Award Sounds

For the past several months, I’ve been going through a social reboot. This involves consciously reassessing my social life and deciding what connections and social habits to maintain and what to change.

But this year I’ve decided to go further with this process and declare outright social bankruptcy. This is an area of my life that was far enough off track that changing it for the better is closer to starting over from scratch than making modifications to an existing structure. It’s more analogous to changing careers than it is to tweaking an existing career.

I could see that my social life was becoming exceedingly unbalanced. It was a source of many stimulating connections, but the overall big picture wasn’t working very well.

While many people have trouble with physical clutter piling up, the main source of clutter in my life has been social clutter, most of which flowed into my life as a result of having a popular website/blog and having many open doors on the Internet through which people could easily connect with me.

Initially I thought that being so accessible was a good thing. I liked having an open door policy. To do otherwise seemed like it would be too cold and aloof.

In the beginning that open door policy worked okay, but too much of a good thing can eventually become a curse.

A Gift or a Curse?

Imagine if people starting coming to your house and bringing you gifts because they want to express their appreciation.

At first, you may receive their gifts with gratitude. How nice of them. How lucky you are to receive such abundance.

Now imagine that the gifts keep coming, year after year and with increasing frequency.

Eventually you start seeing patterns in the gifts. The same types of items appear dozens, then hundreds of times. What was once a delightful surprise now becomes routine and predictable.

Soon you stop bothering to open some of the gifts. You can tell what they are from the outside packaging. You don’t need what’s inside since you’ve received similar items many times before. You may still appreciate the sentiment, but the gifts themselves no longer hold much value to you.

You start running out of space to store the gifts. They pile up. You shove them in closets and fill your garage with them. And they just keep coming.

You can reasonably expect that this pattern will continue for many more years to come. It isn’t going to stop on its own. You begin to dread the treadmill you find yourself on.

All the while, people follow up to ask you about the gifts you received. At first you really are appreciative. Then you become indifferent. Then you may feel resentful. You may try to feign appreciation from behind that resentment in order to be polite, but it isn’t always easy. After a sufficient amount of time elapses, the gifts are entirely unwanted. As new gift bringers arrive, you stop answering the door as often.

Due to the asymmetrical nature of these interactions, those individual gift givers can’t see any problem with it. They always feel they’re doing a good deed. And so if you aren’t appreciative each time, they quickly jump to the conclusion that there must be something wrong with you.

So what do you do?

You could ask people to stop bringing gifts, but whom do you tell if it’s different people each time?

You could hire someone to process the gifts for you, but why pay someone to process what you don’t even want? This would also do a disservice to the gift givers since you’d never personally receive and appreciate their gifts. They probably wouldn’t have brought the gifts if they expected their gifts would merely be processed by an assistant. They intended the gifts to be personal.

Social connections are like gifts. In small quantities they’re precious, and it’s easy to appreciate them. In vast quantities, however, they can become a curse.

I hit that curse level a long time ago and did my best to manage it, but eventually I realized that it was a no-win situation, and I had to make some fundamental changes. I couldn’t just get better at processing the gifts that arrived. I had to stop the gifts from showing up altogether. I had to eliminate the curse aspects and get back to a more reasonable level of interaction.

Declaring Social Bankruptcy

It took a while to accept it, but eventually I realized I had to declare social bankruptcy. I’d gone too far down a path that wasn’t working. I could see that it was time to get off that path entirely.

I began to think about what kind of social life I’d create for myself these days if I had the opportunity to start over completely from scratch. I imagined that nobody on earth knew who I was. What if I didn’t have email… or a website… or any social media pages… or a phone number?

What would I consciously decide to add back? What would I avoid recreating?

I still like writing, so I’d keep that. I like speaking too, so I’d recreate that as well.

But there are some items I wouldn’t recreate, at least not in the same way they’re present in my life today.

One of those things would be email. I’d keep it for some very limited usage, but I wouldn’t use email as my primary business communication tool. I’d reduce my email usage by at least 90% and check it maybe once or twice a week, with perhaps 15 minutes of usage time per week. I wouldn’t have an assistant process a bunch of messages for me. I’d set it up so hardly anyone would message me. I’d only receive emails that I wanted to receive, from people I wanted to be able to email me.

Another thing I wouldn’t recreate would be online interactions with people regarding my articles, including comments, questions, and discussions. Reading feedback can be stimulating at times, but I don’t find it inspiring or fulfilling, and it certainly isn’t necessary. Life itself gives me all the feedback I require. It’s fine if people want to discuss and share what I’ve posted on their own, but I don’t need to participate in those discussions. By the time I’ve posted something, I’ve already moved on to the next thing. For me writing is a process of letting go. To write is to release. If I get involved in discussions about my past work, my attention is pulled back to where I’ve been, and I experience greater levels of attachment. I’d rather keep my attention on where I am and where I’m going.

If I’m going to discuss anything work-related, it’s more interesting to discuss what I’m inspired to explore next. It’s easier for me — and more fulfilling as well — to have such discussions with friends face to face. So again the online element is superfluous.

In the long run, my open door approach to connecting with readers was a bust. I tried modifying the parameters of that open door — for years — but eventually I had to close that door altogether. Life is a lot simpler without all that social clutter.

Closing those doors (quitting Facebook, shutting down the forums, disabling my online contact form, etc) was tough to do at first, but now I’m far enough along with this contraction process that I wish I’d done this years ago.

I’m also revamping the way I use email, including killing off old email addresses and reserving email for a much lower volume of communication henceforth.

Obligation vs. Freedom

There are several themes that run through this social rebooting process. One involves eliminating social obligations and expectations and replacing them with freedom of choice.

My social life has been overburdened with perceived obligations. People who have a social connection with me frequently expect that our connection entitles them to something from me, such as a reply to their emails or advice when they request it.

In small quantities that isn’t a problem, but in the quantities I’ve experienced this, it’s too far over on the curse side.

So as part of declaring social bankruptcy, I’m erasing any social debt people feel I owe them as a result of our past connections.

Feeling obligated to live up to other people’s expectations isn’t how I wish to manage my social life. I wish to experience a social life based on freedom of choice by all involved, where no one feels they have the right to leverage our connection to obligate the other person.

Freedom must still be balanced with responsibility, so if I’ve freely chosen to obligate myself in some way, such as entering a business contract or making a verbal agreement with someone, I’ll honor that of course. But I’m not going to let those unspoken obligations creep back into my social life, where people feel they’re entitled to something from me just because they exist in my reality.

If certain people can’t handle this and wish to complain about it, I’m not going to maintain a serious connection with them. The types of people I like interacting with already feel similarly anyway, so I’m not losing anything I value here.

Online vs. Offline

The second shift involves doing more of what fulfills me and less of what doesn’t fulfill me.

I love connecting with people face to face. Occasional video-Skyping is okay too. But typing individual messages to people has grown pretty stale. And if I have a lot of messages to read and reply to, that just feels burdensome.

So I’m deliberately axing almost all of my one-on-one communication via the Internet. And I’m replacing it with more face to face social interaction.

I’m making this change not only for personal socializing but for business networking as well. I may use email to help maintain some connections, but I’m essentially closing the door to new business connections that arrive by email. New business contacts will have to meet me in person, and that will essentially mean they’ll have to come through organically via my existing social network. It will be exceedingly difficult for cold callers to reach me personally.

Incompatible vs. Compatible

The third shift has to do with the types of people that I connect with on a regular basis.

The bulk of people who’ve gotten in touch with me in the past were readers of my blog, Internet marketers, and the press. In small doses these interactions are normally fine, but in larger quantities it can get a little crazy.

As part of declaring social bankruptcy, I felt it wise to close the door on these types of interactions via the Internet, so I could create some space to reassess my social life without so many distractions piling up.

During this quiet time, I realized that I didn’t wish to recreate the reader-based interactions. These are too often interactions where people put me on a pedestal and place themselves on a perceived lower tier as they interact with me. It’s not a big deal when it’s a temporary thing like during a workshop weekend, but it’s not something I like having in my life on a daily basis. These interactions provide little value to me, and they encourage me to keep revisiting the past instead of focusing on new challenges. If you think my decision to cut these people off is selfish, that’s because it is.

Sometimes I’ve even said to people, “Please don’t do the fanboy thing with me.” While I’m sure some people draw energy from having others look up to them, I find it very unnatural when adults behave like that towards me. I prefer it when people connect with me as equals.

Regarding Internet marketers who approach me primarily because they want something from me, I’m not going to lose any sleep over shedding those connections. These types of approaches are very common online, but they’re much less frequent in person. And in person it’s much easier to help the person get past their fake salesy persona and behave a bit more naturally.

Connecting with the press might seem to be a wise door to keep open for business reasons, but after doing so many interviews, I don’t see much value in continuing the practice. Mainstream journalists and the publications they represent are too often a mismatch for my message. They have an overwhelming tendency to want to reduce everything to cutesy sound bites, and they frequently get the sound bites wrong anyway. These people are almost invariably over-stressed and harried, so they can only crank out incredibly shallow work that provides little or no long-term value. Most publications of this nature don’t provide a compatible medium for a message about conscious living.

So as I declare social bankruptcy on these types of connections, what’s left?

I thought about the kinds of friends I want to keep in my life, as well as new friends I’d like to attract. These include people with qualities and values such as:

1. Freedom – people who maintain free and flexible lifestyles and have control over their schedules (can’t connect with people who aren’t available)
2. Self-Sufficiency - high-functioning people who can take care of themselves (not needy, clingy, or high maintenance)
3. Happiness – people who are generally happy and fulfilled with their lives
4. Growth – people who value growth above security (security-minded people are very boring)
5. Courage – people who seek to identify and face their fears; people who are following their “path with a heart”
6. Offbeat – people whom others might label as weird, quirky, or unusual (I like social rebels; the social conformists don’t seem particularly sane)

There are lots of people in my life who will claim to value these qualities, but not as many can claim to be living them. People who are living up to their values tend to have a certain peacefulness about them that’s a joy to connect with.

I’ve been maintaining many partial matches in my social network, i.e. people who have enough compatibility to create a connection with me but not enough to maintain a mutually fulfilling relationship in the long run. These partial matches are relative dead ends though, and they crowd out more compatible connections.

As part of this bankruptcy process, I’m reassessing each connection in my social network as if it’s a brand new connection opportunity that just showed up for the first time. I’m letting go of past social baggage with certain people and asking myself if it makes sense to include them in my social map today. At the same time, I’m raising my standards with respect to the types of connections I’ll invite in and maintain.

Quantity to Quality

In previous years I’ve had lots of relatively shallow connections in my life and a handful of deep ones. But virtually all the joy and fulfillment comes from the deeper connections. So I’ve decided to release most of those shallow connections and invest more time and energy in creating and maintaining deeper connections but with fewer people.

I don’t find it difficult to create and maintain deeper connections, but when there’s too much social clutter in my life, it keeps me flailing around in the shallow end of the pool more often than I’d like.

Instead of maintaining a large but loose social network, I’m dumping that model and replacing it with a much smaller, tighter social network. I seek fewer friends, but deeper and more compatible connections.

Having an extensive social network with loose ties with lots of people may seem like a good thing to some people, but I haven’t found much fulfillment in that model. Breadth is no substitute for depth.

I think the main mistake I made here was assuming that having a bigger funnel at the top would result in deeper connections at the bottom. It doesn’t work that way in practice, however. Shallow connections rarely evolve into deeper ones. Deep connections frequently avoid the funnel altogether. When truly compatible people show up, we tend to click right away — within a matter of hours. For the most part, either we click right away, or we don’t. There is no funnel.

As part of this process, I’ve been going through my Google Contacts and making liberal use of the delete function. I figure that if I haven’t contacted someone in 6 months or more, I probably don’t need their contact info.

Having fewer contacts to maintain simplifies my life and makes it easier to focus on connections I wish to maintain. If I ever really need the info for a deleted contact, I can always get it through some other means, like searching my email archives or requesting it from someone.

After a few passes, I was able to reduce my contacts down to 64 people. My goal was to get it down to 30 or less. With a couple more passes, I got it down to 28. Smile.

I may gradually build it back up to around 40 or so, but I’m in no rush. It’s nice to see the whole list fit on one screen for the first time ever. No scrollbar.

Contraction, Then Expansion

Having been through a financial bankruptcy many years ago, I can tell you that declaring bankruptcy isn’t such a terrible thing. When you go bankrupt, you shed what clearly isn’t working for you. For me it was a very liberating experience.

I find this social bankruptcy process equally liberating. It’s obviously not the same thing as a financial bankruptcy, but the energetic effect is similar. Old obligations and expectations are released. Hope and optimism replace feelings of overwhelm and disappointment.

I’m looking forward to rebuilding a positive and supportive social life this year, practically from the ground up. Having such an active social life for so many years, even if it wasn’t particularly fulfilling, gave me a lot of clarity about what I want to experience in this part of my life instead.

Initially I hoped to transition directly from where I was to where I wanted to go. But I couldn’t get that approach to work. The old patterns were too strong, and I didn’t have enough clarity about where to go next. It’s like being in a job you don’t like, but you’re still unsure about what you might do instead or how to make it work. You have to quit the old job first, break free of its distractions and conditioning effects, and take some reflective time to get in touch with what you’ve learned and what you want. Then you can take steps to create something new. There may be some negative side effects to this approach, but they’re worth it. Staying stuck in a no-win situation is worse.

In a similar vein, I eventually accepted I had to undergo a social contraction first before I’d have any hope of creating something better. I couldn’t transition directly from planet A to planet B because planet A’s gravity was too strong. I had to leave planet A behind first, then explore a bit in order to identify planet B and plot a course to it.

I’m in that exploratory phase now, which is a refreshing change. As I shared above, I have more clarity about what I want to experience next, but I’m in no rush to get there. I’m still shedding bits and pieces of the old planet A, and I feel very relieved as I watch it recede further into the past. My social life is quieter and simpler than it’s been in years, and I’m taking advantage of this peaceful period to get back in touch with myself.

Ho’oponopono It

When I was at the Transformational Leadership Council retreat in Kona, Hawaii last week, we did an interesting Ho’oponopono exercise that included writing an exhaustive list of anyone and anything from the past that we still felt a lingering attachment to. At the end of the exercise, we tore up our lists, a symbolic way of shedding those attachments. This doesn’t mean shedding those people from one’s life. It just means releasing any unconscious attachments to them, so you can make a freer and more conscious choice about how to relate (or not relate) to them thereafter. At least that was my understanding of the exercise.

At the time I did that exercise, I didn’t sense that anything special had happened. It was a nice gesture but not particularly transformational for me. However, when I returned to Vegas several days later, I could tell that something had shifted in my attitudes towards certain people. I could more easily distinguish the aspects of those connections that I was freely inviting vs. those aspects that had become riddled with unconscious expectations and obligations. I felt a greater sense of freedom to relate on the basis of choice while releasing any lingering loyalty to the expectation side. I felt more empowered to relate to people as my true self without worrying about their reactions.

I think that deciding to stop participating in traditional holiday gift exchanges as I shared in yesterday’s post was one result of this Ho’oponopono process. I might have gotten around to it eventually, but I feel this process helped speed things along. I was able to get it done without worrying about other people’s reactions. I saw that it was more important to be true to myself and stop trying to satisfy other people’s expectations of me.

As I allow myself to explore this delightfully peaceful space of fresh possibilities, I’m already noticing new doors opening. Part of me wants to dive in and explore some of them, while another part of me wants to hold off and enjoy the silence a bit longer. I’m sure I’ll begin to explore some of those alternative paths soon enough, but the most important thing for me right now is to explore in an unattached, noncommittal way. I want to experience a social life where each relationship feels like a fresh choice made anew, not an obligation to remain loyal to the past.

When it’s obvious that some part of your life isn’t working, stop. Release what isn’t working. Then choose another path. People will squawk at you, but you’ll be happier on the other side.

Read related articles:

• Opting Out of Holiday Gift Exchanges
• Getting Back to Growth
• How to Network With Busy People – Part 3
• How to Network With Busy People
• Facebook and Twitter
• Social Networking: Rethinking Productivity
• How to Network With Busy People – Part 10

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Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Today I told my family that I’m permanently opting out of buying/giving/receiving gifts for all future birthdays & holidays.

Many people grow up with holiday traditions that center around buying and exchanging gifts with family members. I enjoyed and appreciated this when I was younger, and I have many fond memories about it. These days it no longer resonates with me though. It’s not a good fit for my values. I feel it’s time to make a conscious choice here and drop this tradition from my life.

Gift giving is a popular love strategy that means a lot to certain people. I respect that. But it’s not a tradition that I personally find fulfilling or meaningful, either on the giving or the receiving end of it.

My primary love strategies are physical touch (like hugs and affection) and spending quality time together. I experience these in abundance, which makes gift giving feel really hollow by comparison.

I’ve never been particularly good at shopping anyway, nor do I care to get better at it. Most years I don’t even start my Christmas shopping till December 23rd. This past year I didn’t start till Dec 26th.

I know that some people love shopping for gifts, but for me the experience often feels tedious, annoying, and even creepy. I always procrastinate on it and then have to force myself to do it. Then I usually surrender before I seriously try, and I resort to buying everyone gift cards. This is clearly a path without a heart for me.

Some people like making gifts instead of buying them, but that doesn’t resonate with me either. I’d still be bothered by the obligatory nature of it. I occasionally enjoy giving someone a gift (bought or made) when it strikes me as a free and inspired choice. But when it takes the form of an expected obligation, it gives me the overwhelming urge to pummel an elf.

I told my family that if they still feel compelled to get me gifts, they can donate to charity instead. I suggested fellow TLC member Cynthia Kersey’s Unstoppable Foundation, which builds schools and wells for children in Africa.

As for how my family reacts to my decision, that’s up to them, but from my end it’s a done deal regardless of their responses. Hopefully they’ll understand though.

I feel good about this decision. It simplifies my life, which I like. And perhaps by sharing this quickie blog post, it will inspire others to consciously reexamine their holiday traditions.

Which of your behaviors are consciously chosen? Which are merely inherited?

Which practices would you discontinue if you knew there’d be absolutely no negative backlash from anyone?

If you wouldn’t continue a practice except for reasons of social pressure and obligation, then your motivation is fear-based, and fear will taint your gifts as well. If you can’t give from a place of free conscious choice motivated by love and inspiration, then is it really a gift you’re giving? To me that sounds more like a curse.

Leo from Zen Habits has a nice article about opting out of gift exchanges. Although Leo’s reasons are different than mine, he shares some insightful food for thought.

Read related articles:

• Timeboxing
• The Best Valentine’s Day Gift
• Social Bankruptcy
• A Cup of Tea With the Grim Reaper
• How to Network With Busy People – Part 3
• How to Make More Intelligent Info Product Purchases
• Freeing Mental RAM

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Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Several months ago I was speaking with my friend Morty Lefkoe about fears and limiting beliefs that I noticed among my readers. I shared with him that one of the biggest problem areas was approach anxiety. While many readers appear to be very social online, it’s common for them to be pretty socially timid in person — I know this quite well from interacting with them both online and face to face.

