Then he went to bed, but his thoughts of Stacy kept him awake. Talk to her tomorrow at school, or at least before the game. But he also found that, just before falling asleep, his thoughts were drifting toward Nicole as well.

Doug Crowley was going to go the way of all flesh, and as quickly as possible I would find him and flense him and send him off to the ocean’s floor in four neat and separate garbage bags, and I would do it before he could write another taunting drivel-filled blog bragging about his insult to me. I would tape him and teach him what it truly meant to be Me, and I would make him wish he had chosen someone else to fill out his shadow, and the only question at all was a very simple one-word query: How?

If we are going to imagine new learning institutions that are not based on the contiguity of time and place-virtual institutions-we have to ask, what are those institutions and what work do they perform? What does a virtual learning institution look like, who supports it, what does it do? We know that informal learning happens, constantly and in many new ways, because of the collaborative opportunities offered by social networking sites, wikis, blogs, and many other interactive digital sources.

WHAT DOESN’T WORK SO WELL Psst: Check out all the contradictions, which are all part of the entrepreneurial life. Afternoons: Once it hits 2pm my brain doesn’t work so well. I use this fuzzy time to do monotonous tasks such as social media scheduling, WordPress fixes, editing, etc. Scheduling/ batching: I’d also like to batch things like writing blog posts and creating videos. But I tend to do them randomly when the urge takes me, which isn’t productive at all. Social media: It’s a huge time suck that I wrestle with all day, every day. Boundaries: I try to switch off each evening around 3pm (school days) or 6pm (work days). But I often find myself logging in again. (It doesn’t help that Netflix is on my laptop, which makes it all too easy to flick over to my work email or business Facebook groups every two seconds.) Bravery: Because I’m willing to give things a go, I sometimes launch them without thinking things through!

TWITTER HAD ROOTS IN THE alter-globalization movement. The anarchist Evan Henshaw-Plath, one of the engineers who created the “micro-blogging” social network, had been a software developer for Indymedia. Back in the late 1990s, he helped build a “status update” newswire on the top of Indymedia’s web page in order to keep readers abreast of what was going on—mostly where the cops were and what they were doing—during protests. Then they developed a way to send these out en masse via text message. This eventually grew into Twitter, launched in 2006.

PENNEBAKER’S WRITING RULES Set a timer for twenty minutes. Open up your notebook, or create a new document on your computer. When the timer starts, begin writing about your emotional experiences from the past week, month, or year. Don’t worry about punctuation, sloppiness, or coherence. Simply go wherever your mind takes you, curiously and without judgment. Write just for yourself and not for some eventual reader. Do this for a few days. Then, throw the paper away (or stick it in a bottle and cast it out to sea), or close the document without saving it. Or if you’re ready, start a blog or find a literary agent. It doesn’t matter. The point is that those thoughts are now out of you and on the page. You have begun the process of “stepping out” from your experience to gain perspective on it.

In our day, friends, there weren’t fancy computers or the internet telling us how to be a man. We just…were men. We figured things out, took responsibility & got the job done. We never needed some motivation or a fancy coaching program to do that. Sweetheart, This isn’t to brag about a bygone era, but to remind you that you too possess that same potential. But yes, now the time has changed. Maybe you need a little help figuring out what it means to be a Man today. Being a man means – having the ability to make yourself do the things that should be done, when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not! There are a few things that make a real man. Go on my blog to read the full list of things that you must do become a real man. (rajeshgoyaldotin) Darling listen - Become the Man You Want to Be! I wish you to know that becoming a man is not a one-time decision or event: it’s something you have to choose every day. It’s like shaving; just because you do it once doesn’t mean you’re done; you still have to wake up & do it again in the morning. Remember, dear – you are supposed to become an honorable man & not just a man; it’s not enough to know you need to act, you also need to know what actions to take. What should you start doing? Where do you hope your actions will lead you? Here’s to all the strong, confident men out there, young & old! Stay Classy, Sassy & Fabulous! Blessings!

