Georges Simenon was one of the most prolific novelists of the twentieth century, publishing 425 books in his career, including more than 200 works of pulp fiction under 16 different pseudonyms, as well as 220 novels in his own name and three volumes of autobiography. Remarkably, he didn’t write every day.
The Belgian-French novelist worked in intense bursts of literary activity, each lasting two or three weeks, separated by weeks or months of no writing at all. Even during his productive weeks, Simenon didn’t write for very long each day. His typical schedule was to wake at 6:00 A.M., procure coffee, and write from 6:30 to 9:30. Then he would go for a long walk, eat lunch at 12:30, and take a one-hour nap. In the afternoon he spent time with his children and took another walk before dinner, television, and bed at 10:00 P.M. Simenon liked to portray himself as a methodical writing machine—he could compose up to eighty typed pages in a session, making virtually no revisions after the fact—but he did have his share of superstitious behaviors. No one ever saw him working; the “Do Not Disturb” sign he hung on his door was to be taken seriously. He insisted on wearing the same clothes throughout the composition of each novel. He kept tranquilizers in his shirt pocket, in case he needed to ease the anxiety that beset him at the beginning of each new book. And he weighed himself before and after every book, estimating that each one cost him nearly a liter and a half of sweat. Simenon’s astonishing literary productivity was matched, or even surpassed, in one other area of his daily life—his sexual appetite. “Most people work every day and enjoy sex periodically,” Patrick Marnham notes in his biography of the writer. “Simenon had sex every day and every few months indulged in a frenzied orgy of work.” When living in Paris, Simenon frequently slept with four different women in the same day. He estimated that he bedded ten thousand women in his life. (His second wife disagreed, putting the total closer to twelve hundred.) He explained his sexual hunger as the result of “extreme curiosity” about the opposite sex: “Women have always been exceptional people for me whom I have vainly tried to understand. It has been a lifelong, ceaseless quest. And how could I have created dozens, perhaps hundreds, of female characters in my novels if I had not experienced those adventures which lasted for two hours or ten minutes?” Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey What kills the creative force is not age or a lack of talent, but our own spirit, our own attitude5/24/2013
Some people maintain their childlike spirit and spontaneity, but their creative energy is dissipated in a thousand directions, and they never have the patience and discipline to endure an extended apprenticeship. Others have the discipline to accumulate vast amounts of knowledge and become experts in their field, but they have no flexibility of spirit, so their ideas never stray beyond the conventional and they never become truly creative.
Masters manage to blend the two—discipline and a childlike spirit—together into what we shall call the Dimensional Mind. Such mind is not constricted by limited experience or habits. It can branch out into all directions and make deep contact with reality. It can explore more dimensions of the world. The Conventional Mind is passive—it consumes information and regurgitates it in familiar forms. The Dimensional Mind is active, transforming everything it digests into something new and original, creating instead of consuming, We all possess an inborn creative force that wants to become active. This is the gift of our Original Mind, which reveals such potential. The human mind is naturally creative, constantly looking to make associations and connections between things and ideas. It wants to explore, to discover new aspects of the world, and to invent. To express this creative force is our greatest desire, and the stifling of it the source of our misery. What kills the creative force is not age or a lack of talent, but our own spirit, our own attitude. We become too comfortable with the knowledge we have gained in our apprenticeships. We grow afraid of entertaining new ideas and the effort that this requires. To think more flexibly entails a risk—we could fail and be ridiculed. We prefer to live with familiar ideas and habits of thinking, but we pay a steep price for this: our minds go dead from the lack of challenge and novelty; we reach a limit in our field and lose control over our fate because we become replaceable. The Dimensional Mind has two essential requirements: one, a high level of knowledge about a field or subject; and two, the openness and flexibility to use this knowledge in new and original ways. To awaken the Dimensional Mind and move through the creative process requires three essential steps: first, choosing the proper Creative Task, the kind of activity that will maximize our skills and knowledge; second, loosening and opening up the mind through certain Creative Strategies; and third, creating the optimal mental conditions for a Breakthrough or Insight. Finally, throughout the process we must also be aware of the Emotional Pitfalls—complacency, boredom, grandiosity, and the like—that continually threaten to derail or block our progress. You must engrave deeply in your mind and never forget: that your emotional commitment to what you are doing will be translated directly into your work. If you go at your work with half a heart, it will show in the lackluster results and in the laggard way in which you reach the end. If you are doing something primarily for money and without a real emotional commitment, it will translate into something that lacks a soul and that has no connection to you. You may not see this, but you can be sure that the public will feel it and that they will receive your work in the same lackluster spirit it was created in. If you are excited and obsessive in the hunt, it will show in the details. If your work comes from a place deep within, its authenticity will be communicated. This applies equally to science and business as to the arts. Mastery by Robert Greene Forget about blending in.