Social timidity is frequently a result of approach anxiety. Instead of proactively approaching new people to form connections (for friendship, dating, networking, etc), these people often hold back. There can be a variety of reasons for why they hold back, but it typically boils down to fear caused by limiting beliefs about approaching people, initiating conversations, expressing interest, etc.

When I shared this with Morty, I figured there might be 5-10 common limiting beliefs that contributed to approach anxiety, such as “being rejected is bad” or “I’m not good enough.”

Morty grew curious about what limiting beliefs he might find if he investigated this further. Since his specialty is helping people eliminate limiting beliefs quickly and permanently, this was right up his alley. I’ve been recommended Morty’s method for more than two years now, and many people have found it an effective way to remove beliefs that were previously holding them back, so I figured the subject of approach anxiety would be a worthwhile area for him to explore, one that would be a good fit for his process. Morty agreed.

Morty also knew that if he could figure out the most common limiting beliefs that contributed to approach anxiety, he could use that information to create a new product that would help people with this specific challenge, so this undertaking made good business sense as well.

Investigating Approach Anxiety

To explore this more deeply, Morty recruited volunteers who felt socially limited by approach anxiety, those who rated their fear at least a 7 on a scale of 1-10. Then he interviewed them to discover what beliefs were making them feel anxious or hesitant to connect with new people.

To Morty’s surprise (and to my own as well), he discovered a great variety of beliefs that contributed to approach anxiety. There weren’t just a handful of them — there were dozens that he was able to identify.

The main problem wasn’t the quantity of beliefs, however. The bigger issue was that there was very little overlap between participants, meaning that each person had different beliefs that contributed to their experience of approach anxiety.

This meant that it wouldn’t be practical for Morty to create a single product to help people eliminate this problem. Morty can still use his method to help such people one on one by phone or Skype, but he can’t turn it into a product because there’s too much variety in people’s limiting beliefs. To eliminate a limiting belief, it must first be identified, and that identification process plays out differently for each person.

I was disappointed that we couldn’t use this idea to create a new product that would help people afflicted by approach anxiety. I liked the idea of helping people to permanently and inexpensively eliminate such a problem. But I didn’t want to let Morty’s initial research go to waste, so I asked him if I could share the backstory about this idea and the beliefs he was able to identify with his volunteers, and he graciously agreed.

I expect this may still be helpful to many people since identifying a limiting belief is an important first step in eliminating it. Sometimes just being aware that you have a negative belief can get you started on the path to letting it go.

Limiting Beliefs That Contribute to Approach Anxiety

For this project Morty focused his interviews on men, so all of the subjects were male. He surely would have uncovered even more limiting beliefs if he expanded this to include women as well.

The age range of the participants was 20-38 with most in their 20s. And as I mentioned previously, Morty asked people to rate their fear on a scale of 1-10 and chose people who answered at least a 7.

Here are some of the feelings these participants reported:

1. Anxiety when talking to a woman
2. Fear of being criticized or judged
3. Fear of talking to an attractive woman

And here’s a list of limiting beliefs related to approach anxiety that Morty and his participants were able to identify:

1. Change is difficult.
2. I can’t do anything right.
3. If a woman isn’t attracted to a man initially, she never will be.
4. I’m a bother to people.
5. I’m a dangerous person.
6. I’m annoying.
7. I’m a loser.
8. I’m broken.
9. I’m inadequate.
10. I’m inferior.
11. I’m not acceptable.
12. I’m not attractive.
13. I’m not good enough.
14. I’m not interesting.
15. I’m socially awkward.
16. I’m ugly.
17. I’m unlovable / not lovable.
18. I’m weird.
19. It’s wrong to show sexual interest in a woman.
20. It’s wrong to be attracted to women.
21. It’s wrong to be turned on by women.
22. My sexual desire is bad.
23. People aren’t interested in me.
24. People aren’t interested in what I have to say.
25. Relationships are difficult.
26. There’s something wrong with me.
27. What makes me good enough or important enough is having people like me.
28. Women don’t want nice guys.
29. Women don’t want to be bothered.
30. Women don’t want to talk to guys.
31. Women want more financial security than I could provide.
32. Women want men who are assertive and get what they want.
33. Women want attractive men.
34. Women want interesting men.
35. Women want men who are confident / flirtatious.
36. Women want men who are witty / make them laugh.
37. Women want men who treat them badly.
38. Women want men with exciting lifestyles.
39. Women want men with money and stability.
40. Women want popular guys.
41. Women want security / to be protected physically.
42. Women want successful men.

This is an interesting collection to be sure, but it’s far from exhaustive. I’m sure you can identify many more, especially if we consider limiting beliefs that women have as well.

We can loosely categorize this list into beliefs about oneself, beliefs about others, and beliefs about interactions.

Overcoming Limiting Beliefs

Many of the self-related beliefs are linked with low self-esteem and a low sense of attractiveness. Eliminating the negative belief is one way to fix those problems. Another way is to shift your focus onto your overall lifestyle, and take more action to create a life that fulfills you. When people are pleased with their lifestyles, it shows. It’s easier to attract people you like when you’re enjoying the other parts of your life. It’s also easier to attract compatible partners when you’re already living a life you enjoy.

As for the beliefs about others, the main issue there is overgeneralization. Everyone has different standards for what they find attractive and what they don’t. These patterns certainly aren’t universal.

With billions of people on earth, we can find many people who may fit those patterns and many who don’t. And in any given week, people can oscillate between matching and not matching these patterns. Sometimes people feel social and would be glad to be approached by almost anyone. At other times people turn inward and prefer more solitude.

One pattern I see here is the implied limiting belief that if you approach someone who doesn’t want to connect with you (for whatever reason), and you get rejected as a result, then you made a mistake and never should have approached in the first place.

Of course there isn’t much real danger in trying to initiate and deepen connections, but that doesn’t make the fear any less real. The fear may be rooted in false beliefs and erroneous assumptions, but it can still exert control over one’s behavior.

There is a matter of calibration involved here, so as you gain experience, you can increase your hit rate, but this doesn’t mean that getting a rejection now and then is a terrible thing to be avoided at all costs. It’s really no big whoop. You basically have to risk some rejection in order to build experience. The more experience you have, the easier it is to read people and get a sense of who’s open to connecting with you and who isn’t. Making a mistake here isn’t the end of the world.

The good news is that when these limiting beliefs were eliminated, the fear went away too. And when the fear goes away, that’s where the fun begins.

Finding Counterexamples

One of my favorite methods for eliminating limiting beliefs is to deliberately seek out counterexamples. If I can find even one or two counterexamples for a belief, then the belief tends to collapse. My mind can no longer pretend that it’s true.

A long time ago I had the belief that women aren’t interested in sex as much as men are. I also had some related beliefs about sexuality being bad or sinful. I can credit 12 years of Catholic school for installing such notions. This certainly isn’t uncommon.

Then I saw the movie Kinsey, which opened my eyes to the notion that sexual desire is a very individual thing. That helped put a dent in my overgeneralized beliefs.

Later I met women who were comfortable talking about sex openly, and they shared thoughts, feelings, and attitudes that contradicted my old beliefs. It took me a while to make the 180-degree turn from my Catholicism-installed falsehoods, but I eventually collapsed those limiting beliefs.

I also had to be careful about installing opposite beliefs like “women love sex more than men do” since that’s an overgeneralization as well. I find it more helpful to accept the notion that this is a very individual thing.

Accepting Variety

Overgeneralizing is an attempt to treat everyone the same, as if you can come up with a single pattern or strategy that works well with everyone. Generalizing works okay in some areas of life, but in other areas there’s too much variety, including in the area of human relationships.

Our brains automatically and unconsciously seek out patterns in specific data, but sometimes they make mistakes, and we need to consciously adjust their conclusions.

Deep down we may indeed have similar needs and desires, but we have different ways of satisfying those needs and desires. So what one person finds attractive, another person finds creepy, boring, or repulsive.

If you can accept this, you’ll see that it’s silly to expect everyone to like you as you are. Some people will. Some people won’t. Such are the vicissitudes of life.

Instead of trying to get someone to like you or worrying about saying or doing the right things to create attraction, it makes more sense to express your personality and preferences openly to the degree that’s possible, and then let other people self-select if they feel they match you.

Alternatively, you can focus on initiating connections with people you find attractive, while accepting that your interest may not be mutual. If the other person doesn’t feel the same, it doesn’t mean you aren’t awesome. It just means the other person doesn’t agree that you’d be a good match. Certainly that isn’t the end of the world. There are billions of other people you can seek to match with.

For the past several years, I’ve mainly been using the expressiveness strategy because I’ve had so much social input coming my way. All I really had to do was to express myself openly and shamelessly, and then I could select among the people who seemed to resonate with what I shared. If people didn’t like me, they usually filtered themselves out of my reality, and if they didn’t, then it was easy for me to decline to interact with them. If people initiated interactions with me as a result of what I shared, then I could choose to accept some of those invites, and at least I was guaranteed to have an interaction with someone who was interested in connecting.

This worked well for attracting people who are interested in me, but it doesn’t give me as much opportunity to connect with people that I find equally interesting. So for the past several months, I’ve been closing most of those open doors (like my Facebook page, the forums, and my contact form), so fewer people can approach me to connect. This gives me more opportunity to initiate my own connections with people I’d like to get to know better and to be more selective.

With my old socialization strategy, I would sometimes stray into my own version of approach anxiety, but of a different sort than the one discussed earlier. I actually worry more about being approached. Will the person be interesting? Will they be honest about their intentions? Are they just trying to get something from me?

As my social interactions became increasingly patterned, I felt I was at risk of developing limiting beliefs like “Everyone needs something from me” and “People are energy vampires.” I thought it best to turn off the flood of incoming connections for a while, so I could have more space to consciously think about what kind of social life I’d like to create and experience.

The benefit of getting limiting beliefs out of the way is that it creates more room for conscious choice.

Training Up

Another favorite way to tackle limiting beliefs is with progressive training. I see limitations as a weight to be lifted. The more you train the relevant muscles, the easier it is to lift and finally dispose of the limitation.

As a child I was very shy. In kindergarten I used to play in the sandbox alone most of the time. If I had any friends, it was just one or two close friends that I played with. I didn’t feel very comfortable socializing with other children, especially in large groups.

In grammar school what I hated more than anything else were speech contests. These were mandatory every year in my school, but I never felt comfortable presenting in front of the class. I got nervous, my hands would shake, and I was pretty bad at it too.

I improved a little from this forced practice, but I still didn’t like that I got nervous when I spoke in front of the class.

Eventually I decided to conquer this fear, and I thought that progressive training would be a good strategy. I started volunteering to speak tech conferences. Then I joined Toastmasters and later the National Speakers Association to keep making progress.

This approach took time, but it worked. The more practice I got, the more comfortable I became with speaking, and the less nervous I was. Now I feel just as comfortable in front of a group as I do playing video games with my kids. What used to be anxiety producing now gets channeled into enthusiasm and fun. I now find myself looking for ways to make it more challenging; if it feels too easy, it isn’t as stimulating for me.

Enlisting Social Support

Another important thing to realize is that you can be afraid and still take action. This is hard to do on your own, but it’s much easier to do when you have some social support. Without social support it’s too easy to succumb to fear and make excuses. But when you’ve committed yourself to people who will hold you accountable, it’s harder not to act.

For example, if you agree to give a speech, you’ll usually find that you can still follow through even if you’re really anxious about it. People do this all the time. They get up to the mike, and for the first several minutes they’re nervous. You can see their hands shaking. Or their voice cracks and they can barely catch their breath. They’re clearly having an emotional reaction, but they still do it.

What may surprise you is that many pro speakers with decades of practice still get nervous when they speak. But they’ve learned that if they agree to speak anyway, they’re going to follow through even if they’re nervous.

Think about how you can apply this idea of social support to other forms of social interactions that may be troubling you. Can you invite a few friends to encourage you along the way and to hold you accountable?

I’ve seen how well this works at some of my workshops. People who can’t get themselves to start up a conversation with a stranger can suddenly take action when they have two accountability partners encouraging and supporting them.

Further Help

Although we don’t have a singular solution that works for everyone, approach anxiety is a problem that can be overcome.

If you want more information about how Morty can help you with such challenges, feel free to call him at 415-884-0552, and ask about working one on one with him. For help in overcoming other limiting beliefs, be sure to read my blog post about this. You can also test Morty’s method to eliminate a limiting belief for free.

If you prefer a very hands-on approach to improving your social skills, I invite you to attend the 3-day Conscious Relationships Workshop (Feb 17-19 in Las Vegas). Approach anxiety is one of many topics we’ll address, both with group discussions and interactive exercises. At CRW you’ll have the opportunity to experiment and receive feedback in a positive, supportive, nonjudgmental environment.

However you decide to tackle the challenge of approach anxiety, try not to be so hard on yourself. It’s not the end of the world if someone doesn’t want to connect with you. No matter how weird or broken you think you are (or how cold you think other people are), many people would enjoy your company.

People can provide value to each other in the simplest of ways, such as by listening to each other, sharing a meal, and holding hands as they go for a stroll. If you can smile, you can provide something that millions (probably billions) of people would receive as valuable and worthwhile.

Read related articles:

• Remove a Limiting Belief in About 20 Minutes
• Lefkoe Method Video
• 8 Guidelines for Choosing Effective Beliefs
• StevePavlina.com Podcast #012 – Building Confidence
• Domination and Submission
• Man Transformation – How to Attract and Enjoy a Fulfilling Relationship
• Installing Empowering Beliefs

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Conscious Relationships Workshop - Feb 17-19, 2012


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Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

The Conscious Success Workshop this past weekend went amazingly well, even better than I expected. I received lots of positive feedback on it afterwards as well as some suggestions to improve it if/when we run it again. It was a very rewarding weekend to be sure. It’s gratifying to know we stimulated lots of positive growth and change for those who attended.

These workshops are highly interactive and very unlike anything else out there. Each workshop is centered around a core of serious content where I share the best tools I’ve encountered and plenty of stories and examples to illustrate them. We also have plenty of social exercises so you can easily make new friends, written exercises to help you apply the ideas right away, group discussions for people to share their own stories and contribute helpful ideas, creative exercises, games, and more. At CSW we even had some spontaneous music as well.

$100 Early Bird Discount for CRW expires Jan 17

Next month we have the Conscious Relationships Workshop (Feb 17-19 in Las Vegas). The $100 early bird discount expires at midnight on Jan 17, which is tomorrow, so if that workshop interests you, this would be a good time to sign up. The group rate for the hotel will expire soon as well; the cutoff date for that is Jan 20.

Just to clarity, the relationships workshop is about more than just romantic relationships. We’ll cover that of course, but we’ll also address friends, family relationships, working relationships, networking, connecting with strangers, overcoming approach anxiety, and much more. The core of this workshop is upgrade your social skills, so that you can connect more easily with new people, deepen your existing connections, and learn a wide variety of tools for resolving conflicts and other relationship challenges.

As I mentioned at the Conscious Success Workshop, our relationships are the primary means through which we create success for ourselves and others. Without relationships, success has little meaning.

As with all of these workshops, the keyword is “Conscious.” This means that these workshops aren’t centered around what matters to me. They’re centered around what matters to you. The idea is to help you clarity what’s most important to you in life — on your path of growth, to your lifelong success, in your intimate and casual relationships. Then we help you learn and apply a variety of tools to make your desires a reality.

So for our relationships workshop, it doesn’t matter if your intention is to find a marriage partner, to deepen your existing relationship, to date around a lot, to be celibate, or to explore polyamory. Anything you desire is fair game. The point of CRW is to help you more deeply understand what you truly desire in your relationships, to help you accept those desires, and to assist you in making them real for you.

Hope to see you at CRW next month.

Read related articles:

• Gearing Up for CGW #6
• CSW Almost Sold Out
• 3-Day Las Vegas Workshop Oct 2-4

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Conscious Relationships Workshop - Feb 17-19, 2012


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Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

The Conscious Success Workshop starts in only 10 days (Jan 13-15, 2012 in Las Vegas). We’re close to selling out, so if you’re planning to sign up, please don’t wait till the last minute, or there’s a possibility we won’t have any seats left.

I estimate that we can sell about 6 more tickets before the room is at capacity. (Update: We now have only 3 seats left.)

This is the eighth 3-day workshop we’ll be doing in Las Vegas. When I look back on our first Conscious Growth Workshop in 2009, I see that we’ve really come a long way. I especially enjoy the process of designing workshops that are empowering, engaging, social, and practical.

I’d say that the main difference between CSW and other programs on success is this: A typical book, audio program, or workshop on success usually begins with setting goals. After you set some goals, you get a bunch of advice on how to take action to move towards those goals.

This approach does work for some people, but it usually fails. The problem is that it’s too likely that you’ll set socially conditioned goals to begin with — goals such as how much money to earn, what car to buy, how much weight to lose, or what kind of job to get. Those goals may look good on paper, but they’re not enough to center your life around — they’re too shallow and too boring compared to what you can create with a more conscious approach.

If you dive into goal setting too soon, you may come up with some ideas and feel slightly motivated as you write them down, but that motivation won’t last, and those goals won’t stick. That’s because the goals you set weren’t really yours to begin with. If you find yourself changing directions every few months and not sticking with any goals long enough to achieve them, the most likely reason is that you haven’t learned how to set goals consciously. The goals you set were just surface thoughts. If you did the same goal setting exercise a month later, you’d have come up with different goals.

At CSW we’re going to use a smarter and more conscious approach. We’ll address goal setting but not right away. First we’ll help you identify and discard socially conditioned surface goals. Once we get those out of the way, then we can go deeper into what you truly desire to experience in life. We’ll help you build a solid foundation of self-understanding with a variety of exercises, with the aim of creating a holistic life vision, not a disjointed set of goals. Once you have a clear vision for your life and you understand the person you wish to be, you can set goals much more consciously, but you can also enjoy a lot of fulfillment and success simply by sticking to your vision, even when you don’t set specific goals along the way.

CSW is designed to help you discover and embrace what it will take for you to be a success, based on your values and desires. Once you get in touch with that, it’s easier to get into the mode of doing success by taking action. This being aspect is crucial if you wish to experience the type of success that results from your own conscious choices, as opposed to the socially conditioned version of success that’s promoted by mainstream media. Conscious success will fulfill you deeply. Socially conditioned success may leave you feeling very empty inside, regardless of how much you seem to have achieved.

