How to change your life
Today I’m happy to unveil my new blog. It’s called The Blogging Blog and, unsurprisingly, it’s all about blogging.
I’m going to keep this post short and simple because what I would really love it for you to check out The Blogging Blog. Here are some particular posts that may be of interest to you:
A few months back I wrote a post here about why a blog is an excellent personal development tool. The other day I was watching the movie Julie and Julia (don’t ask), but because it was something that was the result of a blog, I was kind of curious about the story. I wanted to see if I could extract anything useful from watching it. What struck me about 30 minutes into the movie was the the main character set a goal, and used a blog to accomplish a goal. Sure, her goal was completely random, but it made me think that the process she followed might be a great formula for using a blog to accomplish any goal. In fact many blogs start because of an effort to accomplish some sort of goal.
Choose a goal: First you want to choose a goal. Your goal should be something that you can track or measure. It could be losing weight, learning an instrument, or whatever it is you want to do. For the sake of what I’m talking about, let’s use something like learning to play guitar. I can’t play the guitar, but I have played a musical instrument for an extended period in my life. Yep, I was a band geek.
In the 8 months since I started my blog I’ve gotten to know dozens of bloggers. While each one has his or her own unique interests and opinions, I think it’s fair to say we all agree on one thing: a blog is a phenomenal personal development tool. Here are some reasons why:
Goal Setting: Setting goals is a fundamental component of any personal development program. While there are a few different variations, it really comes down to one basic idea: write down your goals. A blog provides a great platform for writing down your goals and provides a place where you can review them on a regular basis.
While I don’t claim to be a blogging expert, I have picked up a few tips and tricks over the past 9 months that have helped me break into the Technorati Top 10,000, push past 2,000 RSS subscribers, and find myself a job as editor on PickTheBrain.
In this article I will share everything I know about blogging, including how to get started, find the perfect image for your article, and increase your subscriber count.
Why start a blog? Here are 5 reasons:
1. It’s Cheaper Than Therapy
Socrates said “The unexamined life is not worth living.” I agree. Writing is a great way to generate ideas and clarify your thoughts about both your inner and outer worlds. Of course, consider privacy issues before airing any dirty laundry online.
Well….. its been a bit quiet here lately. My life has been pretty crazy though. A summary of the last 2 weeks:
Busiest week of the year at my (ex-) job due to end of financial year
Packing up our things and moving out of our place in Australia
Life travels fast these days. Regular readers will know that I will soon be moving to Canada with my fiancee and baby boy to live. This move has been on the cards for sometime, but it always felt like some far off event. Now it is less than 3 weeks away….
I find it’s important to every so often hit the pause button on my life and see what’s working well, what could be done better and what to ditch. Now is one of those moments. In particular, I want to reflect on this blog.
Since I began writing for this blog, I have found ideas for posts or further research constantly pop into my head. Ideas come when I first wake up, when I am in the shower, when I am exercising, on the bus to and from work, and when I am writing posts on related or entirely unrelated material. I’m sure this is the same for anyone who is passionately working on a personal project.
At present I have the target of 1 post per day on my blog. A habit I have found to be extremely useful is writing down ideas as soon as they come to me. Unless I do this, there is no guarantee that at 6am (when I do most of my writing) that I will be able to recall the great idea I had yesterday for a new post. So a simple trick I do is carry a pen and notepad with me throughout the day, and when a great idea comes along I write it down straight away.
