The problem with people who don’t have to work hard for things is that they don’t know how to work hard.
Advice
Find the source
The water is crystal clear and cleanest, closest to the spring.
Do it anyway and turn up the volume
You have to be ok with people hating you or critiquing you whenever you do something interesting, or try something new.
Nobody mentioned that to me when I was growing up. Figure out what you feel is right and go for it, regardless of what others think.
The world is full of people who will criticize you, no matter what you do. Do it anyway.
A winter’s day in the Northern Cape
In the Northern Cape, South Africa, Andy, the Anatolian sheepdog, starts his first day of winter boot camp. Enjoy
Break from the pack
Remembering someone’s name and being present during a conversation means you are doing better that 99% of the people out there.
Make a move
Sometimes in life you’ve got to fire yourself.
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Born on May 7, 1861, Rabindranath Tagore’s poem is inspiring in 2020 and beyond. He could be writing about overcoming this dreadful pandemic.
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
Rabindranath Tagore
Busy work versus deep work
One of the blessings from the 2020 lockdowns it that they let me see how much of my day was full of wasted time and fluff.
I confused busy work with high output deep work. They are different.
That which is said of men
“Although this detail has no connection whatever with the real substance of what we are about to relate, it will not be superfluous, if merely for the sake of exactness in all points, to mention here the various rumors and remarks which had been in circulation about him from the very moment when he arrived in the diocese. True or false, that which is said of men often occupies as important a place in their lives, and above all in their destinies, as that which they do.”
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, Chapter One.
Write every day
Sometimes I will write a post on here that gets a good bit of traction via Facebook shares, Twitter, or old fashioned email forwarding, and other times a post won’t resonate as all.
I’ve also stopped predicting what will resonate and what won’t. There will be days when I’m excited to press the publish button and share a message, but it lands with a plop and quietly disappears.
I have also noticed that people dig through my archives, and sometimes a post has a second life.
The real visitor juice kicks in when the search engines index a post. It’s like an evergreen flow of free traffic to my site via Google and Baidu.
On some days when I’m swamped, I might release a photo or a small quote I’ve found; on other days, I can dig deep and write about something that’s been percolating.
I write about things I know about.
The best posts are authentic, from the heart and about something I’ve experienced first hand,
Writing every day builds the muscle. Start now.
markbartels.org 