As a simple example, I enjoy conscious success as a writer because my writing is aligned with my true desires. I find it very fulfilling to share ideas with others around the world through the medium of blogging. I write when I’m inspired to write, not because I have to. I have no deadlines, no boss, and no editor. My articles are uncopyrighted by choice, so anyone can republish or translate them.

I enjoy this type of success because I’ve shed the socially conditioned version of success that doesn’t align with my truest, deepest desires. I don’t care if I have a New York Times bestseller. I don’t care about being on Oprah. I don’t care about making millions of dollars. I don’t care what the critics have to say. This vision of writing makes me very happy, and I feel tremendously successful on this path. On the contrary, I have friends who seem much less happy as writers, even though they’ve been on Oprah and have the bestseller accolades. They’re on a stressful treadmill; I’m free.

There will be many creative exercises to help you go through this process. Some are left-brained, others more right-brained. One exercise involves crayons.

If you’ve found that traditional goal setting has fallen short for you, or if you suspect your goals have been overly infected with what society has taught you to want, I think you’ll really gain a lot from CSW. One of my intentions for this workshop is that by the end of the first day, you’ll have more clarity about your true desires than you’ve ever had before in your life. I say this because most people never learn how to differentiate between true desires and socially conditioned ones, and I don’t know of any other workshops that teach people how to tell the difference.

One of the most powerful aspects of CSW is that it will help to unload false notions of success you’ve been conditioned to believe without question. This will restore your freedom to consciously choose what you desire to experience — and to create it without getting bogged down in false desires. It will be a richly rewarding 3 days for you to experience… and certainly for me to share with you.

Read related articles:

• Workshop Update
• Post Your Goals Where You Can See Them
• Big, hairy, audacious goals
• End Goals vs. Means Goals
• List of Values
• The Meaning of Life: From Purpose to Action
• Your Goal Scoreboard

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Conscious Relationships Workshop - Feb 17-19, 2012


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Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

After shutting down the discussion forums a week ago, I took some time to think about my major focus for 2012, as I like to do at the beginning of each new year.

To wrap up 2011 and transition to 2012, Rachelle and I went to Phoenix for Raw Spirit Fest, and then yesterday we took a side trip to Sedona to meditate in one of our favorite spots. This retreat gave me time to reflect on the past year and to understand what I want to experience next.

During the past few years, I’ve been very active in the social circles surrounding my work, including connecting with people in the forums, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, email, talking face to face, doing consultations, holding workshops, hosting meet-ups in various cities, and so on. I maintained a strong community-oriented focus for much of this time.

For a while it was my conscious choice to immerse myself in all this social energy and to bring people together in various ways. I enjoyed it.

Eventually I began to feel a bit trapped though. Instead of choosing all this social interaction, it became an ever-present part of my life, whether I wanted to engage with it or not. It no longer felt like a choice. I’d engage in social networking simply because I’d been doing so for years. It became unconscious and very routine. Consequently, I developed quite a love-hate relationship with it. When I freely chose it, I loved it. When I felt like I was being sucked into it, I resisted it. I’m well aware that this influenced my interactions with people as well.

I now understand that it’s time for me to move on from this community-centered focus. It was a nice thing to experience, and it stimulated a lot of growth for myself and others, but I know it’s not the best choice going forward. If I keep doing it, it will only hold me back, and it will also suck others into more unconscious socializing.

Getting wrapped up in other people’s energies (thoughts, feelings, beliefs, etc) on a daily basis can be stimulating and rewarding, but the endless repetition can lead to resentment. That isn’t how I wish to feel about my social life, nor do I wish to serve as that kind of model for others.

If I continue actively immersing myself in the social community surrounding my work, I’ll become a victim of my own past. People are typically drawn to my work based on what I’ve written about in the past, but that isn’t who I am today, and it doesn’t accurately reflect where I’m going. When I keep connecting with people who are interested in discussing ideas that I explored years ago, it means I’m not keeping pace with my own path of growth. It’s like trying to drive while looking in the rear view mirror — after a while you begin to hate driving, even if you’d otherwise enjoy it when looking forward.

I’m delighted that so many people resonate with my work. Last month my web traffic hit a new all-time high: 12.4 million page views. Yet all of those pages contain content that was created in the past.

Essentially I’m faced with a question of priorities. Do I continue to actively engage with the social community surrounding my work and allow myself to keep getting re-immersed in past ideas, past energies, etc? Or do I let it go and focus on my own present and future path of growth?

For quite a while, I tried to do both and strike a balance. My efforts along those lines thus far have failed. Maybe a balance is possible, but I can see now that this balancing point isn’t going to be on the side that invites daily social connections that tie me to the past, such as emails, article feedback, private messages, questions, etc.

All this social energy has been acting like an anchor. When I try to move forward, it keeps tugging me back to old ideas I’ve already explored. It re-introduces old problems I’ve already solved but that other people are just beginning to solve. It tempts me to engage in old discussions that have no growth value for me today.

This month is my 15-year anniversary of being vegan, for instance. Is there any value in having the “why vegan” discussion with someone who hasn’t even done a 30-day trial of it yet? Will it be helpful to do more interviews on polyphasic sleep? Do I care to engage with people who think organized religion is the path to salvation? No… that’s looking to the past. I’d rather connect with people who can inspire me to keep growing. To make room for empowering connections, I’m consciously cutting connections that encourage me to keep looking backwards.

I love helping people grow, but I’m not willing to do that at the expense of my own growth.

So in 2012 I want to recenter my life on my path of conscious growth. I want to disengage from all the discussion surrounding my past work and free myself to explore life on my own terms once again.

The forums are closed. My online contact form is closed. I deleted my Facebook page a few months ago. I follow zero people on Twitter, so no one can send me a direct message there. My Google+ page is now closed to comments. If you wish to discuss my work, you remain free to do so; just don’t try to involve me in such discussions.

Socially I’m only keeping open the doors that I consciously choose to keep open, such as my workshops. But I’m closing the doors that encourage too much unconscious communication, such as feedback and questions related to past articles.

Part of this shift involved preparing for the upcoming Conscious Success Workshop, which starts in 11 days. One reason I enjoy creating workshops is that they push me to keep raising my standards. My vision of success involves consciously pursuing my own path of growth, and I want to know that I’m solidly living that vision before delivering this workshop.

As I clear out the mental and social clutter, I’m feeling much lighter and more enthusiastic about this coming year. I’m anticipating new experiments and experiences. I especially love this fresh opportunity to fully engage in what captivates me without regard to other people’s feedback.

In some ways I feel like I’ve been assimilated by the Borg collective for the past few years. There were so many voices in my mind that it was difficult to stay connected to my own desires. Now that those voices are quieting down, I’m enjoying the bliss and peace of reconnecting with what I love most — conscious growth experiences.

Disconnecting from the social elements that didn’t serve me doesn’t mean I’m disconnecting from the world. I love to write and expect to continue doing so. Reading people’s feedback on my writing, however, is something I can live without. I feel I’ve digested enough feedback about my writing to last me a few lifetimes, so I’m cashing in some of those credits to opt out for a lifetime or two.

In addition to refocusing on my own path of growth in 2012 and closing the door on daily social networking, I’d like to reorient my social life to spend more time connecting with others who have similar priorities when it comes to pursuing growth experiences. I had hoped I might meet such people through the social networks surrounding my work, but that didn’t happen. One reason is that such people would rather engage in growth experiences than in discussions about growth. They’d rather travel than talk about travel… would rather speak than discuss speaking… and would rather start a business than talk about starting one.

I don’t want to connect with such people in order to have more discussions about growth. I’d rather connect with people who are up for pursuing some growth experiences together — like traveling together, conducting experiments together, or tackling projects together. We can always talk to each other in the car, on the plane, etc.

Most importantly, when I connect with people, I want to do so from a place of conscious choice, not from a sense of habit, obligation, or routine. What’s most important to me in life is pursuing my path of growth. That comes first. But when this path meshes nicely with another’s path for a while, then why not explore our paths together if it’s something we both enjoy?

Read related articles:

• Workshop Update
• Social Bankruptcy
• CSW Almost Sold Out
• 2011 Focus
• 30-Day Facebook Fast
• Self-Help Cynics
• Social Networking: Rethinking Productivity

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Conscious Relationships Workshop - Feb 17-19, 2012


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Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

In this post I’ll share more details about the reasons I decided to shut down the discussion forums on this site. As I stated in my previous post, I closed them on Dec 26th. The forum archives are still online, and you can search them too.

Forum vs. Blog

First, let’s talk data.

After more than 5 years online, the forums had a total of 48,465 registered members. Registration was required to post messages and send private messages, but anyone could read the forums without registrering. Registration was always free and took just a couple minutes.

That may sound like a large community to some people, but the total number of forum members after 5 years online was still less than one day’s traffic to my blog.

Out of all those members, less than 10,000 of them posted more than 5 messages total, so most of them didn’t participate much at all.

On any given day, however, only about 400 members would visit the forums, although many of them would visit multiple times per day. Even if we include non-registered “lurker” traffic (which includes search engine referrals), it’s clear that the forums aren’t even in the same ballpark as the blog when it comes to traffic.

The truth is that the vast majority of visitors to my blog simply aren’t interested in our discussion forums.

How did the forums become popular in the first place? They were always attached to my blog, which fed them traffic. The forums were always busy with activity due to this connection to the blog. Without the blog it’s fair to say that the forums wouldn’t have been nearly as popular.

Some people have asked me what impact shutting down the forums would have on my blog and my business in general. The answer is that it’s not going to make any discernable difference. Relative to the popularity of the blog, the forums never had enough interest to matter in that regard one way or another.

What about all the content in the forums? Our forum members posted about 1.03M messages across 67K threads. You might think that all this content must generate a lot of search engine traffic, but relative to the blog, it’s still negligible. One popular blog post of mine will generate more search traffic than 10K forum threads.

Forum threads can help with the long tail of search, but they don’t help enough to matter. They can rank in the top 10 for phrases that aren’t competitive, but these are phrases that hardly anyone searches on. Even with lots and lots of threads, it’s like trying to earn a living by hunting for pennies. You may find many pennies, but even a lot of pennies just doesn’t amount to much.

Forum threads aren’t very good at generating human referrals either… unless it’s a thread about the forums being shut down, as I recently discovered.

I just want to point out that business-wise the forums were never a wise investment of time and resources.

However, I neither launched nor terminated the forums for business reasons. It was a personal decision to create them and a personal decision to shut them down.

A High-Maintenance Community

My vision for the forums stayed pretty much the same throughout its existence, with minor tweaks along the way. I wanted to create a place where growth-oriented people could come together to help each other in a positive and supportive environment. Overall I’d say the forums did a pretty good job of holding to that vision, thanks in large part to the wonderful moderators who helped make it a reality.

By and large our community rules were common sense — the same conventions people naturally adhere to in face-to-face conversations. Most of our members had no trouble following them. When we banned members, usually it was for spamming, and our mods were really good at catching spammers early.

This wasn’t the first forum I founded. I’d already had years of experience as an admin with a previous forum I created for indie game developers. That community is still online by the way, even though I haven’t been involved with it for 7-8 years.

The forum on this site was much bigger from the get-go, and it took a lot more admin and moderation work to keep it on track.

I had zero interest in creating an unmoderated forum — for the most part I consider such things to be junk. I knew this one would require careful moderation. The vision dictated that.

In the beginning we were definitely too lenient. Some sneaky Internet marketers got in there, and trolling was a recurring problem. But we kept tweaking things, and I feel that for quite a while, we got it mostly right.

I don’t think perfection is a reasonable standard, but it’s clear that many of our members felt there was no other forum quite as good as ours. In the area in which it worked, I believe it was the best available. You could say that was part of my vision too — to create the best personal development forum on earth.

One thing that was impressive about our community was the diversity of topics. Anything related to personal growth was fair game, including health, work, relationships, finances, spiritual development, politics, and more.

The community took a lot of work to maintain, but for much of that time it was a labor of love. I know it did a lot of good for many people. I know because people kept telling me that it helped them.

Entitlement Creeps in

As I wrote about in a previous article, we had some issues with entitlement creeping into the community. Some people seemed to feel they could annoy other members as much as they wanted as long as they stayed within the gray area of the rules. Others felt they could push further in the direction of using the forums to promote their businesses or affiliate programs. The mods and I often had to make tricky calls in this zone, but we did our best.

Some people would assume that the top standard was fairness. It wasn’t, at least not for me. Forum participation isn’t a fair trade to begin with. It’s a gift. In practice the standard of fairness doesn’t work well; it allows trolls to linger too long and to degrade the community experience for too many others.

Fairness is also very costly. It may make sense for a democracy that has tax revenues to pay for all the structures required to be reasonably fair, but a very active forum that doesn’t tax its members can’t adhere to such a standard. We’re not going to give someone a 12-person jury trial every time they break the rules and claim otherwise. Instead we have to make the best judgment calls we can, and we have to do this quickly.

The top standard I used was to maintain a positive and supportive community. When people worked against that vision, I sought to weed them out. The community rules were designed to support that vision too. Sometimes this meant doing things people felt were unfair, but usually that wasn’t necessary.

The Regulars

As often happens in online communities, ours developed a core group of regulars over time. I would estimate there were around 100 people in this core group at any one time. It wasn’t a sharply defined group though, and some people wouldn’t even be able to say whether they were in this group or not. One thing was clear though — many members felt like outsiders relative to this group.

Some members considered this group rather cliquish, but I wouldn’t use that label. I saw it as a bunch of people who participated in the forums so often that they got to know each other and became online friends. This happens in many forums and was nothing new to me.

You could also say that many of them were quite addicted. Some of them spent hours on the forums pretty much every day. I didn’t have a problem with them using the place as a social hangout too, as long as they weren’t interfering with the overall forum vision. But increasingly I found that they were clinging to the social aspects and nudging the forum away from its original vision.

I don’t think there was any deliberate intent behind it, but this core group collectively became the dominating force in the forums. Some of them served as moderators, whereby they were often charged with moderating people who may have been their friends. This had positive and negative aspects. These friends usually helped keep each other in line by exerting social pressure when someone began to stray, but they also became somewhat protective of their own, as we saw whenever one of them ended up getting banned.

How did these people dominate the community? By sheer volume of posts.

The average community member made a total of 21 posts. The top poster, by contrast, had 22,520 posts. That’s 1061 times the average. And there were many members with 100+ times the posting frequency of the average member.

If you’re willing to outpost someone by a factor of even 10-to-1, I’d say you can dominate them pretty easily as far as a discussion forum is involved.

This by itself garnered some complaints, but if the people in this group were being helpful most of the time, then I didn’t have a serious issue with it. Again, I was evaluating the forum health relative to the overall vision.

The Cancer of Entitlement

Over time I felt like this core group was developing too much of a sense of entitlement. It was detracting from the forum vision, and wasting my time and that of the mods. We spent more time managing social interaction problems with the members of this group, and it often seemed that they were posting just for the sake of posting as opposed to using the forums purposefully. The signal-to-noise ratio degraded.

The mods were pretty efficient at catching and nuking spammers, but more time was being chewed up dealing with the personality clashes of the regulars. It seemed like my job as admin was devolving into babysitting. I wasn’t interested in dealing with it, so I let things slide for a while as I focused on other projects like my workshops.

The mods easily handled the routine items, but when it came to controversial bans involving one of the regulars, they had a hard time pulling the trigger. They frequently opted to keep giving warnings instead. But this response amounts to what’s called intermittent reinforcement conditioning. Effectively this rewards the negative behavior and conditions the offender to do more of the same by proving that s/he can get away with it. So things gradually got worse during this time, and some members quit the forums because of it. I don’t blame them.

When I decided to look into fixing these problems, I tightened standards and reminded mods that we shouldn’t be giving members half a dozen warnings. The rules are simple and not at all difficult to follow. But when the next incident came up which seemed pretty clear cut, they still hesitated. I could see the mods were agreed on the right call, but it was hard for anyone to step up and take responsibility for it. So I sped things along because it would have been worse not to act quickly. Then I had to deal with the banned guy emailing me to complain and then trash-talking me elsewhere. Truth is he’d been behaving like a jerk for a long time and should have been banned much sooner. Some forum members expressed great appreciation that he was finally kicked out.

In some cases it may have been hard to ban one’s friends, but I don’t think that was an issue most of the time. I’d say the bigger problem is that too many mods were hesitant to act on their calls. They’d seen what happened to other mods who ended up having to ban one or more of the regulars. Collectively the regulars would often unload lots of whining, questioning, criticizing, and pleading upon any mods who made unpopular calls. And when you’re dealing with forum addicts who can post like there’s no tomorrow, this post-storm can seem a bit overwhelming, as if you just inflicted some grave wound upon the community. The calls were right, but I can understand why some mods were hesitant to deal with the social backlash.

I felt the mods were excellent at making the right calls, and I agreed with their calls virtually every time. Where we disagreed was on what to do about it. I was in favor of quickly pruning out the forum members who couldn’t play nice. The mods overall fell back on warnings, but we could all see that these warnings were not proving very effective. The mods were quite good at pruning new members who caused problems, but they had a hard time enforcing the same standards with the regulars. I think it’s reasonable to be slightly more lenient with people who’ve been contributing for a while, but not lenient to the point of allowing negative behavior to linger.

This reminds me of a management study I read about many years ago. Testing showed that managers who didn’t get promoted were just as correct in their decisions as managers who did get promoted. The difference is that the promoted managers were willing to act on their judgments and deal with the consequences.

If it sounds like I’m placing blame on the mods for these problems, I’m not. It was my responsibility. I could have invested more time in training them, and I could have replaced them if I felt they weren’t being too wishy washy. If I had it to do all over again, I’d have been far more strict when it came to enforcing standards. The rules worked great and remained very consistent throughout the forums’ existence. The problem was consistent and efficient enforcement.

When this lack of decisive action lingered too long, it created a problematic climate. There was a conditioning effect on the community as a whole. It taught them that we were going to be exceedingly lenient on the regulars and that they could get away with stretching the rules quite a bit. This had a deleterious effect on the community over time, and it drove some people away.

Despite these problems, I still wanted to turn things around and get the community back to its original vision. I realized that wasn’t going to be easy, but I thought it was doable.

A Turning Point

Then an interesting thing happened. Apparently some members and ex-members of our community got together to create their own discussion forum.

That didn’t bother me at all. If the circumstances by which this played out were different, I’d probably have been supportive of them doing that. After all, having some of them jump ship would have made my life easier.

Instead, the way this played out was that I learned that they were secretly using the private messaging system on my forums to send out dozens of unsolicited messages asking people to join them. This mainly involved sending the same copy-and-pasted solicitation to multiple recipients.

This is called PM spam. It doesn’t happen very often, but we’d seen it several times before throughout the forums’ history. When people do this sort of thing, we ban them outright since we have zero tolerance for spamming. Normally no one even notices when PM spammers are caught and banned, but this time the people involved were regulars and were promoting their own private project, so of course they and their friends made a stink about it, even as others thought that banning the offenders was more than warranted.

