I recently had an epiphany: the busier I am, the happier I am.
That’s not just because more work = more profit. It’s because I’m slowly understanding an element of my own personality that I’ve never taken seriously.
I’m a lazy workaholic.
What I mean by that is:
- I multitask.
- I procrastinate.
- I love collaboration.
- I enjoy being involved in numerous projects.
- I respond best to a variety of ever-changing stimuli.
- I work best under pressure.
In other words, the more I’m doing — and the more different things I’m doing — the happier I am because I feel more active, engaged and fulfilled. (I’m just habitually unable to get ahead of schedule. Must have something to do with my undying love of naps…)
This is partly because I hold myself to a high standard. I have great expectations for my own success, and I know I’m capable of accomplishing much more than I usually do. When I don’t, I often feel like I’m wasting my own time and potential, and that causes me to re-evaluate, refocus and redefine what I’m really passionate about.
Granted, your work style may differ completely from mine. You may be happiest when you only have one task to focus on — or even none. But if you occasionally feel like you could (or should) be doing more, here are 3 ways I’ve found to keep myself more engaged, energized and focused on the sum total of my own life.
1. Go Out of Your Way to Meet Interesting People.
In high school and college, everybody is interesting because everybody is new. You’re still figuring out the “types” of people there are in the world, and because so many of your experiences are shared in groups (classmates, roommates, coworkers, family), the collective memories of your actions resonate big and loud in your subconscious.
And then you graduate, and you get a real job, and finding new stimuli becomes a chore.
These days, I freelance, which means I could go an entire week without interfacing with anyone other than my girlfriend and my dog. Sure, there’s email, phone calls and Twitter. But as someone who thrives in a group dynamic, I can’t feel entirely fulfilled when the only incoming stimuli I’m reacting to are pixels.
The fewer people I interact with on a daily basis, the more static and placid my own ideas become. The fewer opportunities I have to learn, or be surprised, or challenged, or grow.
Find people who excite you. Find people who motivate you. Hell, find people who infuriate you. Tackle them. Stick to them. Pick their brains. Argue with them. Find a common ground, or find that you have no common ground at all.
Try to understand each other. Work together, or compete. At the very least, drill deeply enough into who they are that you learn something about yourself in the process. If you don’t seek out reasons to perpetually redefine yourself, you start to forget who you are.
2. Make It a Goal to Experience Something New on a Daily Basis.
When we first adopted our dog, Rufus, I told Ann that I wanted to make sure he got to experience something new every day. It could be a new kind of food, or a new toy, or a new route to walk or a new person to meet. To me (and clearly as a projection of me), I felt like allowing Rufus to fall into a stale routine would rob him of the opportunity to experience as much life as possible, and that would make us pretty lousy dog parents (in my mind, anyway).
In the beginning, this was easy because everything was new to Rufus. After two years, it’s a little harder to go out of his (and my) comfort zone, and not every day is as trailblazing as I’d like it to be. But when I feel like I’m too tired or distracted to walk or play with Rufus, sometimes I remember my original goal and I think, “I have to have five minutes to show Rufus something new.”
And if I can make that kind of time for my dog, I can do the same for myself. Right?
3. Admit That Nothing Matters.
Last weekend, as I looked at my miles-long to-do list and tried to feel bad for being behind schedule, I realized something just as powerful as my passion for staying busy:
Ultimately, I really don’t care.
Things will get done, or they won’t. I’ll succeed, or I’ll fail. I’ll live a life, and eventually I’ll die, and whatever impact I’ve had or legacy I leave will be up to someone else to make sense of. I can’t control that, and trying to is an exercise in futility and a waste of energy that could be better spent exploring and enjoying my life.
So why feel guilty?
This line of thought might seem counter-productive to my stated goal of living a more active and engaged life. It may even seem nihilistic. But, on the contrary, I find that it helps me avoid wasting time and energy on feeling frustrated or guilty for not living up to arbitrary benchmarks and judgments of success, including my own.
Life is short. Or it’s long. Or, if you’re lucky, it’s just long enough.
It’s up to each of us to find our own rhythm. But I doubt I’ll find mine by running in place.
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Tags: bullshit, common sense, Freelance, honesty, inspiration, perception, personal, Sociology
I’m fond of finding ways to fund projects that don’t involve traditional investors or advertisers. One of those avenues is Kickstarter, a crowdfunding resource for creative endeavors. It lets a project’s audience become its investors.
So I thought I’d give it a try.
The Backstory
In 2003, I created Something to Be Desired, a web sitcom that ran until 2009 and earned a 2008 Yahoo! Video nomination for Best Web Series.