Exhibitions are precisely what we shouldn’t trust, because they are so seductive. We go into a room that we can only walk through in a certain way, and there’s a certain lighting scheme, and it might smell a certain way. Whereas when we read something on a blog, we do that in our own home, in the conditions that we have chosen, and we can determine how our body is situated. We just can’t do those things in an exhibition.

and I want to apologize for my ignorance last week. The singular they has a rich history in English, and as I learned on one blog, it is more important to be respectful than to be right. I was caught up in the rules of grammar instead of the function of language. Thank you for educating me, and I hope that you’ll keep letting me know when I need to catch up to speed. And I’m going to do my best so that you won’t have to.

Halfway through the day, Megan started dicking around on the internet. She made her browser window as small as she could, paused for a second, and then looked up “Carrie Wilkins.” She found Carrie’s website, and on it, this bio: Hi, my name’s Carrie. I’m 26. I make things. I paint and I write, but mostly I design. I like to make things beautiful, or creative. I make my own food and I’m trying to grow my own beets. A lot of people around me seem unhappy and I don’t understand why. I freelance because I know I’d go insane if I couldn’t make my own schedule—I believe variety is the zest of life. I know I want a dog someday soon, and sometimes I make lunch at 3 a.m. I believe in the power of collaboration, and I’d love to work with you! What a total asshole. What does she have, some kind of a pact with Satan? The picture next to Carrie’s bio had some kind of heavy filter on it that made it look vintage, and she had a friendly but aloof look on her face. She was flanked on both sides by plants and was wearing an oxford shirt with fancy shorts and had a cool necklace. It was an outfit, for sure, like all of Carrie’s clothes were outfits, which Megan always thought of as outdated or something only children did. The website linked to a blog, which was mostly photos of Carrie doing different things. It didn’t take too long to find the picture of her with the llama with a caption about how she and her boss got it from a homeless guy. And then just products. Pictures and pictures of products, and then little captions about how the products inspired her. Motherfucker, thought Megan. She doesn’t get it at all. It was like looking at an ad for deodorant or laundry soap that made you feel smelly and like you’d been doing something wrong that the person in the ad had already figured out, but since it was an ad, there was no real way to smell the person and judge for yourself whether or not the person stank, and that was what she hated, hated, hated most of all. I make things, gee-wow. You think you’re an artist? Do you really thing this blog is a representation of art, that great universalizer? That great transmigrator? This isolating schlock that makes me feel like I have to buy into you and your formula for happiness? Work as a freelance designer, grow beets, travel, have lots of people who like you, and above all have funsies! “Everything okay?” asked Jillian. “Yeah, what?” “Breathing kind of heavy over there, just making sure you were okay and everything.” “Oh, uh-huh, I’m fine,” said Megan. “It’s not . . . something I’m doing, is it?” “What? No. No, I’m fine,” said Megan. How could someone not understand that other people could be unhappy? What kind of callous, horrible bullshit was that to say to a bunch of twenty-yearolds, particularly, when this was the time in life when things were even more acutely painful than they were in high school, that nightmare fuck, because now there were actual stakes and everyone was coming to grips with the fact that they’re going to die and that life might be empty and unrewarding. Why even bring it up? Why even make it part of your mini-bio?

An example is Neil Patel. You can go to his site right now and he’ll walk you through everything from launching a Wordpress site, to setting up Google analytics, learning SEO, copywriting secrets, and literally a hundred other blog posts covering everything you’d ever need to know to be an online marketer. And it’s all free. But hundreds of people pay him every single day to do that work for them.

What worried him was the thought that his father was right; no-one would notice the theft and even if they did notice no-one would dream of taking it seriously. He tried picking up the phone and practising 999 calls: “Hello, is that the Police, this is an anonymous caller, Alistair Clare is going to steal Stonehenge………………….” “Hello, is this the Police? I have just been driving along the A303 and am sure that I saw someone removing Stonehenge………….” “Hello is that the Police? This is Moriarty the master criminal, if you don’t do as I say I will steal Stonehenge and hold it to ransom……………” “Hello is that Childline? Alistair Clare is causing me acute psychological damage. He is planning to become a master criminal and I am sure that this infringes my human rights…………………….” Anonymous letters seemed a bit thin and a personal blog would be certain to be disbelieved. Barnes, Alexander. The Man who Stole Stonehenge (Kindle Locations 354-366). Unknown. Kindle Edition.

