Read this. Get involved. Or get lost. This is my place to help turn ideas, proposals, and projects into business reality. Please chime in!This is a man after my own heart!
Sometimes I read things—Nabokov, Irving, Munro—and I shake my head. “Yeah, in my entire life, I’ll never be that good.” Then I read other things—I’m choosing not to share what I find wretched writing—and I’m like, “If that can get published, I certainly can.” But now it’s not about being published; it’s about feeling proud of my work, every single sentence. Every word selection and storytelling tactic magnified under a critical glass of assessment. I was born to do this; I won’t fail at it.
Then you can’t sleep. You’re addicted to the refresh button on Amazon’s Top Sellers list, eager to find your position in the lineup. You know when you awake the reviews will be out. A critic will tear you a new asshole, and you’ll weep, realizing not just your dreams but your nightmares came true. Your writing is only popular because of the subject. Your sentences are forced, and you and your life are unoriginal. Your work will be summarized into one laconic phrase: “She tries too hard and fails at that successfully.”
That will happen. Rejection happens to everyone. But I’ll keep writing because I’m not doing it for praise or condemnation. I’m doing it just for me, being true to myself and what I know I was put on this earth to do.
Stephanie has more than one hundred facts about herself and bunches of photos.
Read more of Stephanie here.It's lovely to be a feminist and all. I have gotten in plenty a tizzy over the inequity of the female role in this bizarre universe. Have even tried out the independent, "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle" track, and been quite good at it. Eventually, however, I settled upon this conclusion:Heather writes in About This Fish:
This fish needs a bicycle.
If not for comfort, at least for entertainment's sake.
This is not about man-chasing or desperation. It is rarely even about dating. It's about me deciding that I can be well-educated, independent and happy and still see the need for someone else in my life. That's not desperate; that's real.
THE FISH: 26 years-old, fresh to manhattan and hoping that neurotic stays fashionable for at least a couple more years.This is good writing!
THE SITE: in 2002 thisfish.com began as something of an anonymous venting session -- internet style. you can see not much has changed, excepting the anonymity part. on april 27th, 2004, thisfish.com leapt out of the closet and onto page 131 of the bastard on the couch. thisfish.com thanks editor Daniel Jones for his continued support and a shove in the right direction.
Blogging improves your writing skills.He also has a discussion going on writing styles; how long should sentences and paragraphs in a blog be?
Better writing ability, and an enhanced ability to express yourself in print, is a rarely thought about benefit of blogging.
While most people think of writers as infinitely talented, living in some rarified air denied to the rest of us, writing is a learned skill. While some people are indeed born more talented with the written word than others, most people can become better writers simply through practice.
Note that the friend did take his phone call, otherwise he might have not had this conversation.What's interesting to me is his characterization of those stalwart IT influencing tools: the whitepapers, demos, benchmarking guides and analyst reports. These are touchpoints IT marketers rely on to get their message out, and if my friend is any kind of a canary-in-the-coal-mine, the outlook isn't good. His characterization of "the game" is that he now assiduously avoids any content in which he can't clearly discern the motivations of the messenger. Benchmarking study by a leading analyst: who's funding them? Buyer's guide in a magazine: who's advertising? Discussion guides on a popular forum: who's seeding the boards?
My take on these issues has always been: read them, and think critically about the source. My friend's take: avoid them and look for more reliable information from peers. He summed up his attitude when he told me he treats it as a game: "any time I think anything has been influenced by marketing, I run screaming."
The Brand Autopsy Marketing Practice was established to share the many lessons we've learned about meaningful marketing from working deep inside the marketing departments of Starbucks Coffee and Whole Foods Market.
We believe meaningful marketing connects with people by telling them the story of why a business is remarkable. It's about designing marketing activities to deliver on the vision of the business all the while being clever, savvy, and authentic. It's about treating people as being interesting and interested. And, it's about building brand preference more than brand awareness resulting in loyalty beyond reason from customers.
If you are into meaningful marketing, this is the place to do some reading.
Some of what's left when an appellate/IP lawyer leaves out the monthly statements, spam, brochures and incomprehensible expositions intended to cover someone's behind.Her posts range legal issues, blogging, life on this wonderful planet, and other topics along the way.
This is what Dilbert would be like if Dilbert was a blog.This column delights in telling tales out of school. It’s about what really goes on in corporate America, corporate England, corporate Israel, corporate Australia, corporate Argentina... well you get it.
The focus is on the story, not who’s telling it, or what company the story is about. I’ll leave that to the investigative reporters.