Some people seemed to think I reacted negatively because I felt hurt or betrayed that these people were sneaking off to another forum. Seriously, I could care less about that. I don’t own our members. I interact with other communities too, not just this one. What annoyed me was that they did this clandestinely by using our forum’s PM system for their recruitment. Spamming in all its incarnations, including PM spamming, has always been against the rules, and I wouldn’t tolerate it from regulars any more than I would from new members. In my book these people had clearly crossed the line.

The fact that they were promoting another forum was incidental. My reaction would have been the same if they were promoting a blog, affiliate program, Facebook group, charity, event sponsorship, school project, or any other kind of link. When the same message is sent to dozens of our members unsolicited, it’s spamming. I realize that some people felt it was okay due to the nature of the message and the fact that it came from forum regulars. I was most definitely not okay with that. It’s an abuse of our system and a direct violation of our rules. And this sneaky behavior doesn’t mesh with the forum vision either in my view. The fact that they kept this a secret was a hint and half they knew they were doing something wrong.

And so I banned some of the perpetrators that I could readily identify, and when someone in the forum asked why the bans occurred, I quickly explained the reasons. Normally I wouldn’t bother with that, but I wanted to take responsibility for the decision, so that if they wanted to hold anyone accountable for it, it would be me… and they wouldn’t start bashing the mods for doing so.

Of course since the people who did this were among the regulars, they had a lot of friends in the community. There was some outrage in response, which was predictable.

At this point I hadn’t decided to shut down the forums, nor did I have any intention of doing so. However, I began to seriously think about it as the situation unfolded.

It wasn’t the spamming that led me to think about shutting down the forums. The spamming incident was surprising and annoying, especially when I discovered that some of our mods were involved too, but I didn’t see it as a reason to close up shop by itself. I dropped the mods that I could verify were involved; they’d broken my trust, and I wasn’t willing to entrust them with such responsibilities after that.

The decision to shut down the forums resulted from a shift in perspective I had upon seeing people’s reaction to this event. A bunch of people began taking sides. Some people were curious and wanted to know more details. Some just wanted to play up the drama. It was a very divisive time. That part still didn’t surprise me.

Overall, however, I began to understand just how ridiculous this attitude of entitlement had become. I grew increasingly turned off by people who felt they should be entitled to do things that may negatively impact our community just because they want to and because they expect their friends will back them up.

At this point I felt I had two basic options. Either I’d have to get serious about cutting those members with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement — and quickly. Or we’d have to call it quits. I wasn’t willing to keep the forums going under the current climate.

Some people wanted me to open a dialog with the people involved in the spamming, but I declined. Their motivations were irrelevant. I’m sure everyone who spams can justify it one way or another, but I wasn’t interested in their justifications, and based on how they’d behaved up to that point, I didn’t trust that they’d tell me the truth after the fact anyway.

I was basing my decisions on the facts of what happened, and those facts weren’t in dispute. People disputed the various interpretations of what it meant, but in the end it was my call to make. I still feel it was the right call. If I had to do it all over, knowing what I now know, I’d make the same call.

Testing the Waters

At this point I was about 60-80% convinced that a forum shutdown was likely. There was way too much of a sense of entitlement in the place, whereby a number of members felt they could nudge the rules aside and get away with it, if only because they had the support of their friends within the community. Perhaps they perceived a certain strength in numbers.

But my vision wasn’t to provide a social hangout for some friends who wanted to chat each other in circles. I wanted a community with high standards for interaction and a core focus on growth. If people want to chat with their friends on my site, that’s okay to some extent, but not if it interferes with the overall vision. I felt that over time, they were interfering with that vision, and the forums became more of a social hangout for them and less of a place where people were really helping to support each other with serious growth in mind. So it was actually a good thing for me that some of them created their own forum since it would have made things easier for me if they just left. However, I wasn’t willing to have them secretly using our forums as a recruitment center for their own.

Of course this is a judgment call, but it’s my place to judge it. After all, I was the one paying for it.

I finally concluded that enough is enough already. I was no longer willing to host a forum on the terms they seemed to be demanding of me. Either they could abide by my vision and follow the rules and stop acting like spoiled children, or they could leave.

So I began cracking down and banning those members who tried to push their entitlement attitudes too far. Some encouraged their friends to act out, and those people were kicked out too. Some came back with fake accounts, and they got banned again.

I hear there were quite some lively discussions on Facebook about how I must have turned evil or something… or perhaps that I was evil all along. That alone makes me glad I don’t have a Facebook account anymore.

Some of the people who got booted tried to open a discussion with me, even as they lashed out in other channels, but I wasn’t interested in dialoging with them. I’m still not interested. I simply wanted them out, not just out of the forums but out of my life. Their reactions afterwards only served to convince me that I’d made the right call. They acted like I’d violated their civil rights when I was simply closing their accounts to a service I provided free of charge, and only after they abused it and/or me.

In the end they found out just what they were entitled to.

But I also realized that my efforts to finally get those people out of the forums wasn’t going to succeed. The problem had become too systemic at that point. I could ban a few more people, and that actually did help in the short term, but it wouldn’t have worked in the long run. We didn’t have a closed system. Many of those people were so outraged that they made it clear that if we ever opened up registrations again, they’d come back with fake accounts and try to destroy the place. I think that if it came to that, they would have succeeded in making things a lot harder for us. At least one person from that community was openly discussing using illegal means to damage the forums. Enough is enough.

By waiting so long to get these people out, I had lost too much of the support of the community. Getting things back on track may still have been possible, but I concluded that it wasn’t likely to be worth the effort. It would have been a major uphill climb.

The attitude of some people towards me after being banned was like that of a drug addict whose dealer cut them off. Some blew up with anger. Others begged. Some wanted to pepper me with endless questions and alternatives. And at least one person even tried to drag my kids into the discussion.

This is an online forum we’re talking about. It was a good one to be sure but still one among thousands. I knew that no matter what, I was done dealing with them.

One way of describing the problem is that many of these people were loyal to each other, but I was loyal to my vision. I don’t see any practical way I could have convinced enough of them to buy into my vision for the forums once they began treating it as their personal online home. Ultimately they wanted to make the place into something different, but it wasn’t something I was willing to provide. And they made it clear that if I was to hold to my original vision, some of them were going to fight me on it. I didn’t take that as an idle threat since I’d seen just how much time they were willing to spend online. I concluded that it was time to give it up. I’m sure there are better places to invest my time.

Partly this can be explained as a technology problem. If people were personally identifiable instead of being able to easily create anonymous accounts, we wouldn’t have to worry about them coming back after getting banned, and they’d likely behave with greater maturity. I like that Google+ requires people to use their real life identities. I think that’s one reason the discussions there tend to be very civil, and moderation is rarely needed. With different technology we may have had an easier time solving some of these problems.

I think the bigger problem was how I set things up to begin with. This was a free service to the community. Perhaps the fact that I provided this service for free led too many people to take it for granted. Maybe they figured they could behave like spoiled children and that I’d keep providing this service just because I’d been doing so for years. But when the community standards fall this low, it’s just not worth doing anymore. My terms for creating this community were that it must hold to a certain vision, and when I felt that vision was no longer realistic, closing the forums was inevitable.

Overall I think most of the community really did buy into my vision, and I believe they appreciated it. I’m not the kind of guy that needs to be lauded with “thank yous” for doing what he feels is right. But I don’t think I deserve all the “f— yous” from those who took advantage of my generosity, fell into the entitlement trap, and expected that I’d let them continue on their own terms. At least now they’re free to go develop their own community the way they see fit, and hopefully they’ll soon forget this one and won’t resort to illegal means just to get back at me for what they perceive as unfair treatment.

Overall I’m very grateful for this experience. I learned some powerful lessons about creating and maintaining a community of this nature.

If I had to do it all over again, I’d have been a lot more strict about holding to the forum vision. I’d have done a better job of recruiting and training mods who could be loyal to the overall vision, regardless of their loyalties to other members or their fears about being perceived as the bad guy. If people harshed on the mods for doing their jobs, I’d have empowered the mods to prune those people right quick too. And I’d have pruned some members a lot sooner who were clearly visiting for reasons other than to grow (such as forum addiction). Charging a modest membership fee might not have been a bad idea either.

My Community or Yours

Obviously I don’t own people’s relationships with each other, but I was the one primarily responsible for creating and maintaining the forums. I created the community vision, bought and installed the software, paid for the hosting and bandwidth, invited people to join initially, designed the categories and wrote the descriptions for them, wrote and revised the community rules, recruited and trained moderators, promoted the forums, and interacted with the community to help set the tone.

I had a lot of help along the way of course. There’s no way I could have done this alone. But if I hadn’t decided to make it happen, it never would have existed.

I created this community with the goal of manifesting a certain vision. I wanted to create a specific type of online community that would be unlike any other I’d seen. For me this was a personal choice, not a business one. I wanted to create something unique that would add value to the world. I also felt it would be an interesting challenge.

Despite how it ended, I consider this project a great success. During its existence it helped a lot of people, even apparently saving some lives. I know that many people are very grateful for it.

Once the forum reached the point where I felt it could no longer hold to its vision, I decided to shut it down. Some people say this was a selfish decision. From a certain perspective, they’re right, but then they should acknowledge that it was just as selfish to create it. You can’t pick up one end of that stick without picking up the other.

I don’t feel any animosity towards anyone in shutting down the forums. We had a really good run, and I think many people recognize that its time has come. I would rather consciously end it now than watch it die a slow death.

If you’ve been very active in the forums, then perhaps this is a good time to evaluate whether continuing that sort of activity is how you really want to spend your time. This is a nice opportunity to consciously re-evaluate your priorities. I, for one, am really going to enjoy having this off my plate. There will be more adventures ahead.

Some people have suggested handing this community over to someone else to run, but I’m not interested in doing that. When people asked about this in the forums, I usually gave them some shallow technical reason for why it wouldn’t work. But in reality I was putting them off since I didn’t want to get into it with people one on one. Some of the more technically minded people saw through my feeble excuses, but I just wanted to hold them off long enough to explain this in a blog post.

First off, I don’t know anyone with the technical skills, vision, and willingness to pay the hosting costs for this community that would inspire me to hand it off to them. Secondly, if we transfer things to someone as-is, they’ll end up with the same entitlement issues to deal with, and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. And if I hand it off just for the sake of preserving the community, I can’t see it becoming any better than it was at its peak, especially without my blog constantly feeding it traffic. I wouldn’t want to be associated with something less.

So I’d rather consciously pull the plug on this. People can still retain the connections they’ve made if they desire to do so, and there are plenty of options for that (email, social networks, other forums, etc).

I think most people will be able to understand this, even if they don’t agree with my decision. It was the right decision, and I have no regrets about how it played out. Once the decision was made, I felt a speedy resolution was best, but I wanted to allow sufficient time for people to wrap up existing threads, suggest alternative forums, exchange contact info, and say goodbye. Now it’s done, and everyone is free to move on to a new chapter in their lives.

If anyone else thinks they can create something better than this, then I invite you to do so. Now that the forums are closed, I’m going to fully enjoy the peacefulness of its absence. After 5+ years, I more than deserve a break from it.

Read related articles:

• Effective Online Forum Usage
• Free Speech in Online Communities: The Delusion of Entitlement
• Conscious Success
• Getting Back to Growth
• Polyamory and Blog Traffic
• Why Live Forever?
• Creating Your Vision

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Conscious Relationships Workshop - Feb 17-19, 2012


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Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

I’ve decided to shut down the discussion forums on this site by the end of the year, sometime between Xmas and New Year’s.

The way this played out was a bit explosive I know (which you may have seen if you’ve been active in the forums), but the triggering event was only one in a long series, the proverbial straw that finally broke the camel’s back. In this case I’d say it was bigger than a straw, but it was more than enough extra annoyance for me to finally say, “Enough is enough already. This isn’t worth doing anymore.”

It feels like I’ve been using my power to hold down a coiled spring for so long (pushing to keep the forums going while being out of harmony with them), and this time I finally just let go. The result was a significant “boing” in a different direction. Lots of trapped energy finally had a chance to escape. Perhaps it was more of a “boom” than a “boing,” but either way I’m glad this energy is no longer trapped.

I’m sorry if anyone feels hurt by how this played out. This is, however, often how these kinds of awareness shifts do play out. Sometimes when people finally realize it’s time to quit, it’s not all flowers and hugs on the way out. Often it’s more of an “I am so out of here” or “I’m so very done, done, done” feeling. That’s the feeling I have about this — a feeling of just being done with this and feeling more than ready to move on. At the moment I’m not in a place where I feel particularly concerned about others’ feelings. I think it’s better to be honest about that than to feign a sense of loss or regret. I just want to make this transition happen quickly and put it behind me. It’s hard to want to build or maintain bridges when seeing ashes brings much more relief and peace.

I’m aware that this may not be the most graceful of transitions, and I accept that it’s my responsibility how this ultimately played out. I understand that some people may be upset with me, but I just need to be done with this. My attitude right now isn’t one of, “Let’s make this transition as graceful as possible.” I tried doing a graceful transition before, and it got bogged down more than once. Now I’m doing it Aries-style, ramming my head through any obstacles between me and the door while bellowing “Hulk smash!” This will require more bandages later, but it will get the job done.

If you’ve never gone through such an experience yourself, you probably can’t relate to what I’m going through, and you may think I’m out of alignment with what I teach. In truth I’m going through a very similar process to the one described in a 2008 article called Tolerance Is Resistance to Love, which happened when I transitioned from game development to blogging. Within the past day, I basically shifted from the “stop saying yes” phase to the “commit to quitting” phase.

For me this is a matter of self-love and self-care. What I actually feel most right now is… tremendous relief. That’s a hint and a half that I need to do this. I’m not angry or hurt or upset. Yesterday I was surely annoyed, but in a way that gave me great clarity about what I’m no longer willing to tolerate in my life. After sleeping on it, now I’m beginning to feel excited and happy about the coming year. You have no idea how good it feels to know that I won’t have to deal with all the headaches of forum admin in 2012.

I hope this makes some degree of sense, but when something like this goes down, I have to surrender to the notion that I’m likely to be perpetually misunderstood about the whole thing. And honestly, in this case I think I’d rather risk being labeled an insensitive ogre by many people than to spend hours and hours explaining myself and reading forum members’ public psychoanalyses of me. In fact, it’s the connection to those kinds of experiences in my life that I truly want to burn to ashes right now.

As Carlos Castaneda wrote, “When a man finally realizes that he has taken a path without a heart, the path is ready to kill him.” While this path did have a heart for me when I first embarked on it, it’s clear I’ve lost the heart connection to it a long time ago. My heart is leading me in other directions, and clinging to the past has become way too burdensome to continue.

Quitting Facebook earlier this year was another step on this journey. I don’t have the clarity just yet to know what I want to do instead of these aspects I’m releasing, but I know they’re not what I want in my life, and so I’ll let them go this year, and I know that down the road something more congruent will come into my life. For me this is very much like quitting a job before I have something lined up to replace it. And I think that’s very much in alignment with what I teach. If you disagree, you really don’t know me all that well.

I believe I can turn the forums into a read-only archive, so as a resource it can stay online, at least for a while. I’m not going to transfer ownership of it to anyone else since that would violate my privacy policy, and I seriously doubt anyone would want their email addresses falling into the hands of some potential spammer.

I want to thank everyone who participated in our online community and especially our amazing moderators for doing so much behind the scenes.

Most likely I’ll shut down the forums between Xmas and New Year’s. The earliest I’ll take things offline would be Dec 26th, so you have at least 5 days. Yesterday I removed the links to the forums from my website’s header (refresh your browser if you still see a forums link), and I also closed the forums to new registrations.

If you’ve been active in the forums, this is the time to say your goodbyes, exchange contact info with friends there, and wrap things up however you wish. Since most people who read my blog never even participate in the forums, there’s a good chance you really don’t care about any of this. But if you do care, then I hope you enjoyed all the fish.

Hulk head hurt.

Update Dec 26: The forum shutdown is complete. The forum archives are still available (and searchable too).

Read related articles:

• Effective Online Forum Usage
• Tolerance Is Resistance to Love
• Facebook and Twitter
• Environmental Reinforcement of Your Goals
• Why Live Forever?
• Getting Back to Growth

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Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Note: SBI has extended this promotion through January 3, 2012.

Site Build-It’s special buy one get one free holiday promotion is back again for a short time, starting today. This the best deal they offer, and they only do it once each year around Xmas time. This offer is good until midnight on December 25th, 2011.So if you’re thinking about starting an online business, now’s the time to get started.

What Is SBI?

SBI is a service for people who want to start their own Internet business. They provide the hosting, tools, and education to help you create a real business that generates income for you.

SBI is a very popular service. I’ve been recommending them for years, and thousands of people have signed up as a result of my recommendation alone.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I don’t personally use SBI. I’m not the right type of customer for it. But if I wanted to start my own online business today and I didn’t already have 16 years of experience, I’d use SBI.

Why? SBI would help me get to the income-generating phase a lot faster. I could learn in several weeks what might otherwise take me years to figure out on my own by hunting for resources all over the place instead of having everything I need in one central location, organizing in a step-by-step process.

SBI offers a massive amount of educational resources, support, and tools to help people learn and implement the things I had to learn the hard way.

Years ago when people would ask me how to make money online, I tried to tell them how to do it the way I was doing it. I was very specific with the details too. But pretty much everyone screwed it up when they tried to implement it. They made lots of mistakes that seemed really dumb to me, but couldn’t even see it. I didn’t realize how much of my knowledge in this area is subconscious and automatic. I don’t have to think about it, but someone who’s just starting out really does have to learn a great deal more than I can teach them.

The tricky thing about online business is that it’s very sensitive to mistakes. You have to do a lot of things right. If you screw up  just one of a dozen critical pieces — and virtually everyone does — you can doom yourself to failure. Then no matter how hard you work thereafter, you cripple your traffic and cripple your income.

Lots of bloggers, for instance, write to me with messages like, “I’ve been working on my blog for 9 months now, and I still have very little traffic. What am I doing wrong?” If I go to their sites, it takes me maybe 30 seconds to spot several mistakes they’ve made. If they just used SBI instead of trying to muddle through on their own, they wouldn’t have made those mistakes in the first place, and they’d have traffic and income instead of a ghost town.

An example of a mistake that I can share is ad placement. Some bloggers try to make money with ads on their sites, especially Adsense, but they use ad layouts that aren’t going to be effective. Ads are really sensitive to how you arrange them. One layout can easily earn 10x as much as another. I say this from experience since I used to earn $9-10K per month just from Google Adsense (as I shared in this article).