Freelancing and Creativity - In Freelancing, doing a job in different ways is called creativity. The importance of creativity is immense among all that is required for freelancing work because creativity is the main thing of freelancing. It is difficult to give an exact definition of creativity. Because there is no end to creativity. In the case of some, creativity or the development of creativity begins to manifest naturally, while for some it manifests through talent, practice, and practice. Creativity is basically a mental process that is the result of positive thinking, perseverance, and high analytical ability. Just as it takes practice, practice, and dedication to develop this creativity, there is a high chance that this creativity will be wasted if it is not properly used or applied. Below are the causes of creativity loss and ways to increase Creativity: ** Reasons for loss of Creativity - Lack of focus on work – Creativity does not arise if there is no focus on work, to complete a task properly, there must be focus on it. Irregular sleep – the brain does not work properly if you do not sleep properly, repeated sleep disturbances can also cause many mental problems that hinder creativity. Suffering from indecisiveness – Having too many negative thoughts running through your head while doing a task can also hamper creativity. For example: if the work is going well, if the client likes it, if the client doesn't like it, if the client doesn't pay, etc. Fear of not succeeding at work – Many people rush to work for quick cash income, but it does not work properly or on the contrary, more creativity is lost, which results in payment time problems. As a result, the fear of not succeeding enters the freelancer. ** Ways to Increase Creativity - Dietary discipline – Of course, there is no substitute for healthy eating. Consuming regular meals maintains mental and physical well-being which in turn enhances creativity. Gaining knowledge from nature – Nature is the main source of knowledge. All the sages and poets in the world were worshipers of nature. All of them could see something extraordinary in the ordinary things of this nature. Try to see it that way. From everyday events – notice what is happening around you. You can get new ideas from it, for example, you can get an idea on any subject by reading a book, and new ideas can be invented while watching TV or watching newspaper advertisements. Write down ideas – We all have something going on in our heads all the time, either mainly through thought or sensory processing. So whenever you get an idea, note it down so that you don't forget to read it. So, creativity is created by the combination of ideas and skills. Freelancing is unthinkable without this creativity because to do freelancing you must have a clear idea about something or acquire full skill in that subject. Please Visit Our Blogging Website to read more Articles related to Freelancing and Outsourcing, Thank You.

