Glen Allsopp has released his Blogging Blueprint, a 69 page ebook about how to build a successful blog. It’s free, with no email address required.

If you read at least a handful of personal development blogs then you’ve probably heard of Glen. He quickly took his blog PluginID to over 3,000 subscribers, and he seems to comment and guest post on just about every personal development site. He wrote this ebook to answer all the questions people were asking him about how they can grow a successful blog of their own.

If you’re relatively new to blogging, you’ll probably be most interested in “Part Two: Your Story.” This is where he gives you all the nuts and bolts, from choosing a niche to setting up WordPress to SEO to spreading your brand. This part is probably the most useful for most people, because it’s stuff you can take action on immediately.

But because I’ve been blogging for a while, I was more interested in Glen’s personal story and insights. You’ll find them in “Part One: My Story” and “Part Three: My Secrets.” You’ll read about things such as how he made over $20,000 in 4 months from one blog, why he quit college and how it paid off, and how blogging enabled him to land his dream job.

If you happen to be drinking hot coffee, you’ll want to set that down before reading the footnote on page 14. He talks about a huge mistake he made, which thankfully he was able to correct, but it still makes me want to scream “No!” to his past self. But hey, that kind of stuff is what makes his Blogging Blueprint interesting.

Paul Atreides knew words could kill, and harnessed their power to save the planet Dune. But some people aren’t so noble.

In Dune, the 1984 movie adaptation of the classic sci-fi book, Paul Atreides knows the power that words have. In the movie (but not the book), his people use devices called Weirding Modules to literally turn words into weapons.

By speaking certain words into the device, people can generate a devastating sonic blast. Most words are innocuous. Maybe they just don’t carry enough emotional intensity. Actually, very few words are known to trigger the device, but they discover others when training the Fremen people to use it.

One soldier makes the innocent mistake of calling Paul by his self-chosen Fremen name, Muad’Dib, while holding a Weirding Module. Paul is as surprised as anyone else when his own name triggers the device, collapsing part of the ceiling. “My name,” Paul thinks to himself, “is a killing word.”

Can words have the same kind of power in reality? After all, we’re told that “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” But can’t words do a little more than sticks and stones?

The harmful effect of words might start off small. Someone is told that they’re stupid, or ugly, or they can’t do anything right, and maybe it doesn’t seem like a big deal. But when they hear it enough, they start to believe it.

And when people believe that something is wrong with them, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If they’re having a bad day and something goes wrong, they think it’s because there’s some truth in what the other person said. They think they deserve it, so they feel worse about themselves. And they pass this feeling on to other people.

It’s not even necessarily the words themselves that do the damage, so much as the way they’re said. When someone takes a word with no inherent negative connotations (such as the name of a religious or ethnic group) and uses it in a negative way, people hear the hate.

Other words are specifically meant to do harm. Several groups, including the Special Olympics, have started campaigns to ban the R-word, as it’s now being called.

Can words kill? Absolutely. 11 year old Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover hanged himself after classmates repeatedly called him “gay” in a derogatory way. It’s unclear whether he actually was gay, or whether he was even old enough to know.

13 year old Megan Meier hanged herself after several people created a fake MySpace account, pretending to be a 16 year-old boy who told Megan “The world would be a better place without you.”

In middle school and high school, Seung-Hui Cho was teased for his social anxiety and speaking disorder. People told him to “Go back to China” (he was Korean). As one classmate said, “There were just some people who were really cruel to him, and they would push him down and laugh at him. He didn’t speak English really well, and they would really make fun of him.” Cho went on to kill 32 people plus himself in the Virginia Tech massacre.

Words have more power than you think. Is it really so hard to use them to help rather than harm? For some ideas, watch this:

In Stephen King’s Kindle-only novella UR, a college English teacher buys an Amazon Kindle in order to spite his ex-girlfriend by appearing tech-savvy. Horror ensues.

Yeah, I know, you probably don’t have a Kindle. But this isn’t about that book. This is about ditching technology as we age. They say that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Maybe you can, but often the dog doesn’t want to learn them.

A few years ago I took an online test that tells you what generation you belong to. (Here’s one generation test, though not the same one.)

The one I took had me right at the border of Gen X and Gen Y. It all came down to whether I had a Facebook account or not. I didn’t, so I was classified as Gen X. Now I have one, but I don’t use it. Does that make me Gen Y?