If these stories were attributable and on the record, heads would surely roll, departments would re-org and HR would be working overtime. These are real stories, about real people, who work real jobs, for real organizations. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.
I couldn’t make this stuff up. Not the shenanigans, not the showstopping, not the hidden agendas, and definitely not the policy statements.
Out of Control and into Choice and Competition. Reason Public Policy Institute's web log on competition and choice in public policy. The choices are out there and the ideas are here.As an example, in Dobbsbot-3000:
Would there be a future where there would be robot bloggers?Journalists give loads of attention to jobs lost from offshore outsourcing, yet, as I note in the previous post, robots steal many more jobs than foreigners.
Maybe journalists have focused on outsourcing partly because the think it could cost them their jobs. Maybe they figure a robot could never do what they do.
Maybe those media types just haven’t met Actroid Repliee, the newscaster robot.
My agenda? I want to fully understand and help other people understand the individual, interpersonal, business, and societal costs of exclusion, prejudice, and discrimination. I work to help people be more culturally literate and build their cultural competence.
To achieve that, I spend my time in four major ways: first, as a mother, helping my children learn about those issues, and then as a writer, business consultant and trainer focused on diversity, inclusion, globalization and leadership issues. The whole professional bio is at http://www.inclusiveasheville.com/patti.html,
if you're interested.
All this competition for rank in the hierarchy has brought about some unquestionably wonderful things, and I'm not suggesting that all this competition stop, or that we forego advancements and innovation in science and technology. I'm suggesting that we might be well served if we understood more about ourselves, the limits to what competition for rank in the hierarchy can achieve, and to think about what effort we might make toward achieving those things we all seem to say we want in the world, which all our technology and all our competition have failed to give us.
I think it's possible we may be in the relatively early stages of the process of doing this. I have little doubt that some of that effort itself will be turned into a type of competition for authority, though we might be able to factor that into our efforts this time around, to some extent. I have serious reservations about how successful we might be. China and India are now coming on strong in their competition for rank in the hierarchy, and they won't be deterred from their efforts by thoughts of introspection and reflection. Technology will continue to shrink the world and expand our capacity for both good and ill.
Most days, I kind of think it's pointless to think about people creating a "better world." I suspect it's mostly enough to worry about trying to create one better person, the only person I'm truly responsible for, and that's me. We're not here to change "the world." The world is here so that we may learn how we might change ourselves. Maybe that's the point.
A constantly evolving set of guidelines for dealing with resplendent Jenitude on a day-to-day basis. (The gaps in the numbering are intentional and represent rules that have yet to be written, not rules that have been omitted, and I'd like to thank everyone who has contributed Rules or suggestions -S)
#1 Jen is an exceptional person who is to be worshipped and adored at all times.
#2 Jen is always special.
#3 Jen is frequently up to something.
#4 Jen can usually get away with it.
#5 If your relationship with Jen fails, it's your fault.
#6 (The Jennocious Tenet of Remote Control Ownership) If Jen wants to watch a particular movie or TV show, she will. Even if it clashes with The Game. You may, however, purchase and fit new batteries in the remote.
#7 There is no rule 7.
Here to Unblog the Drain
Welcome to my world. It is the world of big business and small minds. It is the world of paradigms and paranoids that populate the corridors and boardrooms of a certain very large company that, like the disarmed forces, is not all that it could be.
The company must remain nameless. Nameless protects the innocent…in particular, me. Suffice it to say that it is a leader in its field and a follower in its approach. It is a large company that manages to think small. Or, better put, it manages by thinking small. This is a shame because it is a company with all the makings of greatness. If, like me, you can see the big picture, you will understand why I sometimes feel stifled when trapped in a small office, narrow vision, short horizon and shallow pool of cash.
He choses to remain nameless, which I respect. This is different than being "anonymous".
He continues but if this much has interest you, the I recommend that you read the rest.
One thing is for sure: Our future is not your father’s future. This is not inconsequential to us as marketers. The collective soul of humanity is maturing – or as one might say, moving toward collective self-actualization. In Maslow’s model of self-actualization, the well being of all transcends the well being of the individual. This is the direction that in which society is moving.Read more of David here.
The notion that the well being of all transcends the well being of self guts the foundation of traditional consumer marketing. Most such marketing makes the individual consumer the center of attention. This promotes egocentrism. In the Age of Transcendence, this will increasingly seem crude and unwarranted. This means marketers should be realigning the values they project to regain synchronicity with consumer values. The bottom line takeaway is that gradually but persistently people are becoming less concerned with the pettier needs of the individual self.
