Why I FAILED

Failure Isn’t Fun, But…

From BoingBoing, courtesy of Mark Frauenfelder:

J.K. Rowling’s terrific commencement address at Harvard is available as a video, MP3, or text.

The fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure….

I
think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven
years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An
exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a
lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain,
without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I
had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard,
I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to
stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was
a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press
has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea
how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end
of it was a hope rather than a reality. So why do I talk about the
benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of
the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything
other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing
the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything
else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one
arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest
fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had
a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea.
And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my
life. ,…Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained
by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I
could have learned no other way….Such knowledge is a true gift, for
all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any
qualification I ever earned….

Link(via CT2)

I Agree

I could do without the language, but I agree with this post about where Social Media is heading. It’ll be cool when it’s a reality.

Work Is Right In Front of You

Acquiring new customers/clients is costly in both time and money. It is less expensive and more beneficial to keep your current clients happy and Yuwanda Black has written a post describing how.

In “How to Get More Work from Existing Clients” at Freelance Switch, she describes a step-by-step way to ensure you know your client’s needs, understand how you can help and get them to hire you for more of their work. And as she says, “this is an often overlooked marketing method and missing it is like throwing money out the window.”

One of the biggest mistakes I made in my music career was missing this point. I, like most musicians, believed that if I had gotten one call, I would certainly get another. Wrong. There are two flaws with this thinking and Yuwanda addresses them both - and more.

First, you have to stay in touch with your clients. While it’s true that YOU are the center of your life and therefore on your mind all the time, this is not true of them. So, while you’re sitting home waiting by the phone, someone else is getting face time with your client.

Second, you may not have nailed the last thing you were asked to do. How would you know? Have you asked? If they did and they said yes, is that good enough? What might you have done even better, or beyond the original scope?

Yuwanda’s plan starts by arranging for a 10-minute consultation to find out exactly these things. This planned meeting, for which you will be prepared (after all, this is your LIVELIHOOD), allows you to stay on their mind, learn how you did and learn about upcoming opportunities all at once. It also makes you stand out from all the rest.

Oh, and don’t neglect step 3: asking for the work.

My thanks to Lifehacker for the link, read the whole post here.

Stop And Think

The Twitpitch

If You Don’t Take a Risk….

The Self-Defense of GROWING

PersistenceUnlimited brings us a great post on the benefits of educating yourself. I firmly believe that stagnation is the main reason for the rampant boredom I see in most people. And as Brad says: “If you find you are simply bored, education is the perfect remedy.”

He’s dead on, but the reason I’m highlighting this post is the fact that he frames the topic by giving three reasons to educate yourself in defense of your marriage. Uh, YES!!!

My wife and I nearly separated and divorced several years ago and a lot of people thought we should have. But we fought through it be educating ourselves about relationships, personalities, people skills and positive thinking. The result, we learned about each other and fell in love all over again.

Nothing worth having comes without a fight. Whether it be your dreams of vocational success and personal satisfaction or maintaining and growing a lifelong relationship.

Fight for what - and who - you want.

It Takes a Woman

My wife and I watched a show last night with a story about forbidden love within Muslim families. I’ll post more thoughts soon, but something from the coverage came together with yesterday’s post about Dr. Wafa Sultan in a powerful way. Namely, the importance of women.

At one point in the show, the journalist interviewed the Muslim brother of a 16 year old girl who had been raped. His attitude about killing her with four bullets to the head was that she was no different than a broken dish - no longer useful.

I don’t understand that thinking. Especially when I consider that their holy text begins with essentially the same five books as the Jewish and Christian holy texts. Within those books is the story of the creation of woman as a “ezer ke-negdo” or, life-giver. You know the story - God didn’t think it was good for man to be alone, so He created woman.

How do you read a story like that and then consider women to be property like dogs and livestock? And what happens when you do?
Well, you lose the benefit of their help. Instead of relying on the counsel of a helper, you rely on your own thinking.

Men and women are different (which I’m thrilled about, btw). One
fundamental difference is how we process things in our brains. Men’s brains are simple and women’s
brains are extensively integrated. When women experience the
world, they store more information about the events than men do -
especially emotions.

Which brings me to this quote from the article on Dr. Sultan:

“her life changed in 1979 when she was a medical student at
the University of Aleppo, in northern Syria. At that time, the radical
Muslim Brotherhood was using terrorism to try to undermine the
government of President Hafez al-Assad. Gunmen of the Muslim Brotherhood burst into a classroom at the university and killed her professor as she watched, she said.

“They
shot hundreds of bullets into him, shouting, ‘God is great!’ ” she
said. “At that point, I lost my trust in their god and began to
question all our teachings. It was the turning point of my life, and it
has led me to this present point. I had to leave. I had to look for
another god.”

Without the counsel of women, these men - and millions more - have an unemotional, simplistic view of the world. They have cursed the very thing that was designed to help them.

With tragic repercussions for us all.

The Best Advice They Ever Got

Full of good stuff.

The Battle Between Modernity and Barbarism

I’ve been debating whether to post about this for 20 minutes. I’ve finally said yes. Why? Because this does speak to my passion: seeing others succeed.

A Syrian-American psychiatrist, Dr. Wafa Sultan, has ignited the world with her thoughts about her former religion of Islam:

“The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of
religions or a clash of civilizations,” Dr. Sultan said. “It is a clash
between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a
mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that
belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and
backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between
barbarity and rationality.”

Read the article.
See the video.

Then, live your life like it matters. Because it does.