It’s not that I can’t use Facebook, I just don’t want to. I say it’s because it’s a waste of time, but does that make me the same as the people who won’t learn how to use email?

Why do we stop trying new things as we get older?

Is it because we have less time to play around?
Is it because we lose our energy and curiosity with age?
Is it because we’ve had enough time to settle into our patterns?
Is it because we think we’ve done enough by then?

Is this a problem?

Think it’s practically impossible to make money blogging? The statistics would support that premise.

But Ali Hale, freelance blogger extraordinaire, pays her rent and all her bills from blogging. Not by posting on her own blog, but by writing paid posts for other people. And she’s put together a Staff Blogging Course to teach you how to go from zero paid blogging experience to having a nice side income or even a career in blogging.

It’s much easier to make money from someone else’s blog than from your own blog. With your own blog, you need to spend lots and lots of time building up an audience before you can hope for an income. But when you’re a staff blogger, you’re working for blogs that already have an audience, and just need a steady stream of posts to keep their readers coming back. You write quality posts for them, and you get paid.

I know Ali from several different blogs including Pick the Brain, where we both work as staff bloggers. So when I heard that she was coming out with this course, I knew she was well qualified to do it. But it turns out she’s doing even better with her staff blogging than I thought. She’s not making a ton of money in an absolute sense, but she pays all her bills by working just 6-7 hours a week!

Her Staff Blogging Course covers everything you need to get started in your staff blogging career and keep going strong when most people would fizzle out. With detailed information on topics such as finding jobs, keeping records and receiving payments, writing and formatting posts, and staying inspired and motivated, this is an indispensable resource for aspiring freelance bloggers.

Ali includes a variety of tips from other staff bloggers, including four from me. Since I made a small contribution to the finished product, I thought I’d ask Ali if she’d offer a discount to my intelligent and good looking readers. Use the discount code HNreader for $5 off the already cheap price. Any questions? I’m sure Ali will be happy to answer them in the comments.

Someone gave me a bottle of this Japanese soft drink called Ramune. I didn’t know what it tasted like, and looking at the bottle didn’t offer any clues. It had pictures of a pig, a pumpkin, a watermelon, a fan, a flower, a life preserver, and a UFO.

But the weirdest part didn’t come until I tried to open it. I tore off the wrap around the top, removed this green plastic piece, and tried twisting the top. But it just wasn’t twisting off.

I read the label to see if it said anything about opening it, and it did:

WARNING

• DO NOT SWALLOW THE PLUNGER. Throw it away immediately after opening.
• Adults should open the bottle for small children and supervise drinking.
• Do not try to remove the marble from the bottle to avoid injury.
• Do not freeze the bottle or store it in direct sunlight.
• Do not consume if the marble is broken, missing, or descended before opening.

Plunger? Oh, that must be that green plastic piece. Good thing I hadn’t thrown it away. After breaking the connectors that attached the inside to the outside, the green thing became a plunger that you could press your thumb on to apply the force to a smaller area.

Marble? The bottle looked like it had a marble stuck in it, but I thought that was part of the top. But no, there really was a marble stuck in it, and to open the bottle you have to push the marble inside.

So I put the plunger on top, and pushed with my thumb. The marble wasn’t going down, and my thumb was getting bent out of shape. Was I doing it wrong?

I checked online, and found that opening a bottle of Ramune is something of a rite of passage. At least for some people, who use everything from hammers to headbutts to get the darn thing open. Then there are others who say it’s not that big a deal, you just push with your thumb. I fell into the former category.

After wearing my thumb out with no luck, I tried using the heel of my hand. Although I wouldn’t be able to push as deep this way, I could exert much more force, and it would hurt a lot less. But after a few failed attempts, I had dug a deep ring into my hand, and drawn a trickle of blood.

Was this supposed to be another Kobayashi Maru?

I decided to bring out the big guns. My hammer was packed away, but my screwdriver was easy to get to and would work just as well. I put the bottle on the counter (so it would absorb the full impact instead of being pushed away), on top of a cork oven pad (so the counter wouldn’t get scratched).

Then I pounded the bottle several times with the base of the screwdriver, well aware that I was just as likely to break the bottle as I was to push the marble in.