When you run a blog, you want to stand out from the crowd. To become one-of-a-kind as opposed to one-of-many, get comfortable with taking a stand and having people line up on either side of you. Dr. Theodor Seuss Geisel (a.k.a. Dr. Seuss) said it best: “Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” Once your blog is operational, meaningful content has been added, and you’ve begun cultivating traffic, Pat (Flynn) offers three powerful rules for creating momentum and generating income: find partners, sell products and/or services, and spread your wings. One of the most effective strategies for building major traffic is to contact top bloggers in your niche. First, tell them you’re an up-and-coming blogger who respects their work and enjoys their content. Then, add you’re writing an article and would love to get quotes from industry experts like them. The vast majority will take time out of their schedule to answer your questions. Once the article is published, send each contributor a follow-up thank you note with a link to the article. Most will post the link on their site and/or offer a link to your homepage, thereby introducing their audience to your work. This provides you with free exposure and credibility as these top bloggers are effectively endorsing your content. Few things establish brand recognition faster than endorsements from renowned peers. With significant effort and patience it is certainly possible that your blog may become so popular that other bloggers will get in touch to obtain quotes from you. Offer Products And Services For Sale To profit from your blog traffic, you can create products and/or services that best serve your tribe. Examples of content-based products include books, interviews (in video, audio, and/or transcript form), white papers, and research studies. Alternatively, you can become an affiliate by offering products and services created by others for sale and receive a percentage of each transaction. A growing trend is to create a membership program. Some memberships require a one-time fee and provide access for life. Others, known as continuity programs, provide ongoing content and require subscribers to pay a monthly, quarterly, or annual fee. The membership model works great for certain industries—e.g., finance, in which many customers will gladly pay for ongoing news and analysis. One of the great things about a blog is its flexibility. For example, it’s simple to update text and photos so information remains current without the need for relying on an expensive programmer to update the site. It’s also easy to modify on the fly to adapt to the changing needs of your audience. You can even run A/B Split tests, in which you post two versions of the blog to determine which strategies are most effective for achieving higher conversion rates. Remember, online, no one builds monuments. Be willing to periodically play around with layout, content, and structure in order to keep attracting the largest number of potential customers for your message. You should also consider including advertising to generate additional passive income and/or to capture your audience’s contact information. Options include: • Google AdSense (and other ad networks) • Banner ads • Ads for training or certification programs related to your field • Paid guest posts • Ads for teleseminars and webinars that compliment your offerings • Advertorials which feature beneficial products and services • Ads for personal and group coaching • Ads for on-and off-site consulting • Ads for newsletters (often free in exchange for a visitor’s contact information) Internet Prophets: The World's Leading Experts Reveal How to Profit Onlinee by Steve Olsher It was a brilliant strategy.
Instead of learning how to survive in just one or two ecological niches, we took on the entire globe. Those unable to rapidly solve new problems or learn from mistakes didn’t survive long enough to pass on their genes. The net effect of this evolution was that we didn’t become stronger; we became smarter. We learned to grow our fangs not in the mouth but in the head. This turned out to be a pretty savvy strategy. We went on to conquer the small rift valleys in Eastern Africa. Then we took over the world. Variability Selection Theory predicts some fairly simple things about human learning. It predicts there will be interactions between two powerful features of the brain: a database in which to store a fund of knowledge, and the ability to improvise off of that database. One allows us to know when we’ve made mistakes. The other allows us to learn from them. Both give us the ability to add new information under rapidly changing conditions. Both may be relevant to the way we design classrooms and cubicles. Any learning environment that deals with only the database instincts or only the improvisatory instincts ignores one half of our ability. It is doomed to fail. It makes me think of jazz guitarists: They’re not going to make it if they know a lot about music theory but don’t know how to jam in a live concert. Some schools and workplaces emphasize a stable, rote-learned database. They ignore the improvisatory instincts drilled into us for millions of years. Creativity suffers. Others emphasize creative usage of a database, without installing a fund of knowledge in the first place. They ignore our need to obtain a deep understanding of a subject, which includes memorizing and storing a richly structured database. You get people who are great improvisers but don’t have depth of knowledge. You may know someone like this where you work. They may look like jazz musicians and have the appearance of jamming, but in the end they know nothing. They’re playing intellectual air guitar. Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School by John Medina No matter how ugly or poorly designed a website is, if traffic exists, product will be sold.5/18/2013
There are many factors involved with creating a successful website. Most can be easily and quickly learned so long as one critical ingredient is present: traffic.
