Blogs There are SO many free blog sites out there. I’m using Blogger right now because it’s free, it’s hosted, and I can edit the template enough to add a few custom things like my Flickr photo badge. I’ve used and can appreciate Wordpress.com, and also a Serendipity site called Supersized.org. Heck, Ben’s got a free blog site where he SWEARS you can build a new blog in under a minute.

How YOU Can Use it: Blogs are the easiest way to publish information onto the web. You type what you want to say, click Submit, and you’ve got information that’s easily reachable. If you’re a small business, or if you have an interest that you want to share with others, and you’re NOT using a blog as the most basic building block of a business strategy that includes online customers, you’re cuckoo.

Jot- Jot is a wiki site. Wikis are editable online websites that promote collaboration, easy publishing, and all kinds of other useful features. Jot’s neat in that folks have built applications around the wiki, so now you can just click a few things and you can set up a Client Relations Management application, a company contact directory, a project management framework. Whatever you want. I use a free wiki called PBWiki, but I’ve yet to really USE it for much.

My last two examples are a little techie. Feel free to geek out along with me.

VMWare- VMWare is a software product that sits between a computer’s hardware and the operating system, and it permits you to run more than one operating system on the same device. Bigger companies use it to cut down on server hardware, improve disaster recovery planning, build inexpensive development and testing architectures, and a few other nifty things.

How YOU could use it: VMWare gives away VMPlayer (and now, VMServer) for FREE on their site. They also have some pre-packaged virtual machines that you can download and set up superduper easy. (Mind you, the target box where you’ll run this has to have some decent memory and about a gigabyte of free storage space available.) But… you can download and set up a FREE system to try out new operating systems like Red Hat and Ubuntu. You can download full own application development environments like LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/PERL). For free.

Eclipse- Eclipse is a free, open source, integrated development environment. In the old days (or today, if you deal with Microsoft), developers had to pay tons of money to use the tools necessary to write code in a useful framework. Now? You get it for free.

How YOU could use it: Okay, if you’re not a developer, this is a stretch. But at least I’ll say that you can hook up developers to use it for free, and then you could write amazing product use cases that would result im amazing apps. : )

There’s Nothing Stopping You

Oh yeah, except that you need a realistic plan for how you’ll implement these types of things, make money, grow a customer base, etc. But that’s the easy part, right?

What are some of your favorites that I’ve missed?

[email]

Do You, Uh, del.icio.us?

One of my favorite RSS feeds right now is the del.icio.us feed of Bill Keaggy. I find that Bill marks sites that I end up liking and want to look at myself.

I also use a web aggregator called The Daily Mashup. It blends lots of things from del.icio.us, and I forget. populicio.us? Whatever. It’s good.

I use Technorati as well, but for a slightly different search method. Ditto Lifehacker, PigPog, whatever.

The photos I view in a given day are by individual contributors on Flickr.

So, the point is this: I use OTHER PEOPLE to find interesting information on the web, and not search engines. I use search engines to find targeted information. It’s already here. The cyborg is the gestalt of all us humans swirling over the web, determining which sites are interesting enough to link to, or which content is useful, and bubbling it up.

I think that’s what Mike’s working on in his search engine, Seekum. It’s this sense that somehow the fringe is king. Being connect-able is godlike.

Hell, I showed my parents this site called Etsy. It permits people who make something by hand to hook up with people who want hand-made crafts. It’s like this micro eBay for quality products that one produces themselves. It’s again a way that PEOPLE are driving what ultimately gets seen, and not search engines.

What do you make of this?

Hell, more importantly, share your del.icio.us link sources with me. Where are you finding YOUR fascinating new stuff?

[email]

Decide More!

An interesting conversation at lunch gave me the following ingredient for your own personal recipe for success:

You Must Decide More

Life is loaded with decisions. Some of them are easy: regular or decaf, vinegarette or thousand islands, Underworld 2 or Brokeback Mountain. Others are a little more complex, as these decisions shape our lives a bit more. Related to the conversation on transformation and the conversation on how we need to see more third options and fewer time crunches.

Decisions position you for opportunity

The enemy of deciding on things is keeping your options open. People are TERRIFIED of losing options. But, there are times where keeping one’s options open ruin your chances for new opportunities. Say you’re a project manager by vocation. You get an email from a friend who’s a game designer and who wants you to join their company as a developer. You ALSO have a chance to get promoted at the new place. So, you tell your friend you’ll have to get back to him.

He gets the message that you’re not really interested, or that you can’t act. He gives the gig to another guy. Your promotion option vanishes. Where are you? You’re in the same seat, that’s where.

Here’s another example. You decide to build an account at LinkedIn. By doing this, you are putting your name out on the web. That’s a decision that positions you for opportunities. Same with creating a blog. Same with spreading yourself all over the web.

By my decisions, I’ve made it insanely easy for people who think of me to find me.

Decisions Hone Your Logic, Reasoning and Wisdom

Make good decisions, get good things. Make bad decisions, get bad things. It’s amazing how much of life we leave up to chance, but it’s even MORE impressive that by exercising our ability to choose and do so decisively, we CREATE LUCK. Or what we consider to be luck.

By making lots of decisions, you have more of a sample to reflect upon. The more times you try something new, the more of a wealth of experience you’ll build. It takes DOING to learn something new, right?

Decisions Free Up Head-RAM

Ben Franklin didn’t say, “Shit or get off the pot,” but I bet it’d fit his thought process. NOT deciding something takes up lots of space in our heads. If you are fretting over something, you’re not freed up to do more things. Being ready requires some space in your head to act upon the new thing.

Decide. Decide more. Decide often.

