Sometimes life just pulls you into things, and you’re happy to go there.
A raver offering up her boobies to John Digweed.
These days you can sell the stuff.
Imagine that you are an entrepreneur in New York City in the early 1900’s. Your company offers a single service — cleaning up horse poop.
Business is gangbusters. There is no shortage of horse poop. Every buggy needs a horse (or multiple horses) to drag it, and every horse poops multiple times a day. You can’t hire horse poop shovelers fast enough to keep up with demand. In fact, despite your best efforts, the entire city is covered in horse poop. New York City’s 100,000 horses are producing 2.5 million pounds of poop every day.
One day, you notice a weird-looking contraption in the street. It’s buggy, but it has no horse. It’s a horseless-f*cking-carriage!
It’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever seen in your life. It will never catch on. You go back to counting your poop-shoveling money.
Distilling Japanese whisky (not what this post is about).
Lately I’ve been obsessed with the idea that in every field, art form, or “area of life,” there is ONE thing that matters above all else. One thing, that if you get it right, success in that area is inevitable.
I’m naturally a detail oriented person, so it’s a constant challenge for me to zoom out and see the big picture. I know from experience that focusing on the wrong details is just a waste of time. I easily fall victim to the “all tactics, no strategy” trap. I’ll make myself long lists of things to do to achieve my goals, without taking the time to deeply consider my overall strategy and approach. I’ll endlessly try to fix things that should just be discarded. I’ll make judgment calls based on details that I personally appreciate, instead of details that are truly important.
In order to hone my “big picture” skills, I’ve been conducting the following thought experiment: pick one field, art form, or “life area” and try to distill all my knowledge and experience of that area into a single simple idea, the one thing that matters more than anything else in terms of effectiveness, fulfillment, and success by any measure.
The experiment has yielded a number of “Aha!” moments. I don’t expect you to agree with my results (or care about the same areas), but conducting the same experiment yourself might yield an epiphany or two.
Here are some of my questions and results, in areas that are relevant to my own life:
Zooming out on 2010.
I started this blog in December of 2009, so I’ve just completed my first full year of blogging (or, as I prefer to think of it, writing and self-publishing essays). I prefer “essayist” over “blogger” not out of pretension, but because I think it more accurately describes what I’ve been doing; writing about specific topics that I find interesting, in a way that I hope will be interesting, entertaining, and/or useful to others. Not much personal, day to day stuff. No recipes. There’s nothing wrong with that style of blog, it’s just not for me.
So far this site has had about 30,000 unique views. That’s not a lot, but it’s much more than the “just family and friends” traffic that I expected. It’s gratifying to know that a wide range of people have enjoyed reading at least some of my posts. So, thank you readers!
The biggest traffic day was about 4,000 views, from a link someone posted on reddit.com.
I don’t make any money from blogging, nor do I expect to. I pay WordPress a small amount to host the site, and small additional fees to display the URL as jdmoyer.com (without “wordpress” in the URL) and to suppress advertising (which is how WordPress makes money from the blogs it hosts). I’m happy to pay these fees so I don’t have to deal with the technical hassles of blog hosting, comment management, etc. The hosted WordPress tools are great.
Haven't written about this yet, but I will.
Why do I it? Since I started this site, my mind has been overflowing with ideas for new essays and posts. I have a spreadsheet going with ideas for about fifty entries … some of which I’ll probably never get to. I don’t know how long this particular vein of abundant inspiration will continue, but I’m enjoying the ride while it lasts.
The world “outlet” comes to mind. Not so much creative outlet, but rather persuasive outlet. I can try to convince others that my opinion is worth paying attention to, without cornering them at a party and lecturing their ear off. Readers can stop reading whenever they want, without any social awkwardness. They (you) can freely lurk, or comment.
It’s interesting to watch the stats and see which posts people find interesting. Some topics that interest me greatly don’t seem to interest other people much at all (or the people who might be interested haven’t yet found this site), and some posts that I wrote quickly and without much thought have been read many times. For what it’s worth, here are the top five posts (out of about sixty) of 2010 (by number of views).
1. Sleep Experiment – A Month With No Artificial Light
(candle wax, bimodal sleep, feeling unreasonably happy)
2. How I Cured My Asthma With One Simple Lifestyle Change
(a diet change turned around my health and fixed my breathing problems)
3. Minecraft — It’s in Your Head
(a low-res videogame that took over my life for awhile)
4. A Meta-analysis of Kooky Diets, Part III — PALEO!
(3 very fit guys telling you why you’re better off without grains)
5. The Singularity Already Happened – Part I
(my thoughts on the nerd rapture)
Or maybe it happened thousands of years ago?
This post is a continuation of What’s Your Personal Economic Plan?
What Can You Do? What Suits Your Temperament?
Now there's a plan.
There are a few ways to make money. There is passive income, which involves no effort beyond cashing checks. This could be from investment income (interest and dividends), rents (if rents exceed maintenance expenses), passive ownership share in a profitable business, and royalties (from music, books, and performances).
There is the possibility of having a job, with salary and benefits.
There is freelance, or independent work, where you charge a client for services delivered (on a job, hourly, or daily basis).
There is the entrepreneurial route, starting, or gaining an ownership stake in, a profitable business.
Your spouse, significant other, or family might be willing to support you, but this can mean sacrificing a lot of economic autonomy.
There’s also crime, but in the end crime doesn’t pay.
Part of creating a strong personal economic plan is understanding your own temperament. What are you suited for, and more importantly, what are you not suited for? The big “traps” in my opinion are as follows:
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