No matter how ugly or poorly designed a website is, if traffic exists, product will be sold. On the other hand, one might have the world’s best site with copy so compelling it could sell gym memberships to your bed-ridden grandparents, but without visitors, not a dime’s worth of product will sell. Today, link text and PageRank remain the two most important factors in achieving top rankings. Let’s cut through the clutter and examine why these two elements are so important. Relevancy And Link Text A page that’s highly relevant for a given search has three elements: • Search keywords that appear in the page title. • Content that’s pertinent to the query. • Inbound links pointing to the page. Internet Prophets: The World's Leading Experts Reveal How to Profit Online by Steve Olsher Many of the links pointing to a page will stem from other websites. However, links from a site’s own pages count as well. That’s in part why larger sites tend to do far better in search results than smaller sites. Some refer to the latter as “the Wikipedia effect.” Wikipedia is one of the most authoritative sites on the web because it has 1) an enormous number of pages, and 2) thousands of links from other sites. With this in mind, let’s examine one of the most powerful SEO “secrets.” Attaining the highest ranking shouldn’t be your primary goal. A top-ranked page that receives few clicks or fails to convert traffic into leads and sales is a site that requires major modification. Your first goal should be to create products and services that customers want to buy. Only after this core objective is accomplished should you focus on ranking high for the search terms relevant to your target market. Ranking that converts to leads or paying customers is the only sustainable strategy. While there may be a select few who are indeed, looking for a Bikram yoga studio in Chicago, 99.999% are not. They could be searching for yoga apparel, yoga poses, a yoga studio in Tokyo, or one of millions of other possibilities and simply need to be more specific with their query. As a result, your page will receive minimal traffic regardless of its prominent position. Now suppose you narrowed your focus and searched for the term “Bikram Yoga in Chicago.” This returns around one million pages, of which 105f.com is number one. While the odds have dramatically shifted in your favor for achieving page one status (one million pages versus 400 million), major competition for traffic remains, as does the possibility that a great deal of those entering the query may still be seeking something other than what you offer. So, what to do? Identify what makes your business unique. Looking closer at your studio, you recognize that you offer classes for beginners, classes for advanced practitioners, daytime classes for moms and tots, senior classes, and a kids-only class on Saturday. Related search queries for these might include: • Bikram yoga classes for beginners in Chicago • Advanced Bikram yoga training in Chicago • Daytime Bikram yoga classes for moms and tots in Chicago • Senior citizen Bikram yoga classes in Chicago • Saturday kids only Bikram yoga classes in Chicago Internet Prophets: The World's Leading Experts Reveal How to Profit Online by Steve Olsher Creating content requires time, of course, but nothing achieves higher rankings faster. There’s a direct correlation between the number of pages your site has and the amount of traffic it receives. Driving traffic through SEO requires you to be in the publishing business. While this may not be what you had in mind when you opened shop, there’s no way around it. Every time you publish a new webpage, you increase your site’s authority and the chances of a web user finding your business. And if your content is engaging, that visitor may become a long-term paying customer. You now possess the modern-day recipe for search: • Target search queries directly relating to your specific business. • Create pages that provide detailed answers to popular queries. • Include the search query for which you’d like to rank high in every page’s title. • Create attractive, engaging pages with pertinent content. • Use links between pages to help visitors find what they need. • Create link text that includes targeted keywords and phrases. • More webpages on your site will result in greater authority. • Secure inbound links from related sites to increase authority. • Cultivating traffic is mandatory for online success—SEO-generated traffic is ideal. • Well designed SEO strategies lead to higher rankings. • Good page titles, accurate link text, and establishing PageRank are key factors for achieving top ranking. • Search is a “conversation.” Therefore, think about your prospect’s queries and create pages that answer their questions. • Short-tail queries may have a higher volume, however, they convert poorly and require high authority to attain prominent ranking. • Long-tail queries are significantly more targeted, easier to rank well for, generate less traffic, but convert exceptionally well. Internet Prophets: The World's Leading Experts Reveal How to Profit Online by Steve Olsher When reviewing a new business opportunity, there are six crucial questions. These apply to any industry and almost any type of business.