The marble looked like it had moved some, so I went back to pushing my thumb on the plunger, and the marble went it, stopping a couple inches down where the bottle narrows.

The bottle then adds insult to injury because even after opening it, the marble blocks the flow when you try to drink it. But with the right angle, I finally enjoyed the pig/pumpkin/UFO-flavored drink known as Ramune. (It actually tastes something like Sprite).

Just yesterday, I was reading something about attacking problems from a non-obvious direction after reaching a mental dead end. This comes from Whole Brain Thinking: Working from Both Sides of the Brain to Achieve Peak Job Performance:

“Visualize the extreme opposite of the situation. Example: If you are trying to invent a gadget to open bottles, pretend you are trying to bond the bottle cap permanently to make it impenetrable. It will thus be easier to discover the weaknesses inherent in the current bottle caps and a way to get the substances that are inside, out–without resorting to the typical removable cap. You might invent a syringelike contraption that extracts the contents rather than beheading the package.”

I have to wonder if the authors wrote this after an encounter with Ramune. (By the way, this is an example of lateral thinking, just one of many crucial concepts covered in Marelisa Fabrega’s ebook How to Be More Creative – A Handbook for Alchemists).

Any usability engineer would go into conniptions about the bottle design. Yet the challenge of opening it is what gives Ramune its mystique and its fan base. I want to get another bottle, not so much to drink it, but just so I can try opening it again (hopefully doing a better job next time).

If a soft drink can teach patience, persistence, and lateral thinking, then what other learning experiences might be hiding in plain sight, disguised as problems?

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

Got hurt feelings, but don’t know what to do about them?

Wonder no more. Just fill out this Hurt Feelings Report (link from Breanne Potter’s MBTI blog). It appears to be a form used by the Army “to assist whiners in documenting hurt feelings.”

To complete the form, you answer questions such as “which ear were the words of hurtfulness spoken into?” and “did you require a tissue for your tears?”

Most people will find it funny, while some will find it insensitive. What do you think about it?

To be sure, filling out a form to report hurt feelings is absurd. Not because it’s not a valid concern, but because you won’t fix the problem by reporting it.

What I find funny is that many people will laugh at how ridiculous it is to report hurt feelings, but then they’ll fill out a form to complain that they were overcharged by $1 (yes, I know someone who did this). Somehow, incidents are only supposed to matter when you can put a dollar amount on them.

But whatever the problem, whether feelings or dollars or something else, maybe it’s best to either ignore it or face it head on, instead of filling out forms.

You may have heard of blogger and life coach Alex Fayle, also known as the “Someday Syndrome” guy. Someday Syndrome is the affliction that people suffer from when they know their life isn’t what they want, and they stare off into space thinking “someday my ship will come in.”

What Alex does is help people uncover hidden patterns so they can break their procrastination habit and start living the life they desire. He’s certainly done that in his own life, overcoming his procrastination to move to Spain and follow his dreams such as becoming a fiction author. In his new ebook Someday My Ship Will Come In: A Practical Guide to Finding Your Dreams, he shows you how to do the same.

I had a chance to read a draft of this ebook. When Alex asked me specifically what I thought it would do for people, I said the lessons and exercises would help them get clear about their dreams now versus never thinking about them and leaving them to chance. Because the biggest reason that people fail to achieve their dreams isn’t so much that they try and fail, but they put them off to a “someday” that never arrives.

Whatever your dreams are, you can’t just wait for them to come to you. You have to identify them, focus on them, take the first few steps, and get the ball rolling. That’s what it takes to cure your Someday Syndrome. Let Alex show you how in Someday My Ship Will Come In.

One of the books I’m reading now is Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. I’m just reading a little bit here and there, but I’ll definitely be reviewing it when I’m done.

So far, it’s about how success is less dependent on talent and hard work than we think. Yes, it still takes a lot of hard work (according to the 10,000 hour rule) and a good amount of talent. However, one critical factor is often ignored – the environment that made you who you are. It turns out that random factors such as your birth date can be hugely important.

But my review will come later. For now, I just want to talk about what success means.

In What Malcolm Gladwell Should Have Told You In ‘Outliers,’ Glen Allsopp says that while he’s a huge fan of Outliers, he has one problem with it. Namely, that Gladwell tends to define success as a large bank balance or some form of status. Glen says:

“While Bill Gates spent years behind a computer screen, people his age where going to parties, sunning on the beach, meeting new people and making the most of life…yet he has made it.

