What makes my thoughts or ideas any more or less prophetic, important, or meaningful than anyone else’s?
I’m sure I could say some things that some people in search of such wisdom haven’t heard before. They’d probably be rather impressed with what I’d communicate. Who knows though…if I were referencing commonly held beliefs or affirmations often heard in circles that others just haven’t encountered yet, perhaps they would hear the same thing somewhere else along their journey anyway. Isn’t there a phrase about: “When the student is ready, the teacher will be there”? Read more »
The ubiquity and accessibility of the Internet has long since given flight to the belief that: “Everyone has a book in them.” Some of us will write that book. Some of us won’t.
Motivational gurus will work to encourage us to get our book(s) written. Additionally, The Long Tail theory will insure that a broad range of books (of varying content and quality) will get written and read.
Clearly writing a book that gets published and read by others makes most authors feel worthy and satisfied at putting forth their best effort to leave a, hopefully lasting, legacy of some sort behind.
Yet, just because a book gets written doesn’t mean it’s a good book. Of course, “good” is a broad and relative term. Clearly not every book idea is worth writing or reading, regardless of whether or not that indubitably will take place.
Of all the good books that do get written by good writers, the reality about books is as follows: Read more »
I must admit that when I first saw the agenda for the Writer’s Digest Conference, taking place in NYC this year, I didn’t quite understand why there was such a big social media focus at the event. I wondered if the event organizers weren’t just jumping on the bandwagon of the latest online trends.
Gladly, my skepticism turned out to be quite short-lived. Right from the very first session I attended, I immediately understood that this apparent merging of topics wasn’t any kind of a forced fit, but instead was a natural union that made perfect sense. The book publishing environment is clearly changing — it’s not just about getting an agent and finding a publisher anymore.
I decided that since my learnings might be of interest to some of my fellow creative friends, I put together this list of 8 things I learned about “21st Century publishing” and how social media can be used to legitimately bypass the bombarded Gatekeepers and make you a successful Gatejumper. Read more »
There is a lot of advice out there. Ask different coaches for advice on how to be successful and you’ll probably get a lot of different answers, sometimes conflicting, but certainly a core set of common beliefs, too.
Clearly one common ingredient to the success equation is: “having passion”.
A nice clarification I recently heard goes something like this: Passion alone won’t make you successful, but without passion, success isn’t likely or sustainable either – or, more technically speaking, passion is a “necessary, but not sufficient” condition.
So, what gets me speaking about passion now? Well, a recent post on this topic on Problogger: “How Passion Can Transform Your Blog”, along with the “Trust Agents” theme of “humanizing the Web”, has spurred me to share my passions as an experiment to see what, if anything, comes of it.
So, What Am I Passionate About?
Some passions are not so simple to rein in, but here goes…. Read more »
What if we all had a story in us that needed to be told, but we couldn’t find the words to tell it? What if we never tried?
What if we wanted to do or say something that didn’t exist yet, how could we even begin to describe what it might be?
What if it’s a feeling that we didn’t know how to describe? Does that really mean that such a feeling doesn’t exist or that others might not also be experiencing the same thing?
What if that word or topic we are searching for existed somewhere, but we just didn’t know where to find it? Or perhaps it’s a “Buzzword of the Year”, for the year 2012? Read more »
Okay, time is about up! The “100 Articles in a 100 Days” contest which I wrote about in my last post is as good as over.
While I started off with high hopes of accomplishing what I now realize was an overly-ambitious goal of completing this contest in about 1/3 of the allotted time, not surprisingly, that didn’t happen. But that’s okay. I’m still glad I gave it a go.
Surprisingly, I didn’t realize that I would learn as much as I did in such a short period of time. If you are curious, here’s what I got out of my brief participation in this challenge: Read more »
This month I’ve belatedly and ambitiously undertaken the “100 Articles in 100 Days” challenge via Ezinearticles.com. And, since I only found out about it with less than 30 days left, this is an extra big challenge for me. Apparently it is still do-able, so I’ve decided to give it a go.
I don’t know why this challenge excites me. I’ve never succeeded at anything like it before. As it is, I already seem to have a hard enough time trying to write more than two blog posts a month anyway. But, for some reason (maybe it’s the bragging rights) this challenge has caught my attention. If I succeed at it, it will be the hardest I’ve ever worked for a coffee mug (so you can see, the “prize” isn’t the big draw either.) But, I particularly like that I can write about anything I want. Read more »