How long does it take to Learn Freelancing? How long it takes to learn freelancing depends on what you're learning, how you start freelancing, and how hard you try to learn it. Learning something requires more willpower and concentration than any effort. The sooner you continue to learn to work with focus, the sooner you will succeed. And the slower you go, the longer it will take you to learn the task. So if you want to build a career online as a professional freelancer then you must spend extra time on it. Freelancing for Beginners: If you are new to the freelancing sector, there are a few things you need to know. For example: What is data entry? What is outsourcing? Web design key etc. Having a basic understanding of these things will make it much easier for you to learn freelancing. Although freelancing has complex tasks as well as some simple ones. But it is very few and low incomes. There are many new freelancers who want to earn freelancing with mobile. Their statement is, "I don't need so much money, only 4-5 thousand taka will do". In their case, I would say that you learn data entry work. You can earn that amount of money in this work. But if you choose freelancing just to do this job then I would say you are doing it wrong. Because this data entry work is very long, you need to work for 7-8 hours. And if you dream of only 4-5 thousand rupees by working 7-8 hours, then my suggestion for you is that you should not do this work but get tutoring. At least it will be best for you. Freelancing requires you to have big dreams and the passion to make them come true. Misconceptions about Freelancing: There is no substitute for a good quality computer or a good quality laptop to learn and master freelancing professionally. This way you can practice and learn very quickly without any hassle. Many people think that by looking at the monitor and pressing the keyboard, they become freelancing and can earn lakhs of rupees a month. In fact, those who think so cannot be entirely blamed. Many of us get lured by such mouthwatering advertisements as "opportunity to earn lakhs per month with just one month course" and waste both our precious time and money by joining bad unprofessional coaching centers. Why is it not possible to learn freelancing in just one month even in one year? It is clear proof that glittering does not make gold. There are thousands of jobs in freelancing, each job is different, and each job takes a different amount of time to learn. So it is very difficult to comment on how long it takes to learn freelancing. Be aware in choosing the right Freelancing Training Center: But whatever you do, don't go for an online course of Rs 400-600-1200. Because it will also lose the willpower you have to learn to freelance. If you have to do this type of bad course today, then do a government freelancing course or you can take practical training from an organization called "Bhairab ​​IT Zone" for a nominal fee. Here hands-on training is provided by professional freelancers using tools in free, premium, and upgraded versions. Although there are many ways or mediums to learn freelancing or outsourcing. E.g. Outsourcing Learning Books, Youtube Video Tutorials, Seminars etc. Either way, some learn to swim in a day and some in a week. To become a good swimmer one must continue swimming for a long time. Not everyone has the same brain capacity or stamina. Humans are naturally different from one another. The same goes for freelancing. You might learn the ins and outs of freelancing within 6-7 months, it might take another 1-2 years. No matter how long it takes to learn, you need to work twice as long to become proficient at it. But with hard work, willpower, and determination you can make any impossible possible. Please visit Our Blogging Website to Read More Articles related to Freelancing and Outsourcing.

Notice the types of temptations the masters faced. The first attack by the devil played on Jesus’s hunger. Mara presented the Buddha with his fears—everything that is going wrong. “The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” as Shakespeare put it. That’s the DMN’s specialty: dredging up everything that has gone wrong in your past or might go wrong in your future. That’s the first way the demon tries to tempt you out of Bliss Brain. Then the demon presented Buddha with every possible variant of sexual and sensual pleasure. The devil offered Jesus all the wonders of the world. That’s another way the demon tries to distract us out of focus. All the good things we might experience. If presenting you with all your fears fails, then presenting you with all your desires might succeed. There’s a final way the demon can yank us out of single-minded attention to focus. The brains of meditating monks show enormous amplitudes of gamma brain waves, about which we’ll learn more in Chapter 4. Gamma is the wave of insight and integration. In Bliss Brain, we have flashes of unparalleled insight. It’s a creative brainstorm. You get downloads of brilliant blog posts you could write, extraordinary art you could paint, scientific breakthroughs you could achieve, marketing magic you might create, and life circumstances you might enjoy. Yet going down these rabbit holes can be as much of a distraction as your fears and desires. It’s all about me. My safety, my pleasure, my body, my money, my health, my love life, my career. Of all the streaming video series our minds could tune in to, the Me Show is the most compelling. It’s the demon’s ultimate weapon of mass distraction. To reach and sustain Bliss Brain, it’s essential to do what the Buddha and Jesus did: remain in one-pointed focus.

