So, currently I am going through a trying time. I feel like I’m facing up to a problem I’ve not really wanted to face up to before. I have no idea how to solve it (well, that’s not true, I have snippets of ideas, and vague ideas, and general principles and stuff like that, I’m not totally without weapons to fight — just nothing specific).

It’s a good time though, I’m seeing this positively. I guess you can call this the “quarter life crisis”. (This is assuming I live to the age of 100. Which, actually, I do.) Mid life crises are when you ask yourself, “what have I done with my life?” Quarter life crises are when you’re old enough to understand the urgency of that question (I’m 5 years away from 30!) but still young enough to make an impact on my future. I have two questions, then. What have I done with my youth? And, What am I going to do with my life?

So that’s the background. Part of this is decision making, and this is why I wanted to just decide about some things that interest me. Seems basic enough, I guess, but let’s get some structure.

(Maybe this seems a little egotistical. Well, take a cue from the title of this blog … I have a website where I write about my life, and it’s named after me! I think that’s far enough, one more post isn’t going to hurt)

So then. Starter for 10. I love websites. I love reading blogs, listening to podcasts, designing websites, programming PHP, writing wordpress plugins, supporting people on the wordpress forums (not done that in a while, actually) — I just really love it. So there — I have publicly given myself permission to be a web geek. If you are a web geek, you need to do the same.

I love writing. I can’t think unless I write something down. I have an urge to be read. Not just to think about stuff, but to show it to other people. Why live just on the inside of my head? This ties in with the paragraph above. I love writing as a means of communication, but I actually enjoy the physical process of writing, especially typing. (Sorry if I’m boring you by the way — if you want me to be funny, meet me in real life. Or add me as friend on Facebook, I’m quite funny there too. Gonna start being funny on this blog again any time soon!)

So that this post isn’t totally selfish, I want to write about passions in general. How you get passionate, what to do with them, that kind of thing. I spent a good deal of my youth not really knowing who I was or what I wanted to do, and it’s not a happy place to be. Passions are a road of that fog. They’re clues as to who you are, and they’re really important, I think, to living life to the full.

I am not naturally Mr Enthusiasm. (I’m more like Eeyore.) I have had to learn to be passionate and enthusiastic. And I’m still learning! These are some of the lessons I’ve learnt.

Prise your fingers off pessimism

It’s hard to do! Pessimism seems like it protects you from making the wrong decisions or wasting your time, but it doesn’t. Life is basically very good, even though it has its shockingly terrible moments. Refuse to believe that life is nothing other than an opportunity.

Passions don’t just suddenly appear

They grow, like babies or trees, from small things at first. It might be something you always thought about as a kid. I used to play with sentences in my head, to see how the tone affected the meaning of the sentence, even though it was just the same words. I spent ages as a teenager messing around on computers. Not playing games, just wasting time, really, but now I’m not at all fazed by technology. As a student, I spent most of my time writing this very blog. While my degree suffered (due to lack of time management, not writing this blog, I might add) I learnt loads about web coding, which is now making me money.

So these things didn’t just pop into my head, fully formed. They’ve grown as I’ve found like-minded people, and seen them from new angles. Did you know that you can become wealthy from blogging? You need business skills, yes, but you can do it. And did you know that you can change people’s lives? Or make relationships with people on the other side of the world? It started off as a geeky obsession, but now it’s a passion. And a possible income stream!

Nurture them properly

I once talked to someone about knowing what I wanted to do with my life, and I replied with the almost obligatory vagueness. They said, “so you’re still waiting for something to crystallize.” I thought it was an excellent picture, and then forgot about it.

Then years later, I was miserable because I was in a crappy job and I suddenly remembered the comment. it occurred to me that crystals only form in saturated solutions.

Let me explain that …

You’ll never grow a sugar cube out of a glass of water with only one teaspoon of sugar in it. You have to keep adding more sugar until no more will dissolve. Then the crystals start to grow. It was the same with the inside of my head. The more miserable I was, the more negative my “dreams” were — because they had nothing else to be made out of.

I changed (painfully, slowly, step-by-step) the way I saw the world, and now my head is a happier place to be. I’m still on that journey, but it’s worth it for the positive dreams that are coming into my head.

Anyway, this post has gone on too long, and I have shopping to do. So long!

You’ve got to love your brain! It’s the organ that has the most fascinating function in your body: it’s the computer that runs … you! Why punish it by forcing it to work in ways it doesn’t want to?

Found this video just now. I think it’s not only effective and efficient, but also beautiful — the best ideas embrace form and function. I will certainly be using this in the future! (I already take notes that are full of pictures and decorative lettering.)

Exams: How To Mind Map With Tony Buzan

Hope you enjoyed it. For me, it’s back to boring audio editing. But life is still good!

It’s ridiculously simple: stop watching TV.

I have nothing against TV. There are many great programmes that can expand your mind, challenge and inspire you, present new opportunities and show you things in a new way. The trouble is watching TV doesn’t teach you to think.

