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Now’s a good time to stop caring

January 10, 2011 in Tips with 11 Comments

There’s a certain amount of indifference required if you’re want to get along in life, especially in the worlds of art and business. Not everything is of equal value, we all know this. But living like that’s true doesn’t feel safe because it means conflict. Resistance. But sometimes the best thing you can do is to stop caring.

Stop caring about what you think other people want you to be. A good many people live aimlessly because they’re waiting for someone else to tell them how to live. We’ve built a whole industry around it. I know, I’ve bought the books, too.

Stop caring about whether people will like you. Some will and some won’t. It’s not the end of the world and that’s good enough.

Stop caring about whether your story or business idea plays by commonly accepted rules. “Me too” ideas are never innovative. Think differently. Be brave.

Stop caring about how everyone else keeps score. Just because they measure their value in dollars, followers, and unique visitors doesn’t mean you have to. Decide what’s important to you and then fight the urge to second guess that.

What do you care about that you probably shouldn’t?

3 Podcasts to Inspire You

January 7, 2011 in Tips with 2 Comments

I don’t read as many personal development books as I should or would like. I know, I know, it’s hard to believe since I spend so much of my time in the publishing space. The challenge isn’t desire, it’s time. Anyone out there know what I’m talking about? Yes, yes, I see that hand.

The problem with time is that it never falls in your lap. You have to chase it down and wrestle it to the ground like the unruly beast that it is. It does not naturally want to be mastered. So this need to invest in myself led me on a search to find scraps of time that I could leverage. And what better time than the daily commute? One day I realized that I was simply wasting 60 minutes, five times a week. That’s 20 hours a month. Do the math for a year. Yeah.

So I asked a few of my friends which podcasts they were listening to, because they are smarter than me and I want to know what they know. They gladly pointed me to a few podcasts that quickly became my favorites. These are three that I listen to regularly and highly recommend. Try them out. Continue Reading…

Will eBooks hit a tipping point in 2011?

January 6, 2011 in Journal with 4 Comments

Not quite a year ago, I wrote an article about the tipping point of e-books. The iPad had just released, Kindle sales were rising, and the blogosphere lit up with posts about whether or not e-books would change the publishing business. Given the spike in e-reader sales and ebooks over the Christmas season (thanks to more choices and lower prices), I thought it would be timely to re-surface this discussion.

19 of the Top 50 USA Today bestsellers in 2010 were ebooks and January is on track to be the biggest sales month yet for digital as new device owners load up their Kindles, Kobos, and iPads. So, are things going to accelerate in 2011? Let’s turn the clock back ten years and take a look another shift.

The music industry changed forever on October 23, 2001. That’s the day a little company in Cupertino, California, unveiled a way to carry “1,000 songs in your pocket.” Enter the iPod.

Of course, the iPod wasn’t really a new idea. Three years earlier, Eiger Labs released the MPMan F10, an MP3 player created by a South Korean company. Eiger’s version held a whopping 32MB of audio and promised to revolutionize music, which it did and didn’t. The MPMan was a bust, as was the slew of players that followed it, but the iPod was not.

The iPod was a tipping point. Continue Reading…

Your first impression of you is wrong

January 5, 2011 in Journal with 3 Comments

Our inner critic kills more ideas than other people ever will, and usually before our work ever sees the light of day. Even the masters among us must fight it. The difference between them and the amateur is that the ability to move on despite it.

Here’s what Francis Ford Coppola said in a must-read, recent interview on The99Percent.com:

We are very insecure. People are insecure, not just young people. Everyone is insecure. They say that Barbara Streisand, when she goes on, she has a panic attack. She feels she can’t sing. Of course, she can sing. I believe that when you write something, when I write something, I turn it over and I don’t look at it. Because I believe the writer, the young writer, has a hormone that makes them hate what they’ve written. And yet, the next morning, when you look at it, you say, “Oh that’s not bad.” But the first second you hate it.

Do you hate your first ideas? How do you move on despite it?

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