Why Should I Do Freelancing? Guidelines for Beginners Why do we do freelancing? People are doing nothing in the urge of life. Some are working, some are doing business, some are doing advocacy, and some are freelancing. Everyone has one goal behind doing all this, and that is to “make money”. As the days are changing, people's needs are also increasing. Earlier people did not have so many needs so they did not lack happiness. Everyone had their own land, from which crops, vegetables, and fruits were produced and earned a living. Slowly the days started to change, and the use of technology also started to increase, along with it the image and attitude of people started to change. The competitive spirit of who will get more than who, who will be ahead of who started, which continues till now. And that is why people are constantly looking for work, some inside the country and some outside the country. Everyone has almost the same goal, and that is to earn a lot of money, stand on their own feet, take responsibility for their family, build the future of their children, and much more! But does all work make satisfactory money? Of course not. If you are employed then you will get a certain amount of monthly income, if you are doing business then the income will be average with profit-loss-risk, and if you are freelancing then you will be able to control your income. You can earn money as you wish by working as you wish. So let's find out why you should do freelancing:- Why Do Freelancing? What is Freelancing? Freelancing is an independent profession. This profession allows you to work when you want, take vacations when you want, and quit when you want. You will never want to leave this profession though, because once you fall in love with freelancing, you never want to leave. There are many reasons for this. They are easy, self-reliance, freedom from slavery, self-king, having no limitations, etc. All of us have some latent talent. That talent often remains dormant, those of us who spend years waiting for a job can wake up our latent talent and stand on our own feet by expressing it through work. No need to run with a CV to any company or minister for this. Do you like to write? Can you be a content writer, can you draw good design? Can be a designer, do you know good coding? Can be a software engineer. There are also numerous other jobs that you can do through freelancing. You too can touch the door of success by freelancing, all you need is enthusiasm, courage, willpower, morale, self-confidence, and a lot of self-confidence. But these things are not available to buy in the market, so it will not cost you money. What will be spent is 'time' as the saying goes "The time is money and the money is equal to time". To make money you must put in the time. Guidelines for Beginners: As I have said before, if you think that you can suddenly start freelancing and earn lakhs of rupees and become a millionaire within a year, then I would say that bro, freelancing is not for you. Because the greed of money gets you before you can work, you can't go any further. If you are thinking of starting freelancing to utilize your talent then definitely take advice from someone senior to you, take tips from those who are in the sector, explore online, collect video tutorials, and take free courses if available. Still, if there is any problem or confusion which you are not able to solve, then you can visit the freelancing training center called “Bhairab ​​IT Zone”. Here students are trained professionally by experienced freelancers. If you want you can apply now for their free seminar from here, and learn about all the courses Please Visit Our Blogging Website to Read more Articles related to Freelancing and Outsourcing, Thank You.

You might get people who come to snack on it, but they’re not going to be high-quality visitors — because you’re not providing them with high-quality content. Just like with a healthy diet, your blog can’t survive on junk food alone. If, on the other hand, you consistently provide thoughtful, useful, meaty content aimed directly at your prospects, you might see slower growth, but the growth you do see will be more targeted and more valuable to you in the long run.

There are five elements to a strong content marketing strategy: Why you are doing this — in other words, the goal you hope to achieve. Who you hope to reach — your ideal reader. What story you’re telling — your key message. Where you’re going to post and promote this content — the channels you use. When you’re going to post — your editorial calendar.

A résumé gives the employer everything she needs to reject you. Once you send me your résumé, I can say, “Oh, they’re missing this or they’re missing that,” and boom, you’re out. Having a résumé begs for you to go into that big machine that looks for relevant keywords, and begs for you to get a job as a cog in a giant machine. More fodder for the corporate behemoth. That might be fine for average folks looking for an average job, but is that what you deserve? The very system that produced standardized tests and the command-and-control model that chokes us also invented the résumé. The system, the industrialists, the factory . . . they want us to be cogs in their machine—easily replaceable, hopeless, cheap cogs. If you don’t have a résumé, what do you have? How about three extraordinary letters of recommendation from people the employer knows or respects? Or a sophisticated project an employer can see or touch? Or a reputation that precedes you? Or a blog that is so compelling and insightful that they have no choice but to follow up? Some say, “Well, that’s fine, but I don’t have those.” Yeah, that’s my point. If you don’t have these things, what leads you to believe that you are remarkable, amazing, or just plain spectacular? It sounds to me like if you don’t have more than a résumé, you’ve been brainwashed into compliance. Great jobs, world-class jobs, jobs people kill for—those jobs don’t get filled by people e-mailing in résumés.