[email]

Tags:
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Comments on Communication Nation’s Transformation Post

There’s been some great additions to Dave Gray’s post on transformation. The discussion is fascinating:

Communication Nation: When was your last transformation?

On Contributing

I found a neat post about why so few people create content, but so many consume. Found via O’Reilly’s Radar. link.

(Feeling lazy).

[email]

Third Options and Time Crunches

It’s amazing how our minds trick us into thinking there are very limited choices. In one setting, we might find ourselves stuck in a case of, “It’s either ____ or ____.” In another, we might feel an urgency to make a decision based on a time deadline.

In lots of cases, both situations are illusions. And worse, we CRAVE these illusions. Something inside us trends towards deductive thinking, getting us to break things down to raw black and raw white.

Things are rarely black and white.

Third Options

One important thing is to consider third options to every scenario. As a dad, I’m often trying to narrow down decisions. My daughter plays me like a lawyer. She almost always finds a third way through to what she really wants.

Try getting in the habit of adding an option mentally to any decision you’re trying to make. Are you considering looking for a new job? Maybe there are more options than staying put or packing up and moving somewhere. A third option could be to commute.

Time Crunches

People are SO succeptable to time crunches. This is how lots of sales pitches work. This offer is only valid for a few more days. Whoa! I better hurry up and BUY that. When am I EVER going to see another Velvet Elvis Toaster Cosey? Well, you might and you might not. But don’t let time short-circuit the rest of your decision structure.

Try smelling such time crunches and determining what the REAL impact is. If you see an ad for $49 plane fare between Sydney, Australia and Nairobi, but you have to buy the tickets today, it MIGHT be the only time that offer will happen. But won’t a similar offer, or something nearly as reasonable come by again?

Decide which time crunches truly matter, and see if there aren’t better decision-making levers instead of just time.

See if this helps with any difficult decisions you have coming up.

(Suzie, email me).

[email]

Transformation

Dave Gray asked about transformation over at Communication Nation. He’s talking about those watershed moments where something causes you to change dramatically. The question is: What brought about the transformational moment, and how can we engineer such moments to bring about more meaningful change in the world.

Here are a few of my transformational experiences:

Fifth Grade

I realized in fifth grade that *I* controlled my grades. It was the first time that I took hold of my destiny. Of course, I didn’t do this in a positive way. I immediately nosedived my academic experience to be spiteful for being singled out. This was around the time I started getting branded(!) as “gifted.”

Sex

I discover one of my first and favorite drugs. Orgasm.

First Semester College

Similar to fifth grade, I realized that I was the only one who cared where I was at any given moment during any given school day. Unlike grade school, college professor’s could’ve given a rat’s ass about me. I was seat-fodder.

This is Not My Beautiful House

I realize that my life between 1992-1997 was all a series of me trying to make other people happy. I further realize that I’m really wrapped into other people’s opinion of me. I achieve escape velocity from one life, in hopes of giving everyone involved the opportunity to make a new life better.

Quitting the Sure Thing

I left a company where most of the employees can work until they die, where keeping one’s nose clean was the pinnacle of success. Also the employer of my mom and brother, so a family gravitational pull. I went to a small wireless startup company.

9-11

Before September 11th, I wrote fiction by the ton. I was publishing. I did fairly well, and had a little following. I read fiction. After the planes started hitting, something switched. I had to learn. I had to learn LOTS. I started with survival books, but then relaxed my grip and started learning more and more about things that I used to take for granted. I got a-political, strangely, and retreated into the corporate world.

Spawn

The birth of my daughter was transformational. I tried with all my heart for it NOT to be. I wanted to be just as *.* as I was before. Not in a sweet, Hallmark way. It was hell. It was me kicking and screaming and trying to escape the life I saw attached to the label of parent. This was also when I had to start fessing up to the fact that I was officially supposed to be a grown up.

BIGGEST One Of All

I realized that I had LOTS of things wrong with me. I had self-esteem issues galore. I tackled these full on, on many fronts. I read voraciously. I saw a shrink. I went to groups. I built my self-esteem while severing my “what other people think” ties as best as I could.

From this, I started dieting and exercising. I lost 65 pounds. I went from being 100% slovenly to running a dozen 5Ks, a mountain 1/2 marathon, a trail marathon, and another 1/2 marathon in the winter months.

I started writing about self-improvement. I started branching out, trying to meet exciting and engaged people. I decided that I had something to offer.

I’m still at this level right now. In fact, I’m a little entropied from the best of this epiphany and could use some refreshers. I’ve put back some of the weight. I didn’t run for the last 11 months. (I’m starting back now). But, here’s where I am.

Seeding for Transformation

I’m not sure what others will tell Dave about his question, but my opinion is that these things all happened from within. In almost all cases, external stimulii didn’t/wouldn’t have been powerful enough to have moved me forward.

But the seeds were sometimes sown by things around me. I wouldn’t have picked the weight loss method I used had a friend not successfully used this method first. I wouldn’t have moved myself to tackle my self-esteem issues had I not received a near-ultimatum from my wife.

So maybe, in the final analysis, what COULD be useful is to find ways to seed the path. And that, my friends, is why I write here at [chrisbrogan.com]. Think about it. There’s no other external motive. I write the posts I write because I’m hoping that some of them find a place into your thoughts. I’m hoping that occasionally, one of you is motivated to launch yourself FIERCELY into your next transformation. I write about these things because I feel that being helpful and sharing are very important, especially when you’ve healed yourself enough to have things to offer.

I encourage you to consider this all yourself, and visit Dave’s post.

[email]

Educational Podcast Network

As a follow on to my topic earlier about things I wish I’d learned, here’s a link to the Educational Podcast Network. Sometimes, I think serendipity is the internet’s secret sauce.

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