• Is the market large enough? Is there money in it, are there competitors making money, can you? • Is there an existing customer base? If people are buying, then you know it can be sold, creating a new market means you have to teach the customer why to buy from you. You want a market that knows what you are selling and knows they need it.. • Is there an opportunity to dominate the market? What is your unique advantage or selling proposition? Is there something you have that gives you an edge over your competitors? • Can existing technology be used to rapidly grow the business? Taking new technology into a an old market can give an advantage, and can you business scale? • Can the company be profitable and will investors participate? Can you make money at this, how? • Is there a meaningful exit opportunity? You will want to set up be able to sell your business one day; either to exit and move on, retire, or just doing that so your business systems are stable. Internet Prophets: The World's Leading Experts Reveal How to Profit Online by Steve Olsher Franz Schubert (1797–1828)
According to a childhood friend, Schubert “used to sit down at his writing desk every morning at 6 o’clock and compose straight through until 1 o’clock in the afternoon. Meanwhile many a pipe was smoked.” The Austrian composer’s afternoons were less rigorous; his friend noted, “Schubert never composed in the afternoon; after the midday meal he went to a coffee-house, drank a small portion of black coffee, smoked for an hour or two and read the newspapers at the same time.” On summer afternoons, he often went for long walks in the countryside surrounding Vienna, then enjoyed a glass of beer or wine with friends. He avoided giving piano lessons, even though he always needed the money and frequently had to rely on friends for financial support. As one member of his circle remembered, “Schubert was extraordinarily fertile and industrious in composing. For everything else that goes by the name of work he had no use.” Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey If a competitor can outexecute a startup once the idea is known, the startup is doomed anyway.
The reason to build a new team to pursue an idea is that you believe you can accelerate through the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop faster than anyone else can. If that’s true, it makes no difference what the competition knows. If it’s not true, a startup has much bigger problems, and secrecy won’t fix them. Sooner or later, a successful startup will face competition from fast followers. A head start is rarely large enough to matter, and time spent in stealth mode—away from customers—is unlikely to provide a head start. The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else. The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries Modern production processes rely on high quality as a way to boost efficiency. They operate using W. Edwards Deming’s famous dictum that the customer is the most important part of the production process. This means that we must focus our energies exclusively on producing outcomes that the customer perceives as valuable.
Allowing sloppy work into our process inevitably leads to excessive variation. Variation in process yields products of varying quality in the eyes of the customer that at best require rework and at worst lead to a lost customer. Most modern business and engineering philosophies focus on producing high-quality experiences for customers as a primary principle; it is the foundation of Six Sigma, lean manufacturing, design thinking, extreme programming, and the software craftsmanship movement. Thus, for startups, I believe in the following quality principle: If we do not know who the customer is, we do not know what quality is. The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries In the course of your life you will be continually encountering fools. There are simply too many to avoid. We can classify people as fools by the following rubric: when it comes to practical life, what should matter is getting long-term results, and getting the work done in as efficient and creative a manner as possible. That should be the supreme value that guides people’s actions. But fools carry with them a different scale of values. They place more importance on short-term matters—grabbing immediate money, getting attention from the public or media, and looking good. They are ruled by their ego and insecurities. They tend to enjoy drama and political intrigue for their own sake. When they criticize, they always emphasize matters that are irrelevant to the overall picture or argument. They are more interested in their career and position than in the truth. You can distinguish them by how little they get done, or by how hard they make it for others to get results. They lack a certain common sense, getting worked up about things that are not really important while ignoring problems that will spell doom in the long term.
The natural tendency with fools is to lower yourself to their level. They annoy you, get under your skin, and draw you into a battle. In the process, you feel petty and confused. You lose a sense of what is really important. You can’t win an argument or get them to see your side or change their behavior, because rationality and results don’t matter to them. You simply waste valuable time and emotional energy. In dealing with fools you must adopt the following philosophy: they are simply a part of life, like rocks or furniture. All of us have foolish sides, moments in which we lose our heads and think more of our ego or short-term goals. It is human nature. Seeing this foolishness within you, you can then accept it in others. This will allow you to smile at their antics, to tolerate their presence as you would a silly child, and to avoid the madness of trying to change them. It is all part of the human comedy, and it is nothing to get upset about or lose sleep over. If, like Graham, you simply do not have the patience that is required for managing and mastering the more subtle and manipulative sides of human nature, then your best answer is to keep yourself away from those situations as best as possible. This will rule out working in groups larger than a handful of people—above a certain number, political considerations inevitably rise to the surface. This means working for yourself or on very small startups. Even still, it is generally wise to try to gain the rudiments of social intelligence—to be able to read and recognize the sharks, and to charm and disarm difficult people. The reason is that no matter how hard you might try to avoid situations that call for such knowledge, the world is one large teeming court of intrigue, and it will inevitably pull you in. Your conscious attempt to opt out of the system will retard your apprenticeship in social intelligence and can make you vulnerable to the worst forms of naïveté, with all of the disasters that are likely to ensue. Mastery by Robert Greene |
Click to set custom HTML
Categories
All
Disclosure of Material Connection:
Some of the links in the post above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” |