Step Four: Ideal-Week Planning Now you need to take your “only I can do” list and actually plot out how you will get all these things done. I hope your to-do list is shorter than when you picked up this book. If so, that reduction is a massive win in itself. The goal is to schedule all these things out. Literally, go through the list, plot each item into your calendar, and create an automated repeating appointment so it shows up in your calendar on a weekly basis. For example, if only you can write a weekly blog post and you know you need about three hours to write and publish a post, create a three-hour appointment in your calendar from ten to one o’clock on Mondays, for example, and then make it a recurring appointment. The same process can be followed for child-related activities. If you are the person who primarily picks up your kids from school, put an appointment in your calendar for the amount of time it takes to drive or walk to the school, pick them up, and return home. Repeat this task for all the activities you have on the only-you list. Once you’ve entered these activities, you may be thinking, Okay, Lisa, that’s great, but I have now run out of time. So what happens if you actually block everything in and you run out of hours in the week? If I were sitting across from you in a private coaching session, this is what I would ask: •Are all the activities in your calendar truly things only you can do? Is there anything that could be delegated to someone else? •Can any of these activities be batched with something else? For example, could you do research for a blog post on your phone while you run on the treadmill? Can you do phone calls on your commute home or while grocery shopping for your family? •Is everything in your calendar actually aligned with your ideal life plan? Is there anything on the list that is no longer supporting this plan? Be honest with yourself about things that need to go—even if you are having a hard time letting go. •Can you reduce the amount of time it takes to do an activity? This might seem like an incredibly overwhelming exercise, but trust me, it is an incredibly worthwhile exercise. It might seem rigid to schedule everything in your life, but scheduling brings the freedom not to worry about how you are spending your time. You have thought it through, and you know that every worthwhile activity has been accounted for. This system, my friend, is the cure to mom guilt. When you know you have appropriately scheduled dedicated time for your children, your spouse, yourself, and your work, what do you have to feel guilty about?

But how do you actually get this information? To get a deep picture of who your audience are and what they want, you need to 1. Research your ideal reader. 2. Create a persona based on that research. I’m going to give you a hack that I regularly use to find this information.

If you are here to learn how to make money blogging, then you are in the right place. In 2016, when I started my blog, I had no idea how to make money blogging, let alone how much money it was possible to earn with a blog. Let's move forward to this day, it is even more shocking (even) that I have gone from learning to earn money blogging to earn more than $ 50,000 / month with my blog. If you have been reading my blog for a while, then you have seen my journey going from earning only a couple thousand dollars in monthly income largely backed by independent clients, so far doing more every month with my blog that I did per year in My first jobs.

Do Things That Don’t Scale” taught me the importance of the ‘dirty work’ startups have to accomplish in the early days, like focusing on a deliberately narrow market to test the product or going out of their way to acquire users, and make them happy with insane attention-to-detail as if they’re a consultant with only one client. These are just three of the 174 essays currently on Paul’s site. There are a few resources that summarize the content or present a “Top 10,” but at this stage I think the best move is to read the above blogs and a few other articles where the title catches your eye.

My first blog post sucked. My next blog post sucked. I have written dozens and dozens of sucky blog posts, and I can only hope that I will continue to do work that sucks until the day I die. Because it’s in the process of doing that bad work that the good work comes out. Singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran said that he writes four or five songs a day when he’s working on an album. He says, “if you turn a dirty tap on it’s going to flow shit water for a substantial amount of time, and then clean water’s going to start flowing.” Hemingway had a similar philosophy. He said, “I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit.

