Yeah, I am back on YouTube.
Do watch this video, subscribe, and let me know what you think.
Today’s topic?
The steep learning curve a beginner must face, the gap between the quality of the content you create versus the type of content you consume, and why it’s so easy to give up.
There, I said it.
I started my first blog on the 22nd of April, 2012. A month or so later, after having published a bunch of mediocre blog posts, one of my articles went viral.
From then on out, it was all rather confusing. Yeah, Neil Gaiman mentioned one of my articles on Twitter. So did Random House. I was gaining anywhere between 500 to 800 new followers per day.
By November the same year I was earning around $100 per day.
I see everyone running around for success. And I wish that everyone could have their fair share of success and fame and glory and the respect and admiration of others, but the truth is that we do not enjoy the victory, but the struggle.
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Today, I’m celebrating eight years of blogging.
Eight years.
In case you missed the previous post (and the free download with my best blog posts, you can find it here.)
Anyway. I want to share with you the lessons I’ve learned during my blogging journey. One for each month I spent blogging.
And, yeah, that’s me in the picture.
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“It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.” – Ian McEwan
They say the biggest distance between two people is misunderstanding. It creates this gap between people. Or is it a wall? And it’s frustrating, isn’t it? It does make you feel as if you’re alone, the only one who thinks and says and acts in a certain way.
And by feeling so don’t we diminish others as well? Don’t we fail to understand that even though they are different, they’re still inherently the same as us? And they deserve to be treated the same way we’d like to be treated.
I don’t know, it’s a difficult question to answer.
But could you hate someone if you knew why they do what they do? If you could truly understand them? Their thoughts? Their feelings? Know their past? Their struggles? What they want? What they have lost?
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It seems to me that the last couple of years have been all about the grind.
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson famously works out twice before we even wake up. Elon Musk sleeps on a couch in his office. Everyone is either working hard or telling everyone else to work hard.
But what about working smart? What about becoming more efficient? Getting more done in less time. Isn’t that something worth looking into?
Well, lucky you, here are fifteen ideas to help you work smarter, not just harder.
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Like the vast majority of ex-smokers, I tried to quit many times and failed. I remember my first quit: I had smoked three packs of cigarettes over a 24 hour period, and it was the first time that I felt disgusted by the habit. Prior to this, I was one of those who enjoyed smoking. Well, at least that was what I was telling myself.
In order to stop for good, I resorted to listening to Paul McKenna’s hypnosis. I was into self-hypnosis and NLP at the time, so I thought this would be enough to make me quit…
Well, the thing was that I was quite stressed. That’s an understatement. I almost beat a cab driver once, and on another occasion I started running after a car that hadn’t stopped at a pedestrian crossing.
No wonder this didn’t last long. All it took was to get real angry once, more than usual, and the first thing I did was go the grocery store and buy a pack of cigarettes.
After this, I think I tried to quit a couple more times, always insisting on listening to Paul McKenna urging me to give up that nasty habit once and for all, but to no avail.
Then, last year in May, I had become so disgusted with myself for being a slave to this stupid habit, and more disgusted with the fact that I kept trying to quit and failed. Also, a few days prior, a friend of mine told me that he considered all smokers to be emotionally weak: they needed something to help them cope with their own emotions.
That was it. I was going to quit smoking or die trying.
As I am still here and writing this post, I’d like to share the top 10 things that made this quit successful. Continue reading
First of all, I’d like to say that I have been that guy. The loser. Depressed, suicidal, yet doing my best to motivate others. The words I wrote were for myself, for those like myself, and for those who could, one day, end up like me.
That being said, I believe in every single word spoken in that video. I understand the principles at work, I have lived in comfort (and depression), I have desired comfort, and the more I wanted comfort, the more discomfort I had in my life.
If you are inclined to disagree with me, or feel that I am insensitive to people’s mental health, I do urge you to listen Joe Rogan in this video, then try to see it in a less civilized manner. See yourself as less than human, and a bit more animal, and see that happiness and mental well-being is the result of overcoming struggles, not avoiding them. Continue reading