on entrepreneurship
Jan 30, 2011 Affiliate Marketing, Business & Marketing, Help Yourself, Lookatme, I'm Web 2.0!, personal
My mother-in-law sent me a quote today that happens to be from one of my all-time favorite transcendental authors. It was entirely appropriate timing too, as I just started my latest venture Murphy Group Media. I have to say, I couldn’t agree more!
… if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. ~Henry David Thoreau
Thanks Mom!
Tags: business, entrepreneurship, henry david thoreau, startup
Today, I write.
Oct 9, 2010 Help Yourself, Lookatme, I'm Web 2.0!, personal
It has been a long while since I had any desire to blog. It’s almost disheartening to login to my WordPress admin area and see all the outdated plugins, all the spam comments sitting in queue, and the notifications that my core is out of date. It’s overwhelming. But I’m blogging anyway.
You see, you may or may not have known this, but I’m out of a job.
I won’t go into detail, but it was time to for me and my former employer to part ways. While I enjoyed the company of peers, it was very difficult for me to stay fully engaged in work that I wasn’t originally hired to do.
What now?
I have many opportunities for full-time positions and people inquiring about consulting and contract gigs. I’ve started creating my own company that I can umbrella all my projects and gigs under. But there’s just SO MUCH to do.
So, today I write.
One thing that is a definite constant in the industry I chose is the continual need for new content. That means either new graphics, video, audio, or written words. Since my drawing and design skills are akin to that of my 3rd grade son, and I lack the proper tools for a/v editing, I’m choosing to write.
And what a choice! All of my sites have been on hiatus, more or less, for the past 3 years. It’s a mess. Like I mentioned earlier, plugins are out of date, code is broken, DOMAINS ARE DEAD, etc. Add all that to the three years of evolving the industry has done with integrations of FB, Twitter, Google, and OpenID to all and every property on the web, and, well… I’m a little behind the eight ball.
So I choose the constant. I write.
Regardless of how many details are on my to-do list, I could spend weeks on them before I even put a single word on the web. My sites will look pretty, but they won’t have evolved much and they’ll still be getting the same few non-human visitors that they get anyway.
A few minutes, a few words, and I too can produce something new. Now carry this action to all of my sites and my garden begins to grow again. After the content, I can focus on tidying up one of the sites. Tomorrow, I write again, and then I focus on bringing a different site back to life. Then I do it the third day, the fourth, the fifth, and so on.
Soon, it will be 2005 again and I’ll have a wide network of sites and content in my toolbelt once again. Or so I hope.
But this time, it will be different. This time, it’s not a hobby. This time…it’s my job!
You Too Can Be Bipolar!
May 22, 2009 Help Yourself
Friday Night just turned to Saturday morning (I’m being deceitful because I sit on the East Coast while my website is comfortably hosted on the West. Some things I just didn’t have the heart to transition).
I’m sitting on my sofa. Laptop on my lap. After a days of extreme highs and lows, thinking about how I perceive the world, and how much the world has shaped me.
The highs I experienced today were manic. No caffeine rush, no sugar, and I don’t take prescriptions. These highs were natural, but there were no triggers that I recall to create them.
That’s when my wife said: “I wonder if you’re bipolar?”
Wait, what?
Never in my life has this been a question. I’ve never been hyper or suffered attention deficit issues. I have had boughts of situational depression, and know a good funk or two, but internally I never perceived myself as being anything short of mentally strong.
So I immediately dismissed my wifes suggestive reasoning. But, my subconsious never let go of her words.
“Bipolar?”
“HA! No way! Never! That’s genetic, not conditional.”
“Are you sure?”
“Hmm… now that I think about it….”
Now before you or I get ahead of myself and the rest of this post, I’m not about to go off and self diagnose any possible ailment based on a single observation. I have plenty of reasonable doubt that I would not meet the criterion for a diagnosis. Or even come close. But I will entertain the thought of a deep and thorough internal self evaluation. It’s great therapy to give yourself a reality check every once in a while.
Here’s where it gets interesting. I’ve been married to a bi-polar sufferer for 8 years now. The observations made of how she handles, diffuses, and manages anxieties and stresses have been spectacular. The highs and states of elation were also spectacular. It’s the violent swings in the middle that can be horrifying. This medical condition is very real regardless what recent controversies may suggest.
Somehow I ended up in marketing. But if dollars wouldn’t have influenced me, I would have easily ended up in the fields of sociology or anthropology. I’m fascinated by human interaction, cultural influence, religion impact, and the conditioning that occurs with individuals. I strongly believe that each persons unique identity isn’t really his/her identity and it really isn’t all that unique. It’s the result of the culmination of thousands upon thousands of influences being applied to that person over time. I think being in marketing isn’t too far of a stretch in a sense, as it’s all about finding wasy to influence certain demographics to take a certain action (buy something, consume something, interact with something). Most people herd in the same direction, you just need to find their triggers.
It is with this same fundamental core that I strongly believe that environment can create certain emotional imbalances and possible dysfunctions as well.
It is with this core that I feel that even though I’m a mentally stable, logic processing, emotionally level individual, that I can still be capable of firing internal and external indicators that I may be bipolar. I’m not, but after living with a diagnosed bipolar and intimately observing behavior during manic episodes for 24, 48, sometimes 72 hours at a time, that I’m not at all surprised that I too can mimic some of these behaviors. Unintentionally. Subconsciously.
Today, my logic and processing were all still on cue. But my behavior and my energy were visibly manic to an outside observer. Internally, in addition being elated, even my heart rate was up. I was truly on cloud 9! And this is the only possibility I can have for describing it (unless I have a tumor. That’s always what happens on House at least).
I was suffering shadow syndrome symptoms. Fascinating!
Tags: bipolar, shadow syndrome