The biggest mistakes aren’t usually what a blogger does though. It’s what they don’t do that kills them. I look at their sites and see some really important stuff missing. They install WordPress and few plugins and figure they’re good to go. Unfortunately that isn’t enough. WordPress will help you build a nice website, but it won’t build you a business.

If you just want a website, don’t use SBI. That would be overkill. Use it if you want an online business that generates income for you. Making a website is just the first 20%, maybe less. That part is fairly easy relative to building traffic and having your site earn significant income. It’s the difference between learning how to drive and being a race car driver.

Making a website isn’t a competitive endeavor. No one will get in your way if that’s what all want to do. But if you want to make it a real business, now you’re competing with others who are trying to do the same thing in your field, so you’d better know what you’re doing if you want a shot at the income pool.

It’s not enough to just put some content out there and sprinkle in some affiliate links for good measure. If you want to generate income, you have a lot more learning and skill-building ahead of you.

My decision to recommend SBI was born of my frustrations watching various friends try to jump into online business and failing miserably at it. Now I just refer everyone to SBI. SBI gets them up to speed and helps them achieve their goals, and SBI does a better job of it than I would.

SBI helps you break the work down into small chunks, and then it helps you complete the necessary steps one by one. But it’s still a good bit of work.

If you’re lazy and you know you won’t follow through, don’t bother. If you’re willing to put in some effort and seriously make this happen, then SBI is a good choice.

Many people who thrive with SBI do so because they’re fed up with the alternatives. They’re sick of working for someone else and just scraping by financially.

Others do it because they want a more independent lifestyle.

I got on this path as a combination of both. Having a boss doesn’t appeal to me, and I want a flexible lifestyle where I can work when I want, where I want, and how I want. I’m not lazy, but I value my freedom to choose how I spend my time.

I also like earning money from my overall contribution, not from how many hours I sit at my desk.

I worked maybe a couple hours yesterday, doing what I enjoyed, and my website earned a few thousand dollars. I now earn more in a day than I used to earn in a whole season when I had a job, and I can’t be fired or laid off.

About the SBI 2-for-1 Special

The 2-for-1 special is an extra bonus where you can get a second SBI account for a friend or relative (or yourself) for free. It’s a nice deal for couples, for a parent and child, or for two friends, since the two of you can build your own online businesses together and help hold each other accountable.

Most SBIers that I know use the 2-for-1 special to build two sites for themselves though. Every site monetizes differently, so you may find that one site brings in $500 per month while a second site is earning $2000 per month after an equivalent amount of time spent on each. Then you may want to put more effort in the more successful site to build it even higher.

The 2-for-1 is also a nice deal if you can’t decide between two different ideas. Go ahead and develop both, and see how each idea performs.

WordPress or SBI?

If you’re considering using WordPress to build your own online business, you can indeed do that. I used WordPress, and it meets my needs just fine. But I don’t recommend this approach for most people.

Before I started this blog, which became very successful (I hit yet another all-time traffic record last month), I’d already been actively generating income online for nearly a decade. Most of the income I’ve earned in my life has come via my online businesses.

I’m also a skilled programmer. I’m comfortable working with Internet technology and writing my own custom code.

So I’m not in the same boat as most people when it comes to running an Internet business. My choice to use WordPress was dictated by my personal skills and experience.

If you’re in a situation like mine, and you’re already making tens of thousands of dollars per year online without much difficulty, then go ahead and use WordPress or something similar for your new ventures. It’s fair to say you don’t need SBI.

If you have outstanding technical skills and you’re willing to learn the business side, that’s a borderline call. For you I’d still recommend using SBI to start. Use it to learn the business and marketing side until you start making real money with your sites… till you’re bringing in about $5K per month or so. Then think about using what you’ve learned with SBI to switch to WordPress or something similar. You could stay with SBI still, but you may no longer need it at that point.

Most programmers I know can build their own websites just fine, but they suck at building traffic and making money. They create sites that virtually no one visits. SBI is a good choice to help them learn the business side too.

I started as a programmer, and I assumed that learning to run an online business would be no big deal. I was wrong. It’s a whole different skill set, and it took me years to develop those skills on my own, even with tons of business-related reading, audiobooks, seminars, training, etc.

Don’t underestimate the scope of this challenge. It’s better to bite the bullet and learn it the right way, or you’ll have to the privilege of watching people with inferior technical skills run circles around you as they earn income from simple ideas. Don’t just be technically savvy — learn some business savvy too.

If you’ve never made serious money online and you’re not a programmer… or if you’ve been trying and you’re still struggling… don’t keep banging your head against the wall hoping for things to improve. Use SBI and take advantage of their system and resources, which has been refined over many years and is proven effective. That one’s a no-brainer. You’ll reach your goals faster with it than you will without it.

For more help deciding between WordPress and SBI, see this WordPress vs. SBI comparison page. It may look fairly short at first… until you notice the “Click here to show and read the rest of this page” link. It’s disgustingly detailed.

Getting Started

If SBI sounds interesting to you, a good place to start is to watch their video tour. It’s pretty basic, but it will give you an idea of how the service works.

Then you may want to read my full review.

After that you may want to poke around the SBI website.

And finally I recommend you read my Site Build It! Walkthrough.

If you have any questions about SBI, please submit them via their questions form. Your questions will be answered by an actual SBI customer.

Just remember that the holiday two-for-one bonus offer is expires at midnight on December 25th, so you have about 2 weeks to sign up.

Your Lifestyle Is Your Choice

Last year around this time, I wrote a similar post to let people know about the SBI holiday promo since SBI does this once a year. If you saw that post and decided not to act on it, did you make the right call?

If you took action and signed up for SBI back then and followed through on it, then today you’d own a profitable income-generating website. There’s no way to know how much it would be earning since that depends on many factors, but let’s say it would be earning about $2K per month by now, which I think is pretty reasonable based on what I’ve seen other SBIers do.

Do you choose a path that was better than this? If you had it to do all over again, would you make the same call, knowing what you now know?

We can never really know the outcomes of the paths we didn’t choose. We only get to see the outcomes of the paths we actually took. But if you suspect you chose a less than optimal path last year, then don’t make the same mistake this year. Try something different, and see where it leads.

I haven’t had a job since 1992, and I really don’t miss it. It wasn’t easy at first, but I’m glad I pulled the trigger and chose this path.

Some Internet marketers will tell you that building your own online business is really easy. They’re lying to you. It’s relatively easy to maintain it, but it’s not so easy to figure it out the first time. There really is a lot to learn.

If you’re really lazy and can’t get yourself to follow through on anything worthwhile, SBI isn’t going to baby you. But if you have a bit more self-discipline than the average person, and you feel motivated to create a more flexible and interesting lifestyle for yourself, then creating your own Internet business is an excellent choice these days.

With an online business, you can maintain it from anywhere. No one cares what hours you work. You can take vacations and travel when you want to. You can work from home or from a Starbucks or from the beach. And once you learn how to create some income online, it’s not as tough to maintain it and increase it. SBI businesses in particular often scale up very nicely. More traffic means more income.

Most likely I’ll be making a similar post around this time in 2012. When you see that post, will you be one of the people who sat on the sidelines and wished you’d made a different choice today? Or will you be satisfied and fulfilled by the path you took?

If you want more help understanding what the SBI path might look like for you, I’d recommend reading the stories from people who did make that choice. There are many detailed SBI case studies. This is especially worthwhile if you want to get a better idea of the specific results people are getting with it.

Whatever you decide, it’s up to you to creating the lifestyle you desire. The world won’t just hand it to you. I’m quite enjoying the lifestyle I’ve created, and my online business is a big part of that, but it didn’t happen by itself.

Update: SBI has extended this promotion through January 3, 2012.

Read related articles:

• SBI Buy One Get One Free Holiday Special
• SBI 2-for-1 Holiday Special
• Buy One Get One Free Holiday Promo for Site Build It
• Site Build It Mothers Day Special – Save $199.00
• How to Build a Successful Online Business
• Site Build It! Discount Extended 48 Hours
• Site Build It!

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Conscious Relationships Workshop - Feb 17-19, 2012


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Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

In the mid-2000s, most of my income came from advertising. The Google Adsense ads on my website were bringing in $9-10K per month, and it was totally passive income. I focused on writing new articles, and Google took care of selling and serving up the thousands of ads that were displayed each day. It was a pretty nice way to make money as a blogger.

In addition to Adsense, I also sold some ads direct, and I earned income from other ad networks too, although Adsense was by far the best one I tested.

Then one day in October 2008, I decided to stop hosting third-party ads altogether, including Adsense, as I explained in a blog post about dropping Adsense at that time.

The consequences were predictable. Overnight my income dropped significantly.

If I’d kept those ads running, it’s fair to say I’d have received at least an extra $300K in ad revenue since then — probably significantly more since my web traffic has gone up during the past 3 years. Google has undoubtedly continued to refine the Adsense program as well.

If I ever feel the urge to do so, I could easily restore these ads to my website. It wouldn’t take long — a few hours at most. And it would probably start bringing in an extra $10-15K per month.

Many people would consider my decision a foolish one. Some have told me as much.

But my vision of success is my own to nurture. It’s not for anyone else to decide. I intend to grow in the ways that matter most to me, not the ways that society tells me I’m supposed to care about.

Letting go of that $300K bought me a different path of growth than I would have otherwise experienced. It started with asking myself What kind of man do I really wish to be? and How far am I willing to go to become that man?

This soul-searching led to a cascade of other choices, including ending my marriage after being together for 15 years and making some significant lifestyle changes.

Of course I can never be sure what would have happened if I made different decisions — we only get to experience the results of the paths we take, not the ones we don’t — but I’m still pleased with the path I chose. In this case the ad-dropping decision remains easily reversible, but I don’t see cause to reverse it.

Life includes many tests that help us clarify our values. I could have come up with all kinds of reasons to justify why I should have kept taking the ad money and what I could have done on that path, but based on what I knew about myself and what I was already experiencing on that path, I concluded that a different path would be more authentic and empowering for me — but also more difficult.

One side effect of dropping advertising is that I finally started doing live workshops. I’ve done seven of them now, and I have two more coming up. But workshops produce active income, whereas advertising was passive income. I’d previously believed that passive income is always superior to income I have to keep actively earning. But I learned that having to earn income actively can help me grow faster, especially when I have to exercise my creativity to earn it; active income is more challenging, and challenge encourages growth.

When my life gets too easy, I like making things harder on myself because it stimulates more growth. I like getting up early. I like writing deep and insightful articles. I like pushing myself. I like having some pressure to take action. I like being challenged. I don’t want a life of ease and comfort.

I made the choices that I felt were best for me, and I balanced that decision with what I felt was best for others. I think my website is more usable and provides more value to people without all those ads. I also know that the workshops I’ve been doing are providing a lot of value to those who attend. I really like the business model I’m using today, even though it’s more challenging than other business models I’ve tried. Designing and delivering 3-day workshops stimulates a lot more growth in my life than watching ad revenue automatically plop into my bank account.

Society may nudge you to adopt certain values, but at the end of the day, you still have a choice. You can decide which values you’ll hold as sacred and which aren’t nearly as important to you.

Exploring different ways to make money can be an interesting challenge, but I hold my path of growth and how it affects others on a much higher plane.

Conscious success requires making choices to mold your character as you desire to be molded.

Sometimes your choices will receive the approval of others. Sometimes they won’t. Regardless of others’ reactions, do your best to stay true to yourself. Make the choices that allow you to look in the mirror and feel good about the person gazing back at you.

I’ve been thinking more deeply about what it means to succeed consciously as I prep for the Conscious Success Workshop in January. I see a lot of people struggling with fuzzy notions of success that are overly infected by assumptions that society has drilled into them. I know that many people feel pressured to improve their finances, and they worry that they may be sabotaging their success with limiting beliefs about money.

I’d like to suggest that perhaps it isn’t self-sabotage or laziness that’s getting in the way, but it could be a need to develop more clarity about your true values.

There are a lot of ways to potentially earn more money that I wouldn’t feel good about, so I don’t do them. Perhaps you’re in a similar situation.

On the other hand, there are ways to make money that I do feel good about. I feel great about selling workshop registrations, so I can be pretty shameless about that. When someone signs up for a workshop, it’s good for me, and it’s good for those who attend.

There’s a temptation to sacrifice your values to buy into someone else’s definition of success, but again you have the power to choose. At many personal growth seminars, for instance, there’s a big push to get you to spend more money on products in the back of the room. Some people earn more on product sales than they do on seminar registrations. In fact, BOR sales (BOR = back of room) is a common topic for pro speakers to discuss in organizations like the National Speakers Association. Speakers frequently share tips with each other on how to maximize BOR sales.

I don’t buy into this model though. It often creeps me out when speakers push for BOR sales so hard. It feels like they’re just trying to squeeze more money out of people who already paid to be there. Behind the scenes I know that speakers often calculate and track their BOR sales per attendee. Then they try to increase that number over time.

The only products I have for sale at my workshops are my books and Erin’s CDs, and they’re discounted. The main reason we do this is because some people want us to sign copies for them or to buy them as gifts. We don’t sell very much at all though. At the October workshop we did $100 total in product sales, just to give you an idea. In fact, one of those sales was to a conference center employee who was walking down the hall, saw our sign and got curious, and ended up buying one of my books.

It took me many years to figure out what conscious success means to me, and it’s still very much an ongoing process of discovery. I gradually learned that much of what is taught about success, achievement, and wealth just doesn’t resonate with me.

It’s nice to make money, but I prefer to earn it on my terms, even when it means earning less. I like making money from exercising my creativity, such as by writing and speaking. I like making money in ways that feel congruent to me, where more income equates to more value being provided to others. I feel better about earning money from workshop sign-ups than I do from seeing more clicks on third-party ads, for instance.

If you’re able to attend the Conscious Success Workshop next month, I think you’ll find it a very unique experience because it’s about understanding and achieving your own vision of success, not someone else’s.

As anyone who’s been to one of my previous workshops can attest, we create a special vibe at these events that you’re unlikely to see elsewhere. At the October workshop, for instance, I’d estimate that the average attendee received at least 5 hugs before they even made it to their seat at the start of Day 1 — from me, from Erin, from Rachelle, from KB, and from Shae. This doesn’t even include the hugs attendees often gave each other.

No one is going to force you to be hugged if you’d rather not be hugged, but I actually instruct our staff members to greet everyone by offering hugs. This isn’t for any manipulative purposes whatsoever. We do it because virtually everyone likes to be greeted in this way, and it feels good to us. It helps people feel very welcome and fosters an intimate, family-like atmosphere. I don’t know of any other success workshops where you can expect to be showered with warm hugs as soon as you arrive.

I share this because it’s another example of how we can define success on our own terms. Just because other people’s success seminars tend to have a vibe that’s more cold and calculating doesn’t mean we have to buy into that model. Whatever you don’t like about how society seems to be conditioning you to behave, you can say no to that. Then go do your own thing. I for one think American society is cold and disconnected enough already, and I want to help warm it up. I think we’re all better served by relating to each other as family as opposed to acting like strangers.

There’s a tendency to think of success in competitive terms, as if the point is to outperform other people. But that isn’t a very effective model. I think most people will experience far greater long-term success through cooperation, mutual support, and encouragement than they will through hard-hearted solo determination.

One tricky thing for me to figure out was how to create sales pages for my workshops that feel really good and congruent to me. I don’t like hard-sell tactics when someone tries to use them on me, nor do I like feeling that I’m being manipulated to buy something I don’t need. On the other hand, it doesn’t feel good to me to be shy about telling people about these workshops either. I know they help people, and so it would be lame not to encourage people to sign up.

In the summer when I launched some new workshops, I created very basic web pages for each of them. An example is the current page for the February Conscious Relationships Workshop. It’s a pretty simple page that’s mostly just a description of what people can expect to learn there.

My thinking in creating these pages wasn’t to try to sell people on new workshops but actually to get out of the way as much as possible. I wanted to give people a sense of what each workshop was about, but I didn’t want them basing their decision to attend on how persuasive I could be. I figured that it would be better for them to base their decision on whether or not they resonate with my work in general and if the topic appeals to them. That way we’d end up with a really good group of attendees who truly wanted to be there.

I was pleased to discover that these simple pages actually work just fine. Plenty of people have already signed up for each of the new workshops. And by and large, the people who’ve been signing up have been the right ones to attend.

But I still made some mistakes, and I’m continuing to calibrate my approach to feel more congruent to me.

For one, I used to offer a money-back guarantee on all my workshops. I discontinued that guarantee weeks ago. Of course it’s still going to be honored for anyone who signed up while it was in effect, but it isn’t something I’m willing to offer anymore.

I didn’t stop offering the guarantee for business reasons. Refund requests have always been minimal, so that wasn’t the issue. I don’t know if having a guarantee increased registrations overall. I didn’t have a guarantee for the first two workshops I did, and those were very well attended.

I realized that the way I was phrasing the guarantee was a mismatch for the kinds of people I wanted to attract. It was too far in the direction of trying to convince people to attend. My guarantee was based on my assuming 100% responsibility for people’s results, which in practice doesn’t make sense. Each workshop is a co-creative experience, and if people are showing up with less commitment because of that guarantee, that’s no good. I’m going to bring my A game to each event, but I also want other people to be fully committed as well.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was when I received a refund request from someone who didn’t claim to have a problem with the workshop at all. He just needed more money for rent, so he requested a refund as a convenient way to acquire some quick cash. I still honored his request, but it seriously creeped me out. That incident combined with a few other questionable requests convinced me to re-evaluate the decision to offer a money-back guarantee. I let the emotions of that incident subside, so I could make a clear-minded decision, and ultimately I concluded that it was the wrong approach for me.

Another thing I used to do was offer workshop scholarships to some people. I haven’t been advertising that fact because I don’t want to be inundated with freebie requests, but when I felt someone would benefit from the workshop and I knew that were very unlikely to attend due to financial issues, I’d offer them a free registration. Almost always when I made such offers, people took advantage of them.

In practice, however, this has been a mixed bag. Some people who were given free passes really appreciated it, put a lot of effort into the workshop, and got a lot of value out of it. That was nice to see. Unfortunately others utilized the freebies in ways I felt were hugely disrespectful. They’d show up late, skip out on key exercises, and not really take it seriously. They came to play.

So I’ve backed off from doing scholarships except in very rare cases, like with people I know very well and can absolutely trust to do their part. I don’t take freebie requests, so please don’t bother to ask.

My current approach to selling can be described as testing for resonance. This means that I seek to find the best matches for my workshops. As I see it, some people are really meant to be there. These people really resonate with the message of conscious growth, and they’re willing to put some effort into accelerating that process. Those are the people I want to work with.

Most of the material I’ve read about selling treats the process as one of persuading and convincing people to buy. But who actually likes to be convinced of anything they don’t already believe?

Testing for resonance makes a lot more sense to me. So I’ve been pondering how to do this with my workshop pages. I figured a good approach would be to simply write about the topic and share more thoughts about it, just like I do when writing new articles.

