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But there’s a big difference between writing for the heck of it, and actually expecting to get some positive return out of it. There’s also a big difference between writing a five-post boom-and-crash, and blogging for a lifetime.

Hoping to get some help both of those points, I recently watched an excellent video by Mr. 4HWW, Tim Ferriss, and I thought it was fantastic. He calls it “How to Blog without Killing Yourself”, and says, “one of my favorite presentations I’ve given in 2009.” After watching it, and taking notes of the highlights for myself, I’d have to agree.

Now, for anyone reading this who’s anti-Tim, just let me say this: On one hand, that’s cool. Like who you want, and don’t who you don’t. I’ve got no beef with you. But, if you’re thinking to leave me a trollish comment because you’ve got an issue with him, then answer this: Who are you? What have you done with your life so far? How many people have you impacted? Smile on your brother, y’know?

What I’ve written below is my own personal commentary on the notes I took from the above talk. He covers a lot more than what I took notes on, which is why I recommend you watch it – my takeaways are going to be different from your takeaways, by necessity and design. My hope in adding my notes is that it’ll help add some context to quotes taken entirely out of context, and lend some insight from my own personal perspective, for what it’s worth (and hey, if you’ve read this far, then maybe it’s worth enough to you to keep reading…).

On fun:

• It has to be fun, or your readers will not have fun.
• If you’re not having fun, it will come across very clearly in what you write.

Darn tootin’. That’s precisely why I moved my blog to adamkayce.com, and why I’m writing about this. I dig Tim’s stuff; his approach to sucking the marrow out of life is, I believe, admirable. I like his perspective, and how he’s not afraid to go against convention.

And, I also believe that fun has to be paramount in your life. If it’s not, what are you doing it for? You only get one shot at life, and it’s your choice completely if you want to spend it miserably or enjoy every last minute of it.

On fun and blogging:

• Think big, but play often. Take fun seriously!
• Blogging can be your own self-imposed hell if you let it. Most people do that; they follow rules from people who are not paying them to blog.
• Don’t take advice from people you don’t want to emulate.
• My blog is not a source of stress for me. It has been a huge, hugely positive thing in my life, and I plan to keep on doing it for a long, long time.

This spoke to me greatly, having gone through what I’ve been through in blogging so far. I got so wrapped up in what the “experts” were saying needed to be done, that I lost sight of what it’s all about: joy.

I love to write. I’ve been writing for fun since I was kid. I used to write stories while the tv was on, because I loved having paper in front of me, and I loved being able to express in words what was going on in my head. I think it’s only natural that English was always one of my top subjects in school (I even won awards for it), my college degree is in writing, and I’m writing this right now.

Writing is cathartic. It’s ecstatic. It’s a gateway to a fuller expression of who you are, and it grows you as you go, like Seth said in the video up top. And yet, if you’re not careful about the reasons why you do what you do, it most certainly can become a prison, and a self-inflicted torture device.

My advice: Get really clear on why you’re blogging. Chances are, there are going to be a lot of reasons, both business and personal. Just make sure there’s joy in it for you, and that the foundation of the reasons is a personal one. Otherwise, you’ll run out of gas, out of juice, and it’ll sputter and die.

On negative comments, trolls, hate mail, etc.:

• There’s enough negativity in the world; you have no obligation to put it on your blog.
  [He says he treats it like his house; if you come to a cocktail party and start cussing him out, you're gone! And you're not coming back.]

This one took me a while to grasp.

When I had my first troll appear on my first blog, I didn’t really know what to do. Unfortunately, I tried—too quickly—to address all the issues the person had with what I had wrote, taking it way too personally, and way too far. I was coming from a mindset that wanted people to like me, and that liking = agreement. And that if I could please them, everything would work out fine.

Big, big mistake.

One of the greatest lessons I ever learned from marketing champion Sean D’Souza was that—no matter what you do—you’re never going to please everyone… and that’s a good thing. If you are, you’re probably either being too bland, or too afraid to say what you really think. And that doesn’t attract people to your cause, or help you to spread your message. (Great example: Tim Ferriss. The people who love him spread the word about him as they praise him, and the people who hate him spread the word about him as they denounce him. Either way, he gets more press. It’s the classic Law of Attraction at work: What you give attention to, grows.)

On multiple topic blogs:

• If you run a niched blog, the every once-in-a-while stray post is fine.
• Otherwise, you want to make it clear by the branding of your site that it’s fairly broad. (The blog of Tim Ferriss: Experiments in Lifestyle Design.)

Hallelujah.

In case you aren’t familiar with Tim’s philosophies, he’s a big proponent of examining the status quo and seeing if so-called “conventional wisdom” has any wisdom in it at all. Because you aren’t obligated to follow the herd, unless you choose to… and many times, you’ll get the best results if you don’t.