But then, in 2009, I moved to Baltimore, while the show’s cast stayed in Pittsburgh.
As the weeks turned into months, and STBD remained on indefinite hiatus, it became clear that we still hadn’t quite scratched our creative itch. But we also hadn’t figured out a way to streamline the show so it could be produced fast, easy and (ideally) from a distance.
Then we had an idea: why not just create a smaller, faster spin-off?
And so, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you… The Baristas.
The Project
Our goal is to raise $3000 by September 22.
If we do, we get that money to help fund the first stages of the project (equipment, wardrobe, food and drink for the cast and crew, etc.).
If we don’t raise the full $3000, we get none of it because Kickstarter uses an “all or nothing” approach. (However, we can raise more than $3000. There’s no limit once the minimum has been reached — as Tom Henderson’s wildly successful punk rock math project can attest.)
The Hook
Since Kickstarter is built around the idea of offering cool incentives to the people who back your project, we thought we’d give our backers the opportunity to help cast the show.
Anyone who pledges at least $25 to help The Baristas get started will receive (among other swag) a vote on the casting of a new role being created specifically for the series: a brand new barista, whose first day on the job will be the show’s first episode. And the more you pledge, the more votes you get.
Interested? Check out The Baristas on Kickstarter and see all the other incentives we’re offering to our backers — including t-shirts, DVDs, coffee mugs, and even the chance to have a character named after you.
And yes, once the project ends on September 22 (which is right after PodCamp Pittsburgh 5), expect an armchair analysis of my Kickstarter experience right here on this blog.
Hopefully it’ll include the phrase “completely exceeded my expectations”…
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Tags: audience, Business, kickstarter, networking, personal, Pittsburgh, pop culture, Social Media, Something to Be Desired, TheBaristas, video
Ego, Cynicism and Bad Reviews: What I Learned by Peeking at My Bounce Rates
Last week, I shared what I learned by blogging weekly instead of daily. Judging by the high volume of traffic, retweets and comments that post generated, people are very interested in what makes someone else’s blog tick.
One comment that caught my eye was from Virginia Nussey, who said:
When I tried to answer that question, I learned a few more things about my blog — and I noticed I have one post that’s become unusually sticky.
Even Small Numbers Tell a Story
Let’s examine the Top 10 phrases that drove traffic to me during my weekly blogging experiment:
Those terms would be:
What does these numbers tell me?
1. Obviously, not much of my traffic comes from searches.
That’s fine, because I don’t do much SEO, nor do I have a system in place (ads, ebooks, etc.) to profit off search-driven visits. Most of my traffic is driven by word of mouth, or by people specifically searching for me.
2. My blog bounces like a trampoline.
6 of those Top 10 traffic-driving phrases have a bounce rate higher than 60%, which means visitors aren’t interested in reading anything more from me than that particular result. (And, with 4 of those results higher than 90%, some people don’t even want to read that.)
Again, this makes sense. Because my blog isn’t specific to one topic, anyone who does stumble across it is unlikely to linger for long. Also, phrases like “talk less do more” and “how to be productive” indicate that people are searching for general lifehacking tips, not multiple posts from the same author.
But…
3. To know me is to love me (for at least 3 minutes).
Visitors driven by 6 of these Top 10 phrases spent more than 1 minute on the site.
Of those 6 returns, 3 of them (“justin kownacki”, “tolerating you” and “www.justinkownacki.com”) spent more than 3 minutes on the site, and had a bounce rate lower than 50%. This means that more than half of the people who came here looking specifically for me then took the time to poke around.
4. One post to stick above them all.
Last year, I blogged a negative review of Erik Qualman’s book Socialnomics. Since then, I’ve forgotten about it, but Google evidently has a longer memory than I do.
Three of my top 25 inbound phrases (“socialnomics ebook”, “socialnomics review” and “socialnomics ‘erik qualman’ free ebook”) involve Socialnomics. Oddly enough, people looking for “socialnomics ebook” bounced away after only 11 seconds, at a 96% rate.
But visitors from the other two phrases lingered — 6:45 (“socialnomics review”) and 7:59 (“socialnomics ‘erik qualman’ free ebook”). And while that’s only 39 total people, those are 39 people who apparently stayed long enough to read (or at least skim) the full review.
So reviewing a book on social media is one way to wrap Velcro around your blog’s long tail.
5. There are some seriously cynical searchers out there.
In addition to “tolerating you,” some of my other Top 25 search term results include:
You may not please everybody all the time, but you can always count on trolls for traffic.
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Tags: audience, blog, Blogging, books, chrisbrogan, comments, language, perception, personal, Social Media