Your brain is a learning machine. You never stop learning. There’s no choice about the matter: you automatically learn, whether you pursue it or not. The choice comes in what you learn.

If you don’t take control of what you learn, you learn at random. You learn some good things, and some bad, but there’s no direction or theme to what you learn. And by learning, I don’t mean just learning facts or theories, I mean habits of thought, points of view, skills. Random learning is great for trivia collecting, but that’s about it. All you will do is turn your mind into a museum of curiosities.

You have to direct your learning because your mind is what guides your life. If it’s full of good things, your life will be good. If it’s full of rubbish, your life will be rubbish!

The king of all the things you could possibly learn, and the skill I most try to develop, is creativity. Creativity allows you to find the beautiful solution to an ugly situation. Right now, creative problem solving is making people rich in the midst of a recession — right now, as you are reading this. Doesn’t that annoy you? With creativity you can turn being fired into the best thing that ever happened. You can take your broken past and turn it into a beautiful future.

The problem with watching TV is that it doesn’t train your brain to do anything but take in. Did you know that your brain is less active when you watch TV then when you’re asleep? It goes fully into input-mode. It’s almost trance like. There’s no other state that I can think of that’s like it. Maybe being a passenger in a car comes close — I always completely zone out, and have to really concentrate to make conversation. But even then I’m thinking.

While you’re in this trance-like state, advertisers can implant things straight into your unconscious mind. Most adverts are designed to make a brand feel cool, or friendly, or helpful. Advertisers rarely sell things based on hard facts: they go for subjective feelings. This particular cleaning product loves your kids and wants them to be healthy. This particular food is traditional (even though it’s sold online and is made in a factory). This university is better because it’s established and full of “heritage” (or is it stuffy and old-fashioned, while the glorified polytechnic will give you more practical skills?).

The other thing with TV is that it gives the impression that you’re doing something (being the hero, winning the race, being a business success … whatever) when really you’re just watching other people doing that — or pretending to do that! No matter how much 24 I watch, I will never be Jack Bauer. No matter how much Secret Millionaire I watch, I am not helping disadvantaged people with my millions!

Simply switching off the TV forces you to find other things to do, think new things, meet new people. It’s painful at first. You have to face up to the fact that you don’t know what to do with free time! But it gets easier as time goes on. And you get better the more you do it.

If you want a better job, don’t spend your evenings in front of the tube. Read blogs like Escape From Cubicle Nation and Ittybiz and Entrepeneurs-Journey.com. If you want to improve your relationships, go out more! Learn the art of small talk that leads to great conversations. It feels awkward at first, but it gets better. If you want to learn how to cook, buy Delia Smith’s book — don’t just watch her on TV!

If you can’t rid yourself of TV altogether (and who does?), just set a goal that you’ll spend an hour or two doing something creative before you veg out. And TV isn’t completely wrong. When I can’t sleep, watching TV is great for closing down the insomnia circus* that seems to visit my head from time to time.

Free your mind. Switch off the TV!

* Damn, I was funny back then! When did I get all serious on this blog!?

There’s a saying, “Work smarter, not harder”. It means that with a little thought, you can make a process more efficient and reduce the amount of hard work you have to do. I totally agree with this statement, it makes perfect sense and I love making things more efficient.

The trouble is it only works so far: there will always be hard work to do.

One of my dreams is to be wealthy. This is a dream which has arisen from my reading various blogs and books about business and wealth. I would call this a “secondary” dream. It comes from a love of companies like Google, who put their users first, and Fog Creek Software, who really do care about their customers and employees. I read Seth Godin‘s blog about marketing, and Joel Spolsky‘s blog about running a [very] successful software company, and I love their approach. And it happens to be profitable, too. It’s the genius, the cleverness, the ethics that inspire me to become wealthy. It’s the route to wealth that interests me, not the wealth itself.

There is a temptation to think that their wisdom and genius will waft from the screens and into my life, kind of by osmosis. And in a way it will. Seth’s thinking has, in a small way, become a part of my thinking. Joel’s ethics have become my ethics too. But reading will only ever produce things “in theory”. It’s only when you get moving that dreams start to become reality. That’s the difference between success and mediocrity: successful people did something about it. The big wide world of practicality is so much more concrete than the infinite, though unreal, world of imagination.

I’m naturally biased towards the theoretical. I daydream. I did well academically. I love reading. I love thinking. These things are great, I think they’re very important, but I heard someone say that A grade students end up working for C grade students, and it made me realise that where the “real world” is concerned, theoretical knowledge is inferior to practical knowledge. That’s humbling for intellectual people.

I still think there’s an important place for the theoretical. There is incredible beauty in the workings of, say, the cell, or animal behaviour, or the life cycle of a slime mould (seriously, look it up, it’s astounding). It’s just that when it comes to business, that kind of approach holds too tightly to ideas. Business thinking is broad, simple and quick, whereas intellectual thinking is deep and slow.

So to take it back to my original point, there’s only so much that “work smarter” can do. You can only optimise to certain degree. The person who spends their whole time thinking about it will always lose out to the person who spends their whole time doing something about it. Action beats inaction.