About I am the chairman of Thomas Nelson Publishers, the largest Christian publishing company in the world and the seventh largest trade book publishing company in the U.S. This is my personal blog. It is focused on “intentional leadership.” My philosophy is if you are going to lead well, you must be thoughtful and purposeful about it. I write on leadership, productivity, publishing, social media, and, on occasion, stuff that doesn’t fit neatly into one of these categories. I also occasionally write about the resources I am discovering. My goal is to create insightful, relevant content that you can put to work in your personal and professional life. If you are in a position of leadership—or aspire to be—then this blog is for you. I typically post three to four times a week. To make sure you don’t miss my newest posts, you can subscribe via RSS or e-mail. I also accept a limited amount of advertising. My Top Posts If you are new to my site, you might want to start with my most popular posts. Here are my top three in each category: Leadership • Creating a Life Plan • The Importance of a Leader’s Heart • Five Characteristics of Weak Leaders Productivity • Yes, You Can Stay on Top of E-mail • How to Shave 10 Hours Off Your Work Week • Slay Your Dragons Before Breakfast Publishing • Advice to First-Time Authors • Literary Agents Who Represent Christian Authors • Writing a Winning Book Proposal Social Media • Do You Make These 10 Mistakes When You Blog? • The Beginners Guide to Twitter • 12 Reasons to Start Twittering Miscellany • My Take on the Vibram FiveFingers Running Shoes • 20 Questions to Ask Other Leaders • Whatever Happened to Modesty?

What road do I take?” asked Alice. The cat asked, “Where do you want to go?” “I don’t know,” Alice answered. “Then,” said the cat, “it really doesn’t matter, does it?

It took me a couple of years after I woke up in that cold sweat to figure out what flag I was going to plant, and then how to do something with it. Using the process in Step 1, I found the things that I wanted to be known for and the work that I was passionate about. And then I started telling my story all the time to anyone who would actually listen. For me, this story was around Lean UX because of who I was at the time. I created a pitch based on design for designers, by designers, to change the way that they were working. And I honed that voice and that tone and that dialogue by telling the story over and over and over again using blog posts and articles and eventually in-person talks. The first talk I ever gave as a part of my new professional trajectory was on August 12, 2010. I told the story about how we solved the problem of integrating UX into Agile at TheLadders. And then the timeline started to accelerate from there. A month later, on September 24, I gave my first talk about Lean UX and it was in Paris. I was communicating about this topic publicly, and people were saying, “Hey, come give us a talk about it.” And I was writing about the topic in any publication that would actually listen to this kind of thing. I kept speaking and writing and making presentations, and as I got my ideas out into the world and put them into play in any way I could, on March 7, 2011, I finally hit the jackpot. This was three years after I had my 35th-birthday epiphany and the pressure was on—I knew I had just two years left before I was going to become obsolete, an also-ran. I hit the jackpot when I managed to get an article published in Smashing magazine. At the time, Smashing had a million readers online, and so the scale of my conversation was growing and growing because I was becoming known as the guy who had some answers to this question. That was a massive break for me because the article provided me with a global audience for the first time. Obviously, anything you publish on the internet is global and distributed, but the bottom line is that, if the platform you choose or that chooses you has a built-in audience, you stand a much bigger chance. Smashing magazine had an audience. The article, titled “Lean UX: Getting Out of the Deliverables Business” became very successful, and that’s where I planted my flag—providing solutions to the Agile and design problem with a real-world tested solution nicely packaged and labeled as Lean UX.

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Such were the things I discovered in the weeks before leaving for the city. In advance of all of my trips I would dip into the culture by reading novels and poetry, watching films and television programs, and browsing fashion, travel, and design blogs. Doing this, relishing how enjoyable an upcoming experience might be, isn’t just edifying—it can boost our spirits long before we even leave for the airport. “Anticipation is a free form of happiness,” Elizabeth Dunn found in her research on well-being, “the one that’s least vulnerable to things going wrong.

products or services are and how clients benefited from using them. Basically, a case study presents what you do, how you go about doing it, and the particular results that you get from using it the