When it comes to blogging, the advice you’ll often read is that you should create only niched content, specific to a certain audience, and never stray from that course. Keep it tight, keep it focused, and keep everything else out of it.

But there are plenty of examples of people who have defied that convention, and had spectacular success because of it. Tim is one. Christine Kane is another.

So, am I saying you should write about everything, conventions be dammed? No, because it depends. It depends on your goals, your attention span, your passion, and the kind of person you are. What’s right for one isn’t necessarily right for another.

The takeaway here is that there’s not one right way – and many of the self-proclaimed masters would love to sell you on the idea that it’s their way or the highway. And that’s just not true. You have to take a lot of factors into account, and make the choice that’s right for you.

© Adam for Adam Kayce, 2009. | Permalink | 5 comments

Whereas I am but a small drop in a large ocean, Merlin is a pretty good-sized pebble, to put it mildly. Owner of 43folders, Merlin’s humor and helpful wisdom have spared many thousands of people from the bowels of a boring, monotonous, unproductive worklife, not to mention the all-too-common attempts of the “I’m the new productivity guru on the block!”, please-let-this-blogging-thing-make-me-money crowd.

So, if you haven’t seen what Merlin has been writing lately, and if you’re wondering why I haven’t posted in so long, you really have to go take a look. Seriously.

Now, I’m not about to pawn the explanation of my silence off on Merlin’s shoulders, but he so eloquently puts into words a whole bunch of my feelings about blogging, attention, and the social-media-crack that’s running rampant these days, that it just wouldn’t make sense for me to try to do it any better than he has.

Read it? Good.

Now, on to my side of the story.

When I stopped writing over at Viverati (my old, old site) in June `08, it wasn’t really a planned hiatus. I just woke up one day and realized I didn’t have anything else to say. At least, for the time being.

As faithful readers know, I transitioned from Monk at Work to Viverati with the intention of expanding my scope, to include all kinds of stuff about all kinds of stuff, and not just about spirituality and personal development, and how they interface with our work life.

But, as it turns out, expanding my scope meant losing my focus. And that exposed an underlying issue that needed to be dealt with.

Namely, that I was blogging for the wrong reasons.

When I got into blogging, it seemed like a great marketing idea. I thought, “I’ll write about healing, personal development, and spirituality, and people will like it so much, they’ll hire me as a healer, take one of my workshops, or buy one of my products. Yeah, that’s the ticket!”

Did it work? A little. Not as much as I’d hoped, and it turned out that feeding the blogging-and-social-media-beast took more out of me than I wanted to admit. Arbitrary (and sometimes grueling) publishing schedules, and the pressure to post!post!post! took precedence over listening to the inner voice than wanted to speak. It ended up taking more than it gave, at least on the outside.

But what did come out of it was priceless; the realization that community is really important to me. That people come first, and everything else second. And that I no longer wanted to hawk my spirituality for money.

Sound harsh? Maybe it is. But the deeper I got into realizing what worked for me on a heart-level, the more I saw that I wanted to separate my income from my searching. And, since I had been deriving my family’s income from being a healer for over ten years, there was a lot to unravel and rework.

Hence, the hiatus. I couldn’t put words to what I was going through, and I still don’t know if I can. But what ensued was a complete re-tooling of my business, my spirituality, my interests, and my writing here.

On the other side…

As you can see, I’m now putting a many-year hobby into use and doing web work full-time. But, once a teacher, forever a teacher… the focus of my work as a webdesigner is less about designing, and more about teaching people how to use their sites to do whatever they want to do (which, from what I hear, is a far more precious commodity than webdesign).

And the blogging? Yep, I’m back to blogging, but no longer am I blogging to feed the beast, and no longer will I hold myself to someone else’s standards of what I should be writing, or how often, or the number of links per post needed to get to the front page of whatsawhoosit. Screw all that.

If I can’t write authentically, in every way, then I can’t write.

If I’m writing by rules that aren’t my own, then I can’t write.

And if I’m not writing something that matters to me, then I doubt it’s going to matter much to you, either.

So thank you, Merlin, for once again paving the way, for helping me open the door that I’d closed and held shut for so long.

So, what now?

We’ll see, really. I’m not pretending to know how this is going to go, nor am I promising that everything is about to go back to how it was. Quite the opposite, really, in case you couldn’t guess.

What I do know is this: I’m committed to writing about what I care about. It’s going to be from my perspective, as all writing is, if the writer is being honest. Some of you will stay, and some will go, and that’s fine. Community is a fluid thing, and I get that.

And, as Vitor helped me to see, it’s about the person, not the URL. Monk at Work, Viverati, whatever… the door has opened again, and I’m walking through it.

Image by mrhayata.

© Adam for Adam Kayce, 2008. | Permalink | 22 comments