While kids were playing the violin for hours every week, their friends were playing in the park, running through fields and making the most of their childhood. Yet now the violinists are professional or well known…they’ve made it.”

I agree, people who are considered successful have paid an enormous price to get there. If you’re willing to accept being “average” or “good” instead of “off the charts,” you can free up massive amounts of time for other things.

Someone who’s OK with being a little overweight might be a lot happier than a gym rat who works out several hours a day. Someone who’s OK with being a little uninformed might be a lot happier than a Jeopardy champion. It’s much, much easier to be average than an outlier.

Still, the book is about success, not happiness. To learn about success, it makes sense to study Bill Gates and world class violinists. On the other hand, we don’t need to read a book to learn how to go to parties and play in the park. If you want to do those things, you’re free to just do them.

Which brings me to this question: Is success important?

That may sound like a strange question, but it has to do with how you think of success. A lot of people think success is the ultimate measure of your life. Either you’re successful and you’ve had a good life, or you’re unsuccessful and you’ve had a bad life.

I don’t see it that way. To me, success simply means what the traditional definition says. For now, let’s just use this dictionary definition: the attainment of wealth, favor, or eminence.

Is there more to life than the attainment of wealth, favor, or eminence? Of course! I’ve written about a lot of things that are important to me, but which have absolutely nothing to do with wealth, favor, or eminence.

Some people want to be successful. Some people want to be happy. Some people want to be in good shape. Some people want to travel. Some people want to learn. Some people want lots of friends. These are all different things, none of which is the be all, end all of life. We all value different things.

And guess what? It’s OK if you don’t want to be successful!

But wait, if you’re not successful, does that make you unsuccessful, a failure, a bad person? Not at all. I can’t play the violin, but I wouldn’t consider myself a failed violinist. The violin just isn’t important to me, so it’s not how I judge myself.

Likewise, I wouldn’t consider Barack Obama a failed dentist, or Mohandas Gandhi a failed football player. Maybe they’re not good at those particular things, but they have different objectives.

When you walk past a homeless person, your first thought probably isn’t “Wow, look how successful he is!” Because face it, success, as defined by society, means money. After all, money is what society invented as a store of value. On the other hand, no one needs to feel threatened by this, because you don’t need to make money a priority if you don’t want to.

If you want to live the life of the Mexican fisherman, fine. But don’t redefine “success” to mean “happiness” just because it’s much easier to achieve, and you have this false idea that all good people are required to be successful. It’s perfectly fine to decide that success – or if you prefer, “traditional success” – isn’t important to you.

Some people are meant to chase success, but most aren’t. Not everyone can be in the richest 1%, or the healthiest 1%, or the most educated 1%, or the happiest 1%, or the friendliest 1%, and so on. We have to decide on our priorities.

I once met a homeless woman who was doing exactly what she wanted with her life: enjoying the weather, scenery, and tourists outside the White House while protesting nuclear weapons. No sane person would consider her successful, and she wouldn’t be the subject of a book like Outliers, but she was doing what she wanted to do.

And in the end, isn’t that what we should all be striving for?

Oh, regarding the post title – is success for suckers? Yes, but only if you spend your life chasing it at the cost of things that are more important to you. However, if success is important to you, then we have something in common. There’s room for both types.

Photo by aloshbennett

A long time back, I ordered Lorelle VanFossen’s book Blogging Tips: What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging. For over a year, it remained under a pile of other books I haven’t read, until I finally got around to it. I wish I had done so sooner, because it would have been more helpful to me back then.

Much like ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income, this book is not going to give an experienced blogger a lot of stuff they haven’t seen before. But for somebody who’s new to blogging or thinking about taking the plunge, this is a great way to get hundreds of tips covering many aspects of blogging, all in one place.

Blogging since 1994, Lorelle has seen it all. If you need a crash course in blogging, this is a great resource.

Randy Pausch’s autographed photo of Captain Kirk, on which William Shatner wrote “I don’t believe in the no-win scenario.”

In Star Trek, the Kobayashi Maru is a test that puts you up against a no-win scenario.

In this simulation, a civilian ship named the Kobayashi Maru has been disabled by a gravitic mine and is losing life support. If you don’t intervene, the Kobayashi’s 400 passengers will die.

