So You Want My Job: Outdoor Shop Owner | The Art of Manliness

Any other advice, tips, commentary, or anecdotes you’d like to share?

Take your pick.

  • Being normal isn’t.  The best gift you can give to your family and to the world is your authentic self, not what you think society expects you to be.
  • You have to have the courage to paint your own picture and live in it.  If your parents want you to go to medical school and you don’t, don’t do it.  They may be disappointed but in the end, they’ll be proud of you, maybe even jealous a little.
  • Being smart doesn’t mean you’re wise.  I know geniuses who made horrible life decisions and are miserable. They hang their hat on being brilliant.  Some of the wisest people I know are in the trades.  Our plumber is an artist.
  • Being kind to everyone is more important than anything else…and I mean everyone.  My father was a commercial real estate broker who worked in huge office buildings in Los Angeles.  When I went to work with him, he always stopped to talk to the security guards. He addressed them by name. They were people to him, not a fixture at a desk.
  • If someone makes fun of you for doing something, there’s a 100% chance they’re jealous of you and don’t have the courage to do it.  People who do this are cowards. There are always critics and armchair quarterbacks. Ignore them, they’re impotent.
  • If you do it for the money, you’re screwed.  Hell, if you do anything for the money, you’re screwed.
  • Learn to do things with your hands.  It’s great to be a business guy, but if you have to hire an electrician to change a switch plate, you are too separated from reality.
  • Never stop learning, ever.

HelloGiggles – I Hate Myself: My Journey Toward Self-Acceptance

As I lay in bed, I thought, “What if this is just a bad habit?” I have negative thoughts and anxiety attached to anything I do. There they are again, thoughts from a total (insert expletive). But if it’s just learned behavior, maybe I can ditch it. The answer: pushing harder on my follow through than most people have to. But maybe others secretly struggle with this? Or maybe people are blatantly lying about how much they get done? (I’m looking at you, Facebookers!)

I am who I am. That’s it. Riding that emotion, I climbed out of my comforter cocoon, sat at my computer and wrote this piece. As I’m sure you have gathered, I am not Joan Didion. But, who cares? Now that I’ve said it, I can move past the dreaded shame of not being someone else.

I recognise this so well. I’ve been there (although I did have a depression as it turned out) and I still have bad days. Do I do all the things I say? No. Do I have everything in order? No. Am I only working on things I love? No. Do I write with the flare and magic of say Neil Gaiman or Stephen Fry? Eh, no. Fraid not.

But I am working in a job that is nice enough. I have started to put my-self together after several years of being broken (and you can be broken in so many ways!). And that’s just the thing. Stuff takes time. They say overnight success takes years to achieve, and I believe life is the same way.

It’s not about living the perfect life, it’s about figuring out what’s perfect, and striving towards it. That’s what I believe.

To believe the story that someone has left you is to leave yourself. That’s how you divorce yourself. Every time you’re in your partner’s business, dictating whom he should be with, whom he should or shouldn’t leave, you have left yourself, and the effect of that is loneliness and terror. Until you question what you believe, you remain the innocent cause of your own suffering.
Byron Katie

BBC News - Ebooks: Is digital opening up a new chapter for publishing?

Publishers are seeing huge growth in this bit of their business. One of the big leaps in digital is that publishers are able to communicate with their customers directly.

Yes, we’ve been trying to tell you for years.

Digital lends itself to the habitual nature of our content. Our readers finish reading one and they can download the next.

Yupp.

Having direct communication with our readers is hugely important to our future success, it’s not always about direct selling /…/

Again, welcome to the late 90’s.

We don’t just take a book that might exist in printed form and simply transfer it onto the iPad. We are looking for ways to give the reader some new insight into the subject matter that you cannot get on the printed page.

Let’s withhold the snark here and state that this is good. I personally believe that e-ink readers such as the Kindle do a better job when it is pure text. But if we’re talking about taking reading, and indeed media, to the next level, we are currently talking iPad (maybe Kindle Fire or Nook Tablet, but the screens are a tad too small for this) and thinking outside the box.

“The digital transformation is happening quicker than it happened for music,” she says. “Are there some people who would prefer it not to be happening? Of course there are. But it’s creating lots of innovation.”

This is exactly why there is so much doom and gloom. Old, big companies rarely enjoy doing new things. But that is exactly what makes now so exciting. There are new opportunities everywhere!

“It’s an enormously exciting time to be in digital publishing,” says Touch Press CEO and co-founder Max Whitby.

I love this, finally something but all that negativity we keep on hearing from all those droning pseudo intellectual culture-socialist. Hear hear!

Marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world. It’s a very noisy world. We’ re not going to get a chance for people to remember a lot about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear about what they want them to know about us. Our customers want to know what we stand for. What we’re about is not making boxes for people to get their jobs done. Although we do that very well. Apple is about more than that. We believe that people with passion can change the world for the better. That’s what we believe.
Steve Jobs (via bennesvig)