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What’s Your Size? February 10, 2007

Posted by The Probabilist in : [Articles], Consciousness, Goals, Society, Personal Growth, Purpose, Beliefs, Responsibility, Work, Abilities , add a comment

If you’re on the path of personal growth just as I am, then you have to stop every now and then and ask yourself what your current size is. While you could evaluate and rate your holistic level of growth as one neat figure on a scale from 1 to 10, you have to break it down into distinct areas of your whole self to see where you’re excelling and where you’re lagging behind. The reason you should do this is because your total size as a spiritual, mental, emotional and physical being is not the average of your distinct areas of growth - it is severely crippled and slowed down by the parts of you that are at their worst shape.

How you decide to categorize your own development depends on what you value about yourself, so you don’t have to use the same measures I’m defining my own growth with. But in order to inform you a bit what you could include in your list, I’ll show you which 12 points I’m focusing on, how I’m doing in my subjective opinion and what my goals are for 2007. These will give you some form of an idea of what kind of objectives and affirmations you can set out for yourself as well.

I think Steve Pavlina said it best when asked why he pursues personal growth:
“I was born really short, but after working on my growth for many years, I successfully reached a height of six feet.”

Mental, 7

This is the capacity to understand and apply patterns, cognition, language, numbers, causality and different forms of intelligence. It also includes your ability to take on new knowledge and learn new skills. This is the tool set of your mind where you need to increase your mastery at using the right tools for the right job. It should also constantly innovate and find new challenges to pursue once previous problems and worries have been overcome and labeled as personal victories. It may be considered as the most important asset you have since it has the power to influence how well you’re measuring and improving all the other personal growth areas of your life.

My goals for 2007 are to increase my entrepreneurial creativity, to innovate new systems for making money and to join Mensa.

Physical, 5

Your body is a complex system of systems and we may never know what the most optimal way to treat it is. But it’s still a fact that the way you treat it will have its impact on how long the body you reside in can function. You can’t survive life, but how far you can prolong it and how well your body treats you is defined by how much you value it in return. This question comprises of how you exercise, what you eat and if you maintain habits that damage it. This is my secondary focus for the year.

My goals for 2007 are to beat 3,000 meters on Cooper’s test, be a systematic and optimal polyphasic sleeper and to test being a vegetarian for at least a month.

Emotional, 9

Being a very emotional person or a very unemotional person doesn’t make much of a difference if you want to improve yourself - both come with their pros and cons. Being very unattached means that you are weak on both the positive as well as the negative emotions. In this case, the goal is to reach inner balance with yourself about how the universe treats you. On the other hand, if your emotions are very prevalent, attempt to ensure that the negative ones don’t cause yourself and others harm.

This has always been one of my strong areas, so my goal is simply to improve my level of equanimity even further.

Spiritual, 4

Spirituality is commonly thought of as the least important part of a person’s growth plan and I’ve been one of them. It wasn’t until very recently that I discovered this aspect about myself to begin with. I want to show faith in us people as mere mortals being only a part of a greater whole and am therefore inclined to try methods like meditation, lucid dreaming, astral projection and psychic development to seek proof in what lies beyond what our five senses can tap into. This is my primary focus for the year.

My goal is to acknowledge my intuition and find myself orientating more strongly toward subjective reality, the law of attraction, non-duality and other dimensions.

Relationships, 8

How you treat your friends, co-workers and strangers and how they in return treat you goes pretty much without explanation. It doesn’t matter that much how actively you pursue to spend time on this if what you spend time talking about doesn’t contribute to much good. Remember that you are what you like, not what likes you back, and that your relationships project back on to you how much you value the company of others.

My goal for 2007 is to better inspire others to talk about themselves and feel comfortable talking about deep issues that require attention.

Financial, 6

This subject can be highly emotional to some people and even something not to be spoken about according to others. Financial education to begin with, needs to be addressed far better so that everyone understands that they have the option of heading toward abundance. The results a person sees in this category is simply found in their own understanding, perspective, importance, measurement and value of money.

My goals for 2007 are to reach an income of $500/month from blogging, add a few more streams of income, get closer to financial independence and actively manifest the million dollar intention.

Beliefs & Values, 9

Although being a part of the mental you, this category takes control of the direction you’re heading in when considering what you put your mind to. What you believe and know is possible and what you value about yourself and others undeniably guide you on what you spend your time on, who you spend your time with and where you spend your time. This category gives you the framework of what is possible for a human being to accomplish in the first place and what you want to see more of.

I’m a firm believer in that humans are giants trapped in the exterior of a small organic system and we have yet plenty to witness on what we can accomplish to everyone’s benefit. I have faith in myself being able to accomplish most of the goals outlined in this article before the year ends.