Unfortunately, the Kobayashi lies in the Klingon Neutral Zone. If you attempt a rescue, you’ll be in violation of the treaty, which will cause the Klingons to take hostile action.

If you try to save the Kobayashi, three Klingon ships move in on you. They refuse to communicate, and they start firing. You’re outnumbered, and the computer is allowed to cheat, so there is no option but to lose.

The point of the test is not to win, but to behave well in the face of certain destruction.

How do you face a situation that you know you can’t win?

There’s a psychological concept known as “learned helplessness.” It refers to when a person or an animal learns that it’s helpless, so it stops trying, even after the situation changes.

In a 1960s experiment that I hope to God would be illegal today, learned helplessness was observed in dogs by subjecting them to electric shocks.

Two dogs were kept in separate rooms, but wired to the same electrical circuit. When the electricity was turned on, the first dog was able to press a lever that would turn it off for both dogs. The second dog didn’t have access to the lever, and from his perspective the shocks just stopped at a random time (since he didn’t know the first dog controlled it).

Although both dogs experienced the exact same electrical shocks, the first dog learned that he had the power to stop them, while the second dog learned that he was helpless. The dog in control quickly recovered, while the helpless dog become chronically depressed. In further experiments, the dogs that had learned helplessness were subjected to shocks that they were free to run away from, but they didn’t try.

But wait, it gets worse. It’s somewhat understandable for the dogs to think that because they couldn’t stop the shocks in the first experiment, they couldn’t stop them in the second. But in another set of experiments, dogs were temporarily paralyzed with a drug before being shocked. Obviously, they couldn’t even try to escape the shocks. By the time they regained their mobility, they had learned they were helpless. They didn’t try to escape the shocks, even though they had never tried before.

Here’s the silver lining: not all dogs acted this way. A third of them, the optimistic ones, did not become helpless. They still tried to escape the shocks and did, despite having failed before.

I’m not sure how the Star Trek cadets were supposed to behave in the Kobayashi Maru simulation, but I guess it was along the lines of staying focused and trying everything possible. And some cadets tried some unexpected solutions, with varying degrees of success.

- On his third attempt, James T. Kirk cheated by reprogramming the simulator to make it possible to rescue the Kobayashi, saying he didn’t believe in the no-win scenario. (In one movie he was awarded a commendation for original thinking, but in another he was put on trial for cheating.)

- Chekov evacuated his ship before crashing it into the three Klingon ships. (However, this meant that the Kobayashi was not saved.)

- Sulu realized it was a trap, and didn’t cross into the Neutral Zone. (Again, this meant the Kobayashi was not saved.)

- Scotty used a bunch of crazy tactics that let him bypass the Klingon shields and beam destructive items to them. While this worked at first, the simulator kept adding more and more Klingon ships, finally beating Scotty with 15 ships. (Because Scotty knew that his techniques would work in the simulator but not the real world, he was judged unsuitable for command track and reassigned to engineering.)

- Piper used a bunch of unorthodox commands that tricked the computer into fighting itself, which ended up crashing the simulator. (Her instructors acknowledged that it might have worked in the real world.)

- Peter David made the bizarre move of destroying the Kobayashi, figuring that (1) a rescue attempt could not succeed, (2) destroying the Kobayashi was more humane than letting the crew be captured and tortured, and (3) the Kobayashi may actually have been a setup planted by the enemy.

- Peter Kirk (James’ nephew) faced a different version of the simulation, in which the enemies were the Romulans instead of the Klingons. He invoked an obscure Romulan law that allowed him to challenge the Romulan commander to a one-on-one fight to the death, during which all ships must cease fire. Before beaming over for the duel, he told his people to beam aboard the Kobayashi survivors and escape, leaving him to die. (The instructor stopped the simulation at this point, but Peter was credited with a nearly perfect outcome, sacrificing himself but saving the Kobayashi and his own ship. The simulator was reprogrammed to prevent this solution from being used again.)

Every now and then, you may face a situation that seems unwinnable. And maybe it is. But don’t give more power to it than you have to. Don’t be too quick to declare it as unwinnable, when there may be a solution you haven’t thought of yet.

And if you really can’t win, doing your best anyway will keep you away from the trap of learned helplessness for the future. Besides, you can always change your definition of “winning.”