So a few weeks ago I rewrote the CSW web page to see how that approach felt to me. I wrote it to be more like a new article on success and achievement, not a sales page. I don’t think the workshop is even mentioned till about 2/3 of the way through. I mainly shared some personal stories about success and failure from my own life. My aim was to give you a better sense of my thinking about success and to see if that resonates with you. It’s only a small slice into the big picture, but I think it was a good slice to share. The page is much longer than the original version, but that’s because it’s long on content, not salesmanship.

On that page I also added some pics that I’ve never shared online before, namely copies of some of my college report cards.

Even if you know that you’re not going to attend CSW, I still encourage you to read that page if you’re interested in success since I do believe you’ll get some value from the content, especially if you’ve liked some of my other articles on the subject. If you don’t already resonate with the idea of coming to a workshop of mine, I don’t think you’ll need to worry about that page convincing you to attend.

Yet another area where I’ve been re-assessing the notion of conscious success is our discussion forums. I realized that I’ve been a bit lax as admin this year, and the standards for our community have been slipping a bit. Our rules haven’t changed, but our enforcement of those rules hasn’t been as consistent as it could be. Consequently we’ve been seeing a rise in problems like trolling, thread derailment, and members taking disrespectful jabs at each other. Some members have racked up a half-dozen warnings or more, when they really should have been banned months ago.

So recently I’ve been working with the mods to raise our standards when it comes to cutting members who can’t follow the rules as they agreed to do when they joined. Suffice it to say we’re going to be much more strict about it. Otherwise the community is at risk of drifting towards a juvenile stomping ground like so many other online forums. So if you’re active in that community and you sense a tightening of our standards, it’s not because our moderation team is ganging up on people. You can lay the blame for that on me. I want our community to continue to serve as a place where people come together to help each other grow and to offer positive support, and I want to our signal-to-noise ratio to stay high. For everyone else, there’s Facebook.

This article itself could serve as an example of resonance testing. If the ideas I’ve shared here feel good to you, you’ll probably get a lot of value from one of my workshops, and you’re likely to make lots of new friends there who share a similar resonance.

On the other hand, if you’ve read this and think “meh… you’re an idiot for not taking the ad money,” then you’re probably less likely to be a good match for my workshops. So you can also label me an idiot for not wanting your money either. You probably wouldn’t be a good match for the other attendees either.

A key lesson I learned about success is: Sometimes we have to say no to the paths that don’t resonate with us, clearing them out of the way first, and only after that will the more congruent paths come forward and make themselves known. In other words, you may continue to attract mismatched approaches to success as long as you’re still tempted to pursue them. When you finally muster the strength to say no to those paths, then you can gain access to much better ones.

And yes, I really do feel good about shamelessly plugging my workshops… as long as I’m doing it in ways that align with my values. Convincing you to go isn’t the right approach. Testing to see if you’re the kind of person who totally belongs there does feel good, however.

Incidentally, the $100 early bird discount for CSW is still good for one more week. I’m not going to extend it beyond that since we already have enough people signed up to guarantee a vibrant weekend, and from past experience I know that a lot of people sign up in the final week before the discount expires.

Read related articles:

• Workshop Update
• CSW Almost Sold Out
• List of Values
• NSA Workshop
• CGW Sales Page Lessons
• Getting Back to Growth
• Gearing Up for CGW #6

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Conscious Relationships Workshop - Feb 17-19, 2012


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Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

What part of your life always seems to be on the back burner? Is it a certain relationship? A hobby you’ve always wanted to enjoy? A spiritual pursuit?

Do you tell yourself that someday this part of your life will move to the front burner and become a priority? How will that actually happen?

Back burner items tend to remain on the back burner indefinitely. They rarely make it to the front burner on their own. The reason they’re on the back burner is because you put them there, probably because you deemed something else more important.

At one point you may have put your career first. Or your health. Or a particular relationship. But are those priorities still right for you today? Are your current priorities still correct?

If you ask this question in a cursory way, you’ll almost always answer yes. If you told yourself a year ago that your finances must be your #1 priority, they’ll have a tendency to stay there. Whether you’ve made measurable progress or not, you’ll have a tendency to stick to essentially the same priorities year after year.

A True Priority or a Distraction

If your current prioritization tends to be self-perpetuating, how do you know when it’s time for an adjustment? You probably won’t figure it out just by asking if anything needs to be adjusted.

Generally the way you’ll notice that an adjustment is needed is that you’ll notice a nagging feeling that something isn’t right with the way you’re currently living.

Another clue is that you won’t seem to be making much progress in your top priorities. If you look at your actual results in those areas, you’ll see evidence that you’re drifting or even declining.

Often this happens because we like to assume that we can improve some area of life by making it the #1 priority. For instance, if you feel that your finances are weak, you may decide to focus on making more money for a while. But then a few years pass, and your finances don’t seem to be that much better. Overall you feel more stressed too. The main reason you failed here is that making money wasn’t a true priority. It was actually a distraction from a deeper, more important part of your life.

Blocking

When false priorities are mistaken for true priorities, some blocking is bound to occur. You’ll feel resistance when you try to move forward on priorities that seem to make logical sense but which don’t connect with your true desires. No matter how hard you push against that resistance or what techniques you try to use to get past it, it will still be present. That’s because your mistake was further upstream. Your priorities weren’t aligned with your true desires.

When you realize you’re in a blocking situation, give yourself some time to pause and reflect. Even if you didn’t explicitly write down your priorities, what do your thoughts tell you about what’s most important to you?

If it’s convenient for you, jot down a quick list of your top mental priorities. Maybe you’ll come up with something like this:

1. Making more money
2. Improving my overall health and fitness
3. Spending time with my significant other
4. Being more focused and productive at work
5. Learning new skills

But if you were to actually look at your actions as an objective observer might do, you may see that you’ve been prioritizing your day very differently in practice:

1. Communication (email, texting, phone calls)
2. Social networking
3. Consuming information (blogs, news, videos, etc)
4. Doing urgent work
5. Being entertained

These aren’t complete lists, but I think you get the idea — your mental prioritization and your real world actions are not in sync.

If you discover something like this, don’t panic. It’s quite common for people to have two lists that are clearly not aligned. Fortunately this is a fixable problem.

The False Belief You Must Release

The reason for this dichotomy is a common false belief. It’s the belief that prioritizing is a logical affair, that it’s something you can achieve with your logical mind.

In fact, an equally mistaken approach is the belief that this is something you can discern intuitively. That approach will also fail.

Your logical mind is the part that comes up with solutions like: If my finances are the weakest part of my life, then I should make that my top priority for a while. Giving my finances more attention will surely improve them, and then when things are going really well in that area, I can make something else a priority.

This sounds very believable. So it comes as a real blow to the logical mind when this seemingly sensible solution doesn’t actually work. This throws the logical mind for a loop because after all, it should work, right?

Actually it shouldn’t work. There’s an error in the logic here. The assumption that turning a lagging area of your life into your top conscious priority will cause that area to improve is a false assumption. Much of the time, it turns out not to be true.

Many times when you take a lagging area of your life and make it your top priority, that area will continue to stagnate. Sometimes it will even get worse.

And sometimes you can ignore an area of your life, and it will improve all by itself.

We could go really deep into this, but for now I just want to plant the seed in your mind that turning a lagging area of your life into your top priority may in fact be a mistake. Sometimes it’s the worst thing you can do. You’ll see why this happens a little later in this article.

Why the Logical Mind Cannot Prioritize

If you try to set priorities in a logical manner, failure is guaranteed. This is because logic cannot provide a context for prioritizing.

There’s a special class of brain injuries whereby people cannot feel any emotions, or they’re unaware of their emotional states. Interestingly, these people cannot function well at all. They might spend a whole day deciding where to go for lunch, evaluating all sorts of irrelevant details such as the lighting conditions in each restaurant or which table they might get. Such people may brush their teeth 20 times a day, thinking it was a reasonable thing to do. They don’t have a context for separating the relevant from the irrelevant.

Some companies claim to make data-driven decisions, but that’s a misnomer since there must always be an emotional context behind the usage of data. There’s no logical reason for why a company must grow or why it must sell more products or have more impact. It could just as easily shut down, and the people could go do something else instead. Even the choice to make data-driven decisions is an emotional one. The emotional brain provides the context for feeling that it’s good to grow a company; then the data can be logically analyzed to determine what avenues may support that growth better than others. But ultimately the whole decision chain begins with an emotional context, and even data-driven decisions are normally littered with emotional checkpoints.

If you were to try to prioritize your life on a purely mental/logical level, you’d find the task impossible. You cannot logically evaluate and sort the infinite possibilities available to you. In fact, if you try to go that route, you’ll surely experience bouts of analysis paralysis, where you get so caught up in analysis that you hardly get anything done.

Let the Heart Lead

The solution to this trap is simple: Let the heart lead. Use your emotions to prioritize.

This may sound like a cop-out, but there’s a more empowering way to look at it.

First, you’re going to do this anyway. If you try to use the logical prioritization approach, some part of you won’t cooperate. Your mental priorities may look great on paper, but you won’t actually follow them. When have you ever prioritized your life logically and even come close to sticking to your priorities?

The closest you’ll get will be to use drugs like coffee to try to throw your hormones out of balance and overstimulate the logical mind, but your emotions will still reassert themselves from time to time, and the signals will only be more scrambled. In the end your emotions will make you feel worse when you try to graft a logical prioritization onto your life by force. This approach will take you further away from genuine happiness, and it’s ultimately counter-productive.

Maybe someday there will be a better substitute for your emotional brain, but for now you’re stuck with it. Fortunately that isn’t such a bad thing. Your emotional brain is much older than your logical mind, being subjected to many more cycles of evolutions. Your emotional subsystem is a finely honed instrument, far beyond the capabilities of even our most advanced supercomputers.

The logical mind is good at certain things, but prioritizing the big picture isn’t one of its strengths. This is, however, a major strength of the emotional mind. These two aspects of mind complement each other beautifully, but in the Western world we often have the relationship backwards. We need to learn to prioritize with the heart and the emotions, not with the logical mind.

Physically speaking, your emotional brain is mostly in your head, but it’s also partly in your chest. Your heart actually has its own tiny brain consisting of about 40,000 neurites. It’s primitive compared to the brain in your head, but it’s also loud. The communication channel that sends signals from heart to brain is like a firehose, whereas the channel going from brain to heart carries much less bandwidth — more like a thin straw. Essentially the heart functions as a state controller for the brain. The heart can easily tune out the brain, but the brain cannot easily tune out the heart. When you feel strong emotions, those emotions will take over your thinking, determine the types of thoughts you can or can’t have in those moments. But you may find it very difficult to think your way out of strong feelings.

Heart-Centered Prioritizing

When you prioritize with the heart, it’s important to get a clear signal. I recommend that you consume no drugs like caffeine or alcohol for at least a week just to be safe. Otherwise your nervous system is likely to be out of whack, and the heart-mind communication won’t work as well. If you really want to amp it up, eat all raw for a week, or try fasting, juice fasting, or mono meals for a few days first.

You’ll want to achieve a state known as coherence, where the heart and brain synchronize their communication patterns. This is the difference between listening to music and listening to noise.

To achieve coherence, you need to focus on creating a certain emotional state. Once you’re in that state, your brain will sync to your heart. This can be physically measured with the proper equipment. Perhaps the most significant change is in your HRV (heart rate variability). When you’re out of coherence, your HRV bounces around chaotically. When you’re in coherence, your HRV looks like a smooth sine wave if you were to graph it over time. Your heart actually speeds up and then slows down in a very flowing pattern, almost like music.

Emotionally this state of coherence can be described as: unconditional love, compassion, appreciation, and gratitude. If you’re feeling these emotions, you’re there. If you’re not feeling these emotions, you’re not there. Feeling neutral or okay or fine is not coherence.

Coherence has many benefits. It feels good emotionally, but it’s also good for your health, your mental performance, your social life, and beyond.

While the heart is the loudest voice in heart-brain communication, the brain can still influence the heart. So you can create this coherence state by holding thoughts in your mind that are congruent with these feelings. You can recall positive memories or use visualization. Another method is to listen to music that evokes these emotions. I like the song One by U2.

Play around to find a method that works for you. You can do it all in your mind if you want, such as by visualizing a positive scene, but you can just as easily induce coherence through external means, such as by cuddling someone you care about.

The reason to put yourself into a state of coherence first is simple: incredible clarity. Once you’re in this state of coherence, you can trust that your heart-brain communication will be at peak efficiency. You can still attempt to prioritize outside of this state, but the results won’t be as reliable.

Now while you’re enjoying this warm, glowing heart-centeredness, ask yourself what’s most important to you in life. Create your prioritization list by focusing on your feelings. I expect you’ll find this pretty easy to do.

You’ll probably notice that the way your heart prioritizes is very different from the way your logical brain works. For instance, when you’re in coherence, it’s pretty obvious that making lots of money isn’t that important, and it may not make it onto your priority list at all.

You may come up with a list that looks something like this:

1. Feeling connected
2. Helping people
3. Serving the greater good
4. Being kind
5. Sharing my gifts and talents with the world

Please do try this for yourself. Don’t just read this article and skip this exercise.

You’ll probably notice that heart-centered prioritizing is actually faster and easier than logical prioritizing.

The heart-centered approach is also more consistent. When you use the logical approach, you’ll get different answers each time. Every month you apply hard logic to set your priorities, your answers will keep shifting, sometimes radically. But with the heart-based approach, you’ll find that your answers remain remarkably consistent. You may use different words to describe your priorities and shift the ordering around a little, but you’ll be struck by a feeling of coming home to a delightful sense of clarity each time you do this. It may feel like remembering rather than prioritizing. The answers flow with little effort.

When you’re in coherence, your logical brain will function better too, and it will work harmoniously with your emotions to help you create what you desire.

We can also see why it doesn’t work to prioritize based on logic alone. Even prioritizing based on intuition doesn’t work. The reason is that these approaches ignore the importance of coherence. Each time you try to apply your logic or intuition to a problem, you’ll be in a slightly different emotional state. That emotional state will dictate what sorts of solutions you come up with. And if the emotional states don’t match from one month to the next, your solutions will be discordant, and you’ll find it hard to create plans that stick. It’s like listening to music where each track keeps drifting off key — it may still look like music on paper… but not when you listen to it.

We can also see why turning a lagging area of your life into your top priority will often backfire. If focusing more attention on that lagging area makes it harder to achieve coherence, your results will suffer. So if you feel a sense of financial lack and then try to push yourself to make more money, you’ll probably be more likely to induce feelings of stress and overwhelm instead of appreciation and gratitude. And so your emotional brain will lead you to procrastinate. It’s actually trying to get you away from those negative feelings and nudge you in the direction of coherence. This is why you may find yourself addicted to email or social media, which may help you feel better than stressing yourself out with work you don’t enjoy. A better solution is to enter the coherence state deliberately and then decide what to do from there.

Taking Action

When you’re ready to take action on your priorities, start by returning to coherence again. Use your favorite method to create feelings of unconditional love, compassion, appreciation, and gratitude. This way you’ll be syncing to the same state you used to create your priorities, so you won’t have the feeling of second-guessing yourself.

In this state, the right actions will tend to emerge fairly easily. For me it was the desire to write and publish a new article on this beautiful Saturday morning while sipping a banana-coconut smoothie. My desire is to help you gain more clarity and experience more flow and happiness in your life.

Returning to this state of coherence when you set priorities and when you act on them is better than trying to prioritize while you’re in one state and then taking actions in discordant states. Don’t expect good results if you prioritize from a state of desperation and then try to take action from a feeling of stress. Sync your emotions to the coherence state before you prioritize and before you take action. With practice you can do this in a matter of seconds. This is a high leverage practice that makes a world of difference.

A Global Perspective

Imagine how the planet would change if more people began each day by syncing to coherence first. Imagine if governments and corporate boardrooms took a couple minutes to sync to unconditional love before they made key decisions. How many problems could we avoid with this one simple practice?

Wouldn’t this be more impactful and consistent than having each person show up with discordant feelings such as fear, greed, overwhelm, etc?

You can try this with your family and friends as well. The next time you have a disagreement with someone close to you, pause for a moment and see if you can get yourself and the other person to sync to coherence first. Then see what becomes of your disagreement.

Syncing between multiple people is like playing in an orchestra. Each individual may have a different instrument and may play different notes at different times, but their output can flow together harmoniously. When multiple people sync with coherence, they create beautiful music. When they’re out of sync, they create some form of noise.

Consider a 30-Day Coherence Trial

If you want to make syncing to coherence a habit, consider kicking off a 30-day trial. It’s really not that difficult to do, and the potential benefits are huge.

To start the trial, take a few minutes to sync to coherence, and then jot down a list of your top priorities in life. It doesn’t have to be a long list, and the exact ordering isn’t that important. Just write down whatever comes to you.

When you’re ready to begin the action part of each day, pause again for a moment and sync to coherence. Then get started by taking the next action you feel inspired to take.

This synching step only takes a few minutes at most. It can be as simple as playing a song that makes you feel appreciative and loving. Then proceed from that state as you move forward. Try to hold onto it as long as you can.

When you notice that you’ve lost touch with the coherence state and you’re drifting into discordant feelings and losing clarity, take another time-out to re-sync to coherence. Again, this doesn’t take long at all. Recall a happy memory. Play some inspiring music. Or send a quick text message to someone you love: I’m really grateful you’re in my life. I deeply love and appreciate you. <3

Since I completed my 30-day music trial this week, I’m kicking off this new 30-day trial today. My commitment is to sync to coherence at least twice per day. I started this morning by syncing to that state and feeling inspired to write and share this article with you. I hope you find it helpful. Have a beautiful day!

Read related articles:

• Passion vs. Self-Discipline
• Thought vs. Action
• Career Responsibility
• Shifting Your Vibration to Manifest Your Desires
• Overcoming Negative Emotions and Boosting Motivation
• Inspiration vs. Expectation
• Motivation for Smart People (Sans Chest Pounding)

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Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Yesterday was Day 30 of my 30-day music learning trial. My aim was to invest at least 30 hours in learning to compose music. In actuality I put in considerably more time. I found it pretty addictive.

I spent the first half of the trial mostly writing simple electronic songs using GarageBand loops. That allowed me to get some quick experience with arranging songs and noticing how different sounds and instruments can work together.

Here’s an example of a song I created mostly from using loops:

Wanderlust – Enhanced by Steve Pavlina

After that I felt it was time to learn how to create songs without using loops, meaning that I wanted to write my own songs note by note. But this territory seemed so wide open that I didn’t know where to begin. Should I try to write a drum loop first? Could I start with a melody? Just pick an instrument and try to play some notes? How was I going to make different tracks mesh well together?