Work, 5

Overcoming laziness, enjoying physical and mental labor and doing it without any stress or other ailments describes this area of growth. Men were born with the ability to work out great solutions in improving the standard of living and everyone ought to love being part of building the cities, constructions and companies that we see today and beyond this day. Walking around these complex structures that we have created often makes me wonder how for every single detail there is a person who takes care of it so that the whole systems don’t come to a halt. This is my tertiary focus for the year.

My goal for 2007 is to put more effort in fulfilling my part of a working society and finding enjoyment in physical labor.

Goals & Motivation, 8

At first you have to set goals and then motivate yourself to see them come to fruition. Without clearly defined objectives we dwell aimlessly and without control over our destiny. This is where you take the framework of your beliefs and values to see what’s possible and then think through and write down what you want to accomplish for the coming day, week, month, quarter, year, five years and lifetime. You also see to it that you keep track of your progress and prep yourself to keep up and shape your progress.

My goal for 2007 is to better keep track of what my goals are, motivate myself to stay true to them and report the accomplishments to myself.

Family, 7

I’m still a member of the family in the younger generation and don’t have a family of my own, so to speak. This category is also quite self explanatory and if you so wish, you can combine it together with your relationships. The key element to remember is that you can’t choose who your family comprises of so it’s a challenge to keep up good relations with all your relatives to build a great sense of mutual belonging.

My goal for 2007 is to improve my ability to nurture and strengthen all the contacts within my kindred.

Self-worth, 8

How much you value yourself, assert yourself and autosuggest is also a barrier for what you think you can and what you think you’re worthy of being, doing and having. It is also very important to note that this aspect about yourself determines what the words of others mean and how they impact your behaviour - if at all. My view is that it’s most important that you prove to yourself what you’re capable of, let others guide you constructively and remember that by improving yourself, you improve the reality around you.

My goal for 2007 is to enhance my prosperity mind-set and work on my own good fortune in order to free time to aid others through my own examples of what is possible to achieve.

Contribution, 7

This is the question of what kind of an impact you’re making to your environment, the legacy you leave behind and the law of karma. In the end, it doesn’t matter if you believe in reincarnation or not, you still have to decide what to do with the time that is left for you to make a difference. Not believing in any form of afterlife also doesn’t serve as an excuse not to improve society to the best of your ability. I think it’s quite the opposite as it makes it even more urgent to deal with.

My goal for 2007 is to work on my blog to improve my written communication and join toastmasters to enhance my verbal communication.

When looking at the average of these 12 areas, it equates to 6.92, which is what one could consider a comfortable result. However, it feels to me like I’m on 5, a very average result, which is something I wont tolerate any longer, and something that is more a 5 than a 7 because of the areas of my growth that are doing poorly. So I want to get back to the introduction where I said that you have to put the most of your effort on the areas of your growth that are doing the worst.

It reminds me of the analogy of a buffalo herd that is running from danger. Biological evolution makes it so that the buffalo that have the worst genes or are in worst shape are the ones lagging behind and therefore the ones that get shot or attacked.

Because of this, when the weakest ones get eliminated, the speed and mobility of the herd that is left improves. This is why the current performance of the whole flock isn’t dependent on the average speed of the buffalo, but more so dependent on the speed of the weakest individuals. It also means that biologically the best genes survive once the worst ones gradually drop out.

In this case however, constantly eliminating the ones that are doing the worst inevitably leads to total extinction. Do not do this with your personal growth. What you need to do is take the weakest links about yourself and nurture them to the same levels as the rest of you are performing. In this way you greatly enhance the holistic capacity of reaching outstanding momentum and results in your life. It’s all about balance and improving your overall level of personal development. But don’t let yourself down if you don’t reach all goals. Even if you successfully accomplish only 25 %, it’s guaranteed to be a better result than what you’d have achieved not having any goals at all. For further clarification and perspective over this matter, read also my post on the topography of self growth.

Create a similar list about yourself, write down your goals and track your progress for the year of 2007. Make it your best one yet.

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How to Blog - 8 Essential Steps to Effective Blogging February 9, 2007

Posted by The Probabilist in : [Articles], Creativity, Entrepreneurship, Goals, Productivity, Technology, Writing, Blogging , 13 comments

So you’ve decided to start blogging? That’s great, but in order to make the most out of your venture, I’ve compiled a massive 8-step program with lots of detailed advice that you may use as reference whether you’ve been blogging for quite some time now already or if you didn’t know what a blog was until yesterday. It is designed to be easy enough for anyone to follow, yet consist of information that may be new even to bloggers with several months of experience under their belt.

These entries will be long and there will be plenty of external links embedded as well for even more in-depth information and utilities. A new article will be presented every Monday and Friday for the next four weeks. In this sense, it fits perfectly as a real time workshop where you follow each of the 8 steps at the given pace and as thoroughly as you choose to. You’ve probably already pictured for yourself a bit what your blog is going to look like so you are in no way required to follow and do everything exactly as I suggest. Strive for uniqueness on at least one aspect when considering what content, niche, design, features, writing style, layout and audience you want. This guide will be tailored to the Wordpress blogging platform and will also include the element of making money off your blog.

Here are the eight essential steps that will get their own article and link from this introduction.

How to Blog - 1/8 Start Offline (XAMPP, WP, Themes, Files)
How to Blog - 2/8 Go Online - (Web host, FTP, WP Config)
How to Blog - 3/8 Plugins - (How to install, 20+ essential plugins)
How to Blog - 4/8 Design & Tweaks - (Permalinks, Favicon, CSS & PHP)
How to Blog - 5/8 Google Utilities
How to Blog - 6/8 Ads
How to Blog - 7/8 Traffic Building (Internal means)
How to Blog - 8/8 Traffic Building (External means)

I’m not going to let you leave totally empty handed, so I’ll cover the most important things you need to focus on before you make the decision to follow these steps - the reason and the content.

What’s your motive?

You need to establish an underlying reason why you want to blog about something. Do you want to help people with a specific issue? Or do you just want to get yourself heard over yours? Whatever it is, it should be a prevalent and persistent behaviour and thought pattern that will ride the ups and downs that you may experience from time to time. This is most important if your goal is to make a living off of blogging because for such a goal, you need to reserve at least one or two years before you can get to the proof if you’re cut out to be a professional blogger.

Find your why first before reading how to blog because failure is most often found when people start to question why they’re doing what they’re doing. Few people fail out of not knowing how to do what they should do. I can’t really help you any further on that question because you have to find your own personal answer to it yourself. All successful bloggers (as well as entrepreneurs and businessmen) have a strong why and it keeps them going. You may find this article to be relevant as well.

What are you going to write about?

This should be a done deal for you by now, but question first how broad your perspective will be. Will you be able to write hundreds of posts in a very narrow niche or should you keep flexible boundaries to ensure that writer’s block doesn’t hit you? It doesn’t matter if you will monetize your blog or not, readers want to see persistence, a predictable posting frequency and above all else they want to read interesting and useful entries.

As long as you love writing what you’ve decided to write about, you’ve got the highest odds of succeeding in attracting plenty of readers as well as personally having the drive to go on for a long while. Every blogger will agree on the notion that the greatest key to success is writing compelling entries that provide lasting value.

What will the name of the blog be?

For starters, do a Google search on “domain registration” and you’ll find plenty of websites that enable you to enter a url in a field for you to check its availability. I suggest getting your own domain name if you want to stand out as a seriously dedicated blogger. This is also the only option if your idea requires plenty of storage space for media rich content like images, podcasts or videos. Wordpress’ own blog hosting program will not allow you to run ads on your blog. Blogger on the other hand lets you do this in its blogspot directory. More on hosting your blog and going online is presented in step 2.

Then make up your mind on what the blog’s name will be. New blogs grow in numbers like mushrooms in rain, so you’d better make a search on the blog name that you want as well before settling on a final decision. Also decide upon the tagline or trademark text that goes hand in hand with your blog title. Finding a great match between the url and your blog title is getting more difficult for every day, but try to be creative and find a solution that catches and matches with the essence, motive and content of your blog-to-be.

Write compelling headlines

In order to grab attention, your post titles need to be carefully selected. Are you going with wit, clarity, controversy or guidance? Do you aim for people’s emotional or rational attention? Do you want to entertain or provide help? John Wesley provided a great case study over the choice of headlines. Copyblogger presents alternative options of how to rephrase your headlines. And while you’re at it, check the wording of Steve Olson’s headlines in the Most popular posts section in the sidebar. Always experiment and try different methods and analyze the results.

Checklist for introduction

Motive - Why are you blogging? What do you want to accomplish?
Blog Content - What is it about? Niche or general? What do readers expect?
Name & Domain - Check url and name availability. Make it all match together.
Headlines - Know which headlines grab attention. Choose your style.
Post Content - How will you write and present? Write pillar articles once awhile.

In the first step of this workshop (Monday, February the 12th) I’m going to show you how to install and use XAMPP, a free software that allows you to run Wordpress offline on your computer. This way even the most cautious newbie can install and try out the blogging platform and tweak all they want without annoying online readers with downtime, errors or continuous changes when you tweak your blog to the max throughout the 8 steps.

Bookmark this page or subscribe to my feed to stay updated.

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