Ezra Callahan: It’s the very first time we actually bring in outside people to test something for us, and their reaction, their initial reaction is clear. People are just like, “Holy shit, like, I shouldn’t be seeing this, like this doesn’t feel right,” because immediately you see this person changed their profile picture, this person did this, this person did that, and your first instinct is Oh my God! Everybody can see this about me! Everyone knows everything I’m doing on Facebook. Max Kelly: But News Feed made perfect sense to all of us, internally. We all loved it. Ezra Callahan: So in-house we have this idea that this isn’t going to go right: This is too jarring a change, it needs to be rolled out slowly, we need to warm people up to this—and Mark is just firmly committed. “We’re just going to do this. We’re just going to launch. It’s like ripping off a Band-Aid.” Ruchi Sanghvi: We pushed the product in the dead of the night, we were really excited, we were celebrating, and then the next morning we woke up to all this pushback. I had written this blog post, “Facebook Gets a Facelift.” Katie Geminder: We wrote a little letter, and at the bottom of it we put a button. And the button said, “Awesome!” Not like, “Okay.” It was, “Awesome!” That’s just rude. I wish I had a screenshot of that. Oh man! And that was it. You landed on Facebook and you got the feature. We gave you no choice and not a great explanation and it scared people. Jeff Rothschild: People were rattled because it just seemed like it was exposing information that hadn’t been visible before. In fact, that wasn’t the case. Everything shown in News Feed was something people put on the site that would have been visible to everyone if they had gone and visited that profile. Ruchi Sanghvi: Users were revolting. They were threatening to boycott the product. They felt that they had been violated, and that their privacy had been violated. There were students organizing petitions. People had lined up outside the office. We hired a security guard.

4. What does your group think about similar products on the market? If you have a group of products you’re thinking about focusing on, you can start to identify “holes” in the marketplace by listening to what people are already saying. Read customer reviews and look at internet forums. You can also start vetting your idea by posting about it online. My buddy Moiz tried using Tom’s natural deodorant, and he hated it for a simple reason: It didn’t work. He thought, I wonder if I could do this better. So he started asking questions on online forums, getting feedback from other natural yuppies like him. From the response, he knew there was interest. He did a $500 round of prototypes and sold out immediately. That was the beginning of Native Deodorant, which was later acquired by Procter & Gamble for $100 million. It took Moiz only eighteen months to go from a $500 prototype to a million-dollar brand (and it sold for nine figures!). 5. Where does your person hang out with others? With an idea of what we might sell, we can start to think about where our first customers might come from. It’s much easier to make sales when you can drop your product in front of a group of your ideal people. Does your target customer listen to specific podcasts? Do they follow certain influencers? Do they belong to specific groups? Do they read certain blogs? Brainstorm where your ideal customer focuses his or her attention, and you will quickly know where to put your product in front of them. In the next chapters, you will also learn how to develop a micro-audience that is ready to buy your product from you. I also like to write down the names of ten friends who will get excited about a product because your ideal customers know other people just like them.

What are the traits of an awakened person? First, his comings and goings are only as per his wish. Second, no reason of the outside world can influence him and third, whatever he is once determined to do, he breathes only when it is brought to fruition.

Once the beginner gains have been made and we learn what to expect, our interest starts to fade. Sometimes it happens even faster than that. All you have to do is hit the gym a few days in a row or publish a couple of blog posts on time and letting one day slip doesn’t feel like much. Things are going well. It’s easy to rationalize taking a day off because you’re in a good place.

Now, why hasn't this spread over the whole world and why isn't everybody doing it? I'm not sure who it was who hit the nail on the head—I think it was Jon Bentley. Simplified it is like this: only two percent of the world's population is born to be super programmers. And only two percent of the population is born to be super writers. And Knuth is expecting everybody to be both. I don't think we're going to increase the total number of programmers in the world to more than two percent—I mean programmers who really resonate with the machine and that's their bread and butter that they've been born to do. But now that people are blogging, I've seen a great rise in the average ability of ordinary everybody to express themselves. So the second part of that that argument isn't so strong anymore.

Save yourself the double-check by focusing the first time. We lead a distracted life. It's becoming more and more difficult to pay attention. This is one of the reasons we often have to go back and double check to make sure we have all our work materials, locked the back door or turned off the stove. You are more likely to remember to do something if you focus while you're doing it. For example, if you're locking the back door to your house you should stop all conversations,  avoid looking at any devices and focus on the task at hand. You may even want to say something out loud, such as, "I am locking the door on Monday, June 10th," so that you remember it later when you're leaving the house.