I could have started messing around, but that approach felt too blind at the time… like trying to write an article by typing random words until something meaningful emerged. I wanted a bit more guidance before going that route.

So I spent much of the second half of the trial learning about music theory and composition techniques. This included some reading (online and offline) plus Skyping with musicians. I didn’t worry about composing new songs during this time. I wanted to gain more clarity about how I might attempt to write a song from scratch.

This was challenging but helpful. Sometimes I felt lost in a sea of unfamiliar terminology. It took me a while to decipher what people were saying, especially since words can have multiple meanings depending on the context. Is C Major a key or a chord? Were you speaking English or Italian? Yesterday I joked with someone that I could totally understand why many musicians turn to drugs.

I especially loved it when people would say, “Oh yeah, then there’s this whole other thing beyond that, but getting into that now would just be scary.” More than one person said something like that to me during our Skype calls.

Learning music reminds me of learning computer programming. There’s tons of theory to be studied, but much of the theory isn’t of any practical value unless you’re doing very specific things, like writing your own compiler or building an operating system.

Now I feel I’m settling into an approach that looks something like this:

1. Get inspired by an idea for a new song.
2. Dive in and try to create as much of it as I can, using whatever skills I currently possess.
3. When I get stuck due to a lack of skill or a lack of understanding, discuss it with an experienced musician.
4. Apply the advice along with some trial and error experimenting to get unstuck and keep making progress.
5. Repeat from step 3 as needed.

That’s how I learned to write computer code, starting at age 10. I’d start with an idea to write a new program, like getting my Atari 800 to draw color fractals. If I could write the program with my existing skills, I’d do so. If I got stuck, I’d buy and read more programming books or ask someone for advice to get me past that hurdle.

This goal-based approach is proving very helpful. I learn faster when I can immediately apply what I learn to a current project. Without an immediate goal in mind, it’s easy to get lost in a sea of theoretical ideas that I may end up forgetting anyway.

Yesterday I started working on a new song, but since I’m trying to compose each track from scratch, it’s much slower going. So far I’ve created a drum loop, a melody, and one other track, and I feel they mesh well together. The composition is pretty thin though, so I’d like to add more layers to it.

One thing I want to learn next is how to incorporate vocals. I don’t quite know how to do that. I wrote some lyrics, recorded myself singing, and added them to what I have so far, but it doesn’t sound very good. I probably didn’t sing very well, but the bigger issue is that the vocals sound like they’re floating above the other tracks, if that makes any sense. I don’t yet know how to process vocals to mesh well with such music.

So presently I’m on Step 3 of learning the basics of how to add vocals. I already have some ideas to experiment with there.

I enjoy writing my own lyrics and singing them, but I’ve had no voice training whatsoever, so I can’t say how long it will take to become decent at this. I’d love to be able to sing my own songs and have the vocals mesh nicely with the music. Otherwise I’m sure I could find someone with more experience to let me record them singing the lyrics I wrote. In fact, I think doing something collaboratively now and then would be fun — especially for cross-pollinating skills and ideas.

In the long run, I’d like to build enough skill with music such that I can use it as another channel for expressing inspired ideas. I’m already starting to get song ideas, but I don’t know how to express them musically yet. It’s nice to know that the inspiration will be waiting for me when I get my skills up to speed.

I’m really glad I took on this trial. It got the ball rolling in a new direction, which is what I wanted. My 30-day commitment to put in the time helped me get past the “I don’t even know where to begin” excuse. I was never at a loss for something to do for the next hour or two. I could always play around in GarageBand or do another Skype call. Worst case I could simply listen to music and really pay attention to what was going on in each layer; I learned a good bit just from doing that.

Perhaps the coolest aspect of doing this trial is that 30 days ago, I’d never written a single song. Now I’m written a few of them.

I end this trial with a feeling of gratitude. It was a very rewarding experience.

Read related articles:

• Learning Music – Day 9
• Learning Music – Day 12
• Learning Music – Day 11
• Creating Abundance – Video
• Self Development Video Interview
• 30-Day Trial of Learning Music
• Video Interview on Raw Foods, Social Support, and More

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Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Today, most likely within minutes, our discussion forums will pass 1,000,000 messages posted.

Our forums were launched a little more than 5 years ago. They were instantly popular and remained so ever since, partly because my blog was already getting a lot of traffic that helped feed the forums. This made the initial launch challenging — I think we probably signed up and trained around 20 moderators before we even opened the doors.

The forum community has had its ups and downs and dramatic turns, but overall it’s held to its original vision very well: to create a positive and supportive environment where people could discuss their personal growth challenges, a place to get help and to help others.

I really have to credit the outstanding moderators who volunteered their time to help support this community. There’s no way this community would have worked so well without their caring dedication. They really do an amazing job! Most members don’t see what goes on behind the scenes, but the reality is that every week our moderators are taking action to maintain the spirit of the community as a place where people can discuss personal growth without interference.

What I find most rewarding about the forums is how they foster real human relationships. It’s very special to see members meeting in person and creating deeper connections.

Edit: Congrats to forum member Reefs for posting our 1,000,000th message.

Read related articles:

• Effective Online Forum Usage
• Polyamory and Blog Traffic
• Getting Back to Growth
• Why Live Forever?
• 10 Reasons I Disabled My Contact Form
• Suggestions for Future 30-Day Trials

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Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

This week I read Jack Canfield’s new book The Golden Motorcycle Gang, co-written with William Gladstone. The book is centered around Jack’s personal story and his sense of purpose in life, and it invites you to consider your personal role in our ongoing social evolution.

The Golden Motorcycle Gang

Jack imagines that before he incarnated as a human being, he was part of a gang of spiritual beings speeding through the cosmos on their merry way, and they happened upon a blue planet and decided to take a closer look. What did they see? A planet at war with serious troubles. The year was 1943.

This planet was heading towards a crucial point. If it continued on its old ways, it could soon destroy itself, either with increasingly destructive weaponry, by gradually destroying the planet’s ability to sustain human life, or perhaps by descending into chaos when unsustainable systems ultimately collapsed.

Acting somewhat impulsively the Golden Motorcycle Gang decided to incarnate as human beings. They wanted to help earth move in a more positive direction. Initially they forgot that they were part of this gang, but later in life the memories of their spiritual identities gradually returned, and they were able to reconnect with other members of the gang… and then to begin coordinating their efforts.

The story works whether you regard this as a real soul group or simply as a metaphor for discovering one’s calling. Just consider how it might affect your life and your actions if you believed that you were a part of something like this and that you had previously agreed to fulfill a larger purpose.

In Jack’s case the call to making a difference is well established. Among his many achievements, he co-authored the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, which are filled with inspirational stories. This series has spawned more than 200 books that have collectively sold more than 500 million copies. If you visit one of the remaining brick and mortar bookstores, you’ll frequently see entire sections dedicated to these books.

I have a special connection to this book since I’ve been involved with the Golden Motorcycle Gang since 2009. For that reason my name is listed in one of the book’s appendices.

I have a golden motorcycle coin (a symbolic token of initiation that was given to me by Jack) tacked up to my vision board in my home office. I use this board to post words, phrases, symbols, photos, drawings, and artistic creations from my kids — anything that reminds me of my life purpose, goals, and dreams.

Cracking Systems

If you get most of your news from fear-based media outlets, you may worry that the planet is going downhill. The economy is tanking. Wars are being fought with no end in sight. Money is corrupting everything. World leaders trash-talk each other behind the scenes.

Yes, the planet has its problems, but there’s also a rising counter-reaction to these problems. More and more people are progressively waking up, and many are committing themselves to work on solutions to our greatest challenges. Our global challenges are too big for any one person to solve, so collective coordination is necessary.

As many people are well aware, our economic and political systems are showing lots of cracks lately. One problem is that many elements of these systems are unsustainable. For example, we can’t achieve infinite growth from systems that rely on ever-increasing consumption of finite resources. Eventually the simple mathematics will win out. It’s just a matter of time.

On the other hand, there are elements of these existing systems that actually work quite well. We don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We want to keep what works and re-engineer the parts that aren’t working. I for one feel grateful for just how well systems of business and government work in the USA. There are numerous problems of course — these systems are far from perfect — but they do accomplish quite a lot.

Anarchy isn’t the answer. Even the most unconstrained parts of the Internet has shown that self-governance is a failure. Where free will is present, it just takes a few deliberate wrongdoers to wreck the whole system for everyone else. As much as we’d like to believe it isn’t necessary, at this time in our evolution we still require the foundation of force-backed coercive power to maintain a reasonable level of order, whether that power is wielded by governments or businesses. Where there’s no rule of law backed by the threat of force, things break down.

Government and business systems add significant value to our lives, and life without them would be far worse. Without those systems you and I probably wouldn’t even be able to communicate. What we need is to intelligently replace the unsustainable elements with more sustainable ones. By itself that’s an achievable goal. The tricky part is keeping everything running during the transition process. We can’t simply shut everything down and replace it with something new. If we lose the structure provided by our current systems before new ones can be established, we could potentially descend into chaos, and it could take us a very long time to recover from that.

We can also continue to upgrade the systems that are working poorly. Education is a good example. Many best practices are known, but they aren’t yet being implemented on a large scale. This creates rippling problems since an uneducated society cannot produce enough educated individuals to perform vital functions, particularly when it comes to leadership.

Gathering the Gang

There was a time when these GMG group members acted mainly as individuals — writing books, doing seminars, coaching people, and running their own independent businesses. Then they began coalescing into groups, helping to inspire, motivate, and support each other in doing transformational work. Now those groups are beginning to connect in order to coordinate their efforts on a larger scale. This is a very interesting development to witness.

Group cohesion is a challenging thing to accomplish in this case — almost like herding cats. I’m especially curious to see if these groups will be able to find enough common ground to work on bigger projects that require significant cooperation.

My interpretation of the GMG and similar groups and that one of their desired functions is to help us transition from the old, dying systems to new, more sustainable ones. There’s a sense of optimism as well as urgency arising within these groups. On the one hand, we have a lot of smart people now agreeing to coordinate their efforts, doing their best to keep their egos in check as they work together for the common good. On the other hand, the clock is ticking. The old systems only have so much life left in them before they can no longer be maintained.

Some of these people are working on education. Others are tackling environmental issues. Some are working on basic needs. Still others work to raise awareness and teach oneness and compassion. One woman I know works with prisons. They’re making progress on the important fronts. The main question is whether progress is happening quickly enough.

Birth 2012

One thing that’s being coordinated, as explained in Jack’s book, is to have a planetary birthday party on Dec 22, 2012, which is 1 year, 1 month, and 11 days from now. This is yet another step in the direction of helping people come together, set aside their differences, and embrace that we all share a common destiny on this planet. In the grand scheme it may be a small step, but it will help raise awareness of bigger issues and draw more people into the transition process. You can learn more about this birthday celebration and sign up to participate at birth2012.com.

Expanding Your Life Purpose by Finding Your Tribe

Instead of regarding your life purpose as your individual mission, you may find it more empowering to interpret your purpose as part of a team effort. You’re not acting alone. Your actions can be coordinated with others to have more impact.

This doesn’t mean surrendering your will to a group. It means noticing where your individual strengths could contribute greater results by coordinating your efforts with others.

Most members of the GMG are much older than I am, belonging to my parents’ generation. I resonate with their values, philosophies, and projects, but I can see that their paths and my path are a bit different. We’re all working on similar challenges, just from different angles.

I can see how great the level of mutual support is within this group. Many GMG members have been friends for decades. Sometimes they support each other from a distance. Sometimes they work together directly. Either way they’re bound by common values and a common cause.

Whereas members of the GMG often have their values rooted in the 60s, molded by such experiences as the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, my past was shaped by different events, such as the massive expansion of communications technology, the fall of the Soviet Union, the Gulf Wars, and 9/11. I was also strongly influenced by West Coast values since I grew up in California, which is where many members of the GMG currently live.

I like riding with the GMG, I share a lot of love and support with them, and I can see that their missions combine nicely with my own, but energetically and soulfully, the people I resonate with most strongly wouldn’t think of themselves as members of this group. The GMG feels like family to me, but on the level of aunts, uncles, and some cousins. Lately, however, I’ve been feeling drawn to connect with the people who’d be on the level of brothers and sisters.

The Next Generation

Many of the problems the GMG is tackling won’t be solved within their lifetimes. It will be up to the next generation to receive the torch and carry it further downfield.

Reading Jack’s book got me thinking about the people who might be part of this next generation, people who are currently in their 30s and 40s (and perhaps mature 20-somethings) and who want to help shift the planet in a more positive direction.

I’ve met many of these people, but I feel we’re still in the phase of working primarily as individuals, mostly doing our own things while connecting socially from time to time, like many GMG members were doing a decade ago.

Due to the age difference, our careers aren’t as well developed as those of the GMG. On average we don’t have as many resources at our disposal, and our networks aren’t as powerful. But we do have some key advantages. For starters we understand and can utilize technology a lot better than the previous generation. This is a generalization of course, but I don’t think it’s an unreasonable one.

I’ve encountered a few networking groups for people close to my age, but they’re usually very business-centered. Often they just want to help promote each other’s products and become more successful in business. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but such groups don’t usually resonate with me. That isn’t the kind of vibe I’m looking for.

I’d rather connect with people who can direct their ambition towards making a positive difference in the world, especially people with strong service-oriented values.

For many years I’ve been hearing the frustrations of this next generation. Many of them see that the world needs help, and they’d like to contribute somehow, but they see no practical way of doing this. Meanwhile they’re being influenced to play it safe, to go into the corporate world and get a job. When they do this, however, they often wind up in empty, soulless positions — if they can find work at all. They do work that just doesn’t matter that much (according to their values, not mine), but they do it because they feel it’s necessary to support themselves. Consequently, they’re never all that motivated to do their best work or to advance their career skills, so they naturally stunt their career development. Years pass, and they feel they’re falling behind, but they don’t know what to do about it. They often blame themselves and assume the problem is their lack of drive, discipline, or motivation. And they try to hold out hope that something will change for them.

I think the real issue though is that our systems of business and government haven’t kept pace with our evolving consciousness. Many of these people are just too conscious to get sucked into the belief that says moving up the corporate ladder is important. They see through such shallow structures and avoid these dead-end paths, but they lack good practical alternatives.

On the other hand, this generation is more connected than ever, thanks to the Internet, social networking, and powerful portable devices. Quite often these people invest more time and energy in their social lives than in their career development.

Overall these people feel very pressured. There’s pressure to get something going career-wise, but the motivation isn’t there to do it. So the time gets devoted to the Internet and online socializing, and the career path gets drained of life and meaning to feed the social life.

The Need for Better Solutions

I avoided this fate by starting my own business, which is a solution I’ve recommend to others, but I understand that entrepreneurship isn’t a viable path for everyone. Many people would much rather work for someone else, and they’d love to do meaningful work that inspires them — and pays the bills.

Also, starting a new business often involves spending a lot of time working alone, and younger people are so well networked with their peers that it’s harder for them to go that route. It would make more sense for them to work together in groups to do creative work as a team.

Another problem with entrepreneurship is that many people get sucked into soulless business models. They gradually fall into a money-first focus that’s out of alignment with oneness, which leads to long-term unhappiness and stress. It’s sad to see the life drain out of such people when they go that route. They can’t even hug properly after a while.

I love how the community around my work has grown and how people help and support each other and stay connected socially. But many of these same people (perhaps even most of them) are experiencing significant challenges in their career and financial lives. They feel stuck.

Even when they do start their own businesses, long-term success is difficult. I didn’t make my first business profitable till its 6th year, for instance. This isn’t unusual for entrepreneurs. But how to pay the bills in the meantime?

If we want to move away from the soulless corporate job trap as the primary career path that people of this generation settle for in order to cover their expenses, we’ll need to create more and better alternatives.

Getting Stronger

Many members of the GMG are very well off financially. In most cases it took them decades to get there, but it does make service easier when you have a steady stream of royalties from bestselling books coming in, your Rolodex includes lots of influential friends, and Oprah likes you.

When I look at people around my age or younger who have a service-orientated mindset, many of them are struggling in one way or another. Either they’re struggling financially while maintain a strong heart-centeredness, or they’re doing well financially and struggling in their connectedness.

As I’ve seen with the GMG, it isn’t necessary to go it alone. We can help each other grow stronger, which puts us in positions to have a greater positive impact.

At this time in my life, I’ve been encountering a number of people who seem like they could be pieces to a bigger puzzle. Individually they have some interesting strengths and talents, but it’s difficult for them to leverage their strengths on their own. Increasingly I’m sensing that it’s important to help connect the dots between them, whereby some of them could work together in small teams to do some interesting and beneficial work.

Earlier this year I decided to grow my business by hiring more people, but I think that mindset has been too limiting. Most of the people that have been showing up haven’t been the right fit for my current business needs, but I can see that some of them might be able to work well with each other in a more flexible context.

I think it would be beneficial to bring some of these people together in person and help them connect with each other. They could keep in touch online, but for the best possible connection I think a face to face meet-up would be essential.

Most members of the GMG already have their own businesses, but this isn’t as common in the next generation. The next generation, however, has a major social advantage — by and large they’re really good at communicating with each other. In fact, I think many of them would crave the opportunity to work with very conscious people their own age as part of a team. It sure beats getting a mindless corporate job, and for many people it also beats working alone on their own.

Service Orientation

The key is to bring people together who are truly interested in serving the greater good in some fashion, people who have compatible values and similar mindsets regarding service — and people who are willing to work hard to become really good at what they do, so they can increase their ability to contribute over time.

For many years I’ve had a vision of bringing service-oriented people together and helping to provide the support structures that would enable them to do what they came here to do. I think what’s been holding me up was trying to figure out the right business structure for that — by expanding my current business, forming a non-profit, etc. I realize now that the underlying structure isn’t that important. That’s putting the cart before the horse. I think if we can just get some of these people in the same place talking to each other and discussing ideas, the structural issues will sort themselves out.

At this point the idea isn’t fully formed, so I’m tossing this out there to see where it leads. Who are these next generation people? What have they done so far that demonstrates their commitment to service? Would they be interested in connecting regularly with other “family members” who share their values?

Read related articles:

• The Consciousness Revolution
• Ask Steve – What Religion Are You?
• Is Your Genius at Work?
• Understanding Family Relationship Problems
• Ask Steve – Parenting
• Waking Up
• Ask Steve – Money and Financial Issues

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Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Writing music is addictive! I was up till 3am last night working on a new piece and reading about music production. This music vibe doesn’t seem to mesh very well with being an early riser! Is there something about music production that transform people into vampires?

Oh, it’s already past midnight… better get to bed… wait… one more little tweak… should only take a minute…

Two hours later…

Frak… it’s past 2am already… okay, one last edit and then that’s it… for real this time!

Thirty minutes later…

Okay for really real now… I mean it! Save and close… Don’t even think about it… save and close! Click it! Now!

Finally lying in bed…

Wait… I wonder if I should try a…

I don’t feel this new piece is mixed very well, nor is it my preferred style of music (it’s a bit funk-like), but I’m okay with that since my goal for this project was to work on incorporating some bass. I wasn’t even going to finish it last night, but I got it to a state I felt was good enough to call it done.

I used the electric bass as more of a foreground instrument than a background one. I’m still a little uncertain about how to incorporate bass with a melody on top. That’s something I’d like to learn soon. I’d probably be better off if I could learn to compose with instruments instead of relying on loops so much. Presently I find it difficult to identify a bass and a potential melody snippet that I feel would mesh well together.

If you want to give it a listen, here it is:

Electric Bass by Steve Pavlina

I also bought a book called the Dance Music Manual by Rick Snoman. Thanks a bunch to Marius van Dyk for the recommendation. This book got rave reviews on Amazon (no pun intended), and it covers many different aspects of music production: music theory, different styles of electronic music (house, trance, techno, etc), processing (compression, effects, etc), using samples, incorporating vocals, creating drum loops, mixing, mastering, and more. I thumbed through it for 30 minutes last night and already learned a few things. What struck me right away was the incredible attention to detail that goes into creating top quality work in this field. For me I think that will come later. First I want to learn to compose with broad strokes.

A few people also told me about an iPhone app called NanoStudio. Thanks to Ariella Baston for providing the final nudge to check it out. NanoStudio has tons of 5-star reviews, and I’m impressed with what people have been able to do with it. I wouldn’t have thought someone could make a decent DAW for a phone (DAW = digital audio workstation, i.e. music production software — I’m learning the acronyms!), but apparently someone did. I decided to buy a copy (only $15), so I can play around with making music on the go. It also works on iPad, so it may be easier to use on the larger screen.

Growth Accelerators Applied to Music

When I want to learn something new, I consciously apply the 7 principles that we use at the Conscious Growth Workshop and that I wrote about in Personal Development for Smart People. These principles are growth accelerators, so they help me make faster progress. The principles are universal, so they can be applied to all sorts of goals and pursuits, even when you don’t have a clear destination in mind. I also think it’s a lot more fun to learn quickly… as opposed to slogging ahead at a snail’s pace.

The 3 core principles are truth, love, and power. There’s no specific order they need to be applied. They actually work best when you apply them together since they synergize so well.

For this music learning pursuit, I started with the principle of power, which means diving in and taking action right away. No excuses. No hesitation. Just go.

If you don’t feel quite ready, go anyway. If you have a really good reason not to go, go anyway. If other people don’t want you to go, go anyway. If you don’t have time, go anyway. Nothing happens till you’re in motion.

If you stumble, trip, fall, or otherwise fail, that’s fine. You’ll learn from it. Fail because your lack of skill or some genuine obstacle knocked you back. Don’t fail because you defeated yourself in your own mind. Do your best, and let that be enough. There’s no shame in doing your best and falling short. There is shame in holding back.

To me this means diving in and trying to create some music. I already had GarageBand on my Mac, so I watched some tutorial videos and started trying to compose something with it.

To apply this principle, just go. It really is that simple. If you don’t know what to do, frakkin guess. Be totally impulsive. Go with the first thing that pops in your mind. Embrace mistakes, invite feedback, and keep learning. Your impulses will calibrate themselves over time. Initially you may look like a chicken running around with its head cut off, but eventually you’ll identify something shiny to run towards, and you’ll already have some momentum on your side.

I also began to apply the principle of love. This is one of the most underused principles. People overlook it all the time — and very much to their peril. Love is an incredibly potent growth accelerator, and it greatly enhances all the others.

In terms of practical application, love is essentially social support. It’s encouragement. It’s advice. It’s mentoring. It’s plain and simple, good old fashioned, 100% natural, biodegradable… HELP.

To apply the principle of love, you basically shout to the world, “Help me!”

But don’t be the kind of person who asks for help and then does nothing about it. When help shows up, welcome it, receive it with gratitude, and apply it immediately. Otherwise you’re squandering your social support, teaching others that you aren’t worth helping.

People generally like offering help, support, and encouragement to those who will truly benefit from it. It’s frustrating to try to help someone who isn’t serious and wastes your time. It’s rewarding to help someone who will respect and apply your advice. This will often make you want to help this person even more, especially if your help is being leveraged to create further positive ripples.

If someone asks me for advice, and I give them what I feel is good advice, and a week goes by and I see they’ve done nothing with it, how likely will I be to take this person seriously the next time they ask for advice? Most likely I’ll ignore them and direct my attention to people who seem serious.

When you ask for help and it shows up, respect the help that arrives. Even if you think you’re getting bad advice, do your best to harbor a sense of gratitude and appreciation for the fact that someone is trying to help you even a little. This is an important vibe to cultivate.

I respect the heck out of musicians who are much more skilled than I am. I know I could learn a lot from them. So when I ask for help, and such people give me some tips, I try to apply them quickly if I’m able. I can’t follow every lead simultaneously, but I can follow a lot of leads. And when people see that I’m serious and that I appreciate their help very much, it invites even more support.

You can try to go it alone, but why bother? It’s much faster — and a lot more rewarding — to make your journey a social one.

Another way to apply the principle of love is to be open to collaborating on projects, like trying to co-create a song together.

I won’t blindly follow someone’s advice if it doesn’t feel right to me, but if I’m on the fence, I push myself off the fence and onto the side of trusting and taking action. So if I’m not sure whether to buy that book someone recommended, I buy it and read it. If I’m not sure whether incorporating bass is the next thing I should work on, I do it anyway.

I recognize that other people know a lot more about music creation than I do, and their advice is likely to be more helpful for me than my own default decisions. I don’t have a clear enough understanding of what steps to take in order to learn what I want to learn. But other people already have clarity about those steps. They can often envision my next steps better than I can. Over time I’ll be better able to guide my own learning, but for now I’m still developing my music instincts, and so I typically get more mileage from relying on other people’s advice. This can shave a lot of time off my learning curve.

This power-and-love approach has been working wonderfully so far, and now I feel the time is right to start incorporating some truth. So I expect to devote more time reading about music and educating myself to fill in the gaps in my experiential knowledge.

It’s one thing to have a DJ advise me, “you should apply a compressor here.” I’m sure his advice is good, but I don’t understand why I should do that or what the alternatives are. It’s therefore helpful to read several pages on the mathematics of compression, to see pictures of what it does to the sound waves, and to read some do’s and don’ts about its application. This is a nice complement to my experiential learning.

Experientially I still think the next step for me is to figure out how to incorporate some bass and a melody in a song and have them mesh well together. Presently the how-to aspects of that are a mystery to me.

It’s past 2pm already? Okay, one last edit and then that’s it!

Read related articles:

• Music Trial Recap
• Learning Music – Day 9
• Creating Abundance – Video
• Self Development Video Interview
• Video Interview on Raw Foods, Social Support, and More
• 30-Day Trial of Learning Music
• Learning Music – Day 11

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Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Yesterday I decided to try inputting a simple melody into GarageBand by playing it via my Akai MIDI controller. I’m still very new to this, so I came up with a very basic C-major tune, not much more complicated than Mary Had a Little Lamb, but it’s a start.

After a few practice runs — till I could stop screwing up and hitting the wrong notes — I was able to play and record the sequence into GarageBand. My timing wasn’t great, but it’s pretty easy to edit the notes in the software once they’re recorded.

Once I had the recording on screen, I spent a few minutes tweaking the timing and velocity of the notes till it sounded right to me. That part went just fine, and I was satisfied with the result.

Then I decided to try adding a few GarageBand loops to make it more interesting, starting with a basic drum track. I wanted to see if I could get my melody to mesh well with the drums. In fact, when I recorded the melody, I had the drums playing at the same time, so I could play along with the same rhythm.

GarageBand has a feature called a groove track. You can specify one track to serve as your groove track, and GarageBand will slightly adjust the timing of the notes in the other tracks to mesh with the groove track. You don’t have to use this feature, but it’s there if you want it. The benefit is that it helps make multiple tracks sound good when played together. Otherwise small differences in timing can make the different instruments sound a bit out of sync.

It seems you can also specify the granularity of this feature — match to nearest 1/4 note, 1/8 note, …, 1/64th note.

Since I’m new to this, my timing is far from perfect, so I’d definitely like to use this feature if possible. When I listen to my melody with the drum loop added without using the groove track feature, I can tell the timing is a bit off. The notes of my melody don’t quite mesh with the drums at some points.

When I set the drums to be the groove track, and I have my recorded melody sync to it, the result is pretty good. It fixes my slight timing problems, and the melody seems to mesh nicely with the drums. I can’t hear any timing errors at all.

If I try specifying my melody as the groove track and then have the drums sync to it, it doesn’t sound nearly as good. That may be partly because my melody has only a fraction of the notes that the drum loop has. Intuitively it seems sensible that I should set the drums to be the groove track and have my melody sync to that. Is that a reasonable choice?

Now for some reason, when I have the groove track feature enabled and then try to do even the most basic copy-and paste work with this sequence, something goes awry. If I take my short melody and copy and paste it to a different location on the track (perfectly aligned with the start of a new measure), GarageBand shifts some of the notes a little. In fact, it not only shifts notes in the pasted copy — it also changes some notes in the original version! Why is it doing this?

This also happens if I try to move my recorded sequence one or more measures to the left or right. Some of the notes get time-shifted, even if I shift it based on measure-aligned boundaries.

Furthermore this also happens if I create a new track with the same or a different instrument and copy or move my recorded sequence to that track, whether to the exact same measure in time or a different measure.

It’s easy to show you what’s happening visually.

Here’s a piece of a screen capture from GarageBand that shows part of the melody that I recorded and edited. This sounds reasonably good timing-wise when it’s played, and it syncs well with the drum loop too.

 

And here’s what GarageBand does to this same sequence if I try to copy and paste or move it somewhere, either to a different place on the same track or to a new track. It does this not just to the copy but also to the original.

 

Notice that it changed the timing of notes in the triplets. Notes that were played at different times are suddenly shifted to play at the same time. When this sequence is played, it doesn’t sound right.

The timing issue seems to have to do with the triplets — those are the sequences it keeps corrupting. I can drag the notes around to fix the timing issue after the fact, but it seems I’d have to do that every single time, which would be quite tedious, especially if I’m going to experiment a lot with this sequence.

Why is GarageBand messing up the timing of my notes when I do simple operations like copying and pasting, or moving a sequence to a new location?

What am I doing wrong here? Is there some obvious mistake I’m making that I’m just not seeing?

I tried experimenting with different settings, and I even see some that include the word “triplet”, but no matter which setting I’ve tried, similar problems still occur — they just show up in different ways, but it always seems to affect the triplets. I think this problem is being caused by using the groove track, but if I disable that feature, then I lose the benefits it provides.

I don’t know enough about music or music software yet to discern the best way to remedy this problem. Was I not supposed to play something with triplets if I’m trying to sync it with drums? Honestly I didn’t even know what a triplet was till I saw the number 3 appearing above my notes, and Rachelle informed me that it means I played a triplet. I just played what intuitively sounded okay to me.

Apparently these are 8th note triplets, meaning that three 8th notes are being played in the span of what would be equivalent to a quarter note (one quarter note = two 8th notes).

Perhaps what’s happening here is something of a mathematical problem. It looks like the quantization of notes is based on the division of powers of two (1/2 note, 1/4 note, 1/8 note, 1/16 note, etc), and maybe the software is rounding to the nearest interval, and it can’t keep the correct alignment of those triplets when it does this.

It seems that no matter what settings I use for the groove quantization effect, it still shifts some of my notes enough to make it sound off.

I don’t know enough about music, GarageBand, or groove tracks to know what to do about it, so I thought I’d blog about it, and maybe someone who’s much more musically inclined than I am could explain what’s going on and how I should remedy it.

Perhaps one solution would be to disable the groove track feature till the very end, and then I could just do one final editing pass to correct any notes it messes up. But I like having this feature turned on along the way — it’s easier for me to tell if a combination of instruments sounds good if their timing is nicely synced. Even between different loops in GarageBand, this seems to make a difference.

I guess another option would be to re-engineer my melody so it doesn’t include any triplets, but that seems a bit lame to me. If I can stumble upon this as a newbie in writing my first melody, and if there’s actual notation for it, I have to imagine it’s a valid way to construct music. It sounds reasonably okay to me when the triplets are played, so why not keep them? It even meshes nicely with the drum track.

The part I find the most frustrating is that I can get everything to the point where it sounds good, and I’d love to be able to copy and paste those segments exactly as is (either on the same track or a different track), but whenever I do that, GarageBand corrupts not only the copy but also the original. I can fix those changes after the fact, but that requires a lot of extra checking and editing, which I’d rather not do — surely that isn’t how someone with more experience would solve this problem, is it?

The benefit of running into this problem is that I know I’m going to learn something new as a result. Until I got stuck here, I didn’t even know what a triplet was, nor did I know anything about groove tracks.

Despite this little snag, I’m still enjoying this music trial immensely. Diving in and composing some songs using GarageBand loops was a great place to start, and learning to incorporate basic effects like echo and reverb was a nice step beyond that. It was fun to do this a few times, but I’m already feeling limited by what I can do with the built-in loops in GarageBand. I can create something that sounds okay, but I don’t feel like I’m really able to express myself with those tools. The songs I created thus far were valuable learning experiments, but I feel very constrained creatively. I’d like to explore new avenues and build new skills, so I can have more options for expressing myself through music.

I figured the next step would be to try playing my own sequences of notes. I’m sure I have a lot to learn when it comes to composing sequences that sound good together, but I think if I can figure out how to do that, then I can build out a complete song. I’m not worried about being good at it — I just want to understand the process that I have to go through in order to create a complete song from start to finish that incorporates at least a few segments I composed. I can focus on getting good later. For now I just want to learn the how-to.

One really cool development has happened, one that took me by surprise. When I began this trial, some of my musician friends gave me advice and suggestions based on the assumption that I’d be learning how to take “the music in my head” and input it into a computer. I couldn’t relate to that because I didn’t hear any songs in my head, other than what I’d heard someone else play. I certainly wasn’t hearing any original tunes in my mind.

But I could understand this in the broader sense of having inspired ideas come to me. This happens all the time with my writing. An idea shows up, and I feel compelled to write about it (as already explained in How I Write). With all the experience I have as a writer, it’s very easy for me to take such an inspired idea and express it through words. If it’s a bigger idea, then I know how to express it in the form of a workshop. But I have no experience expressing these inspired ideas through music. I wondered if those musicians were implying that I was somehow going to figure out a way to express these same ideas through music.

Well, a few days ago, I actually started hearing music in my mind — just a small snippet or two, but it seemed to be original — nothing I recall hearing elsewhere. I still don’t know how to get those sequences out of my head and into the computer , but I imagine that with time and practice, I can develop the skills to do that. Even so, I think it’s really neat that musical inspiration is beginning to show up for me already.

These musical idea waves come to me in essentially the same fashion as my article ideas do, but the energy signature is different. I can easily tell that what’s showing up is musical in nature — I wouldn’t confuse it with the inspiration for a new article. This is exciting to me because if I’m able to tap into a similar abundant source of inspiration for musical ideas as I’m able to do with articles, it means that I could potentially write lots of music over time. It’s just a matter of building out my skills.

I’m well aware that my skill set isn’t yet a good vehicle for taking those musical ideas that show up and getting them into the computer, but this is a long road. With persistence I can get there eventually, just as I did with learning to program, to write, and to speak. I love the idea of building the skill set to express inspired ideas through yet another medium, so when the inspiration for a new song shows up, I could serve as a proper channel for getting that idea into the physical world.

There’s a part of me that wants to keep tacking on qualifiers to everything I do in this beginner phase with words like, “I know I suck at this, so…” or “Don’t expect this to be any good, but…” I think it’s time for me to stop doing that. It’s true that I’m a beginner, and my current skill level surely reflects that, but deep down I know I’m going to become really good at music. It’s only a matter of time.

I’ve worked hard to gain the ability to express inspired ideas through other forms over a period of many years. I started learning computer programming in 1981, but I didn’t see my first computer game published till 1994. I began writing articles in 1999, but I didn’t really start making a good living as a writer till 2006. I joined Toastmasters in 2004 and invested a solid 5 years in gaining comfort with public speaking, but I didn’t start doing my own workshops till 2009. At least these cycles are getting shorter, partly because I’ve gotten better at learning how to learn quickly. Sharing my journey along the way, for instance, helps me learn faster.

Even though I’m only on Day 11 of my music trial, I’m enjoying it enough that I already feel committed to this path of skill building for the long haul. I expect to stick with this line of development well beyond the 30 days. It doesn’t mean I’ll be blogging about it forever, but I do intend to keep working on it.

The benefit of having a long-term ambition is that it accelerates skill-building, especially during the beginner phase. We can acquire new skills much more quickly if we expect to still be using them 5, 10, or 20 years down the road.

I genuinely expect that 5 years from now, I’ll be writing music in some fashion. It’s possible that some new interest might grab my attention between now and then, but if I hold this expectation now, I’m able to learn a lot faster. The most important factor in learning is to have a strong purpose. I feel there are some ideas I can express through music that I can’t express through other media, and I wouldn’t feel good about leaving that channel forever unexplored.

I see new skills as adding to each other, not replacing each other. So I don’t expect to un-become a writer or speaker and shift to being a musician. I want to explore and integrate a new avenue for creative expression while continuing to use and further develop my other skills. Learning music won’t be the end either. There will be other forms to explore beyond that as well.

So I’m going to do my best to stop playing the helpless newbie card. It doesn’t mesh with how I see myself. I may be new at this, but internally I’m already feeling the mastery vibe calling to me. It’s like I’ve already done it, and I’m just waiting for physical reality to narrate the story of how I got from A to B.

So if you catch me doing the qualifying thing when I share my musical progress henceforth, please give me a good smack upside the head. If I’m going to master the ability to express inspired ideas through music, however long that takes, I might as well start getting comfortable where this path will lead. I want to get used to feeling what it will feel like to be able to competently express myself through music. I don’t have to wait 5 years to start practicing that aspect.

And if GarageBand can’t handle my triplets, then its days in my simulated reality are numbered!

Read related articles:

• Music Trial Recap
• Learning Music – Day 9
• Learning Music – Day 12
• 30-Day Trial of Learning Music
• Why Logic Always Fails You
• A Scientific Method for Exploring Consciousness
• Weaknesses That Matter, Weaknesses That Don’t

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Conscious Relationships Workshop - Feb 17-19, 2012


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Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

I’ve been having a wonderful time with my 30-day trial of learning music. Here’s a quick update to share how it’s going.

First, I’m truly grateful for the flow of support and encouragement that’s been coming my way, especially from experienced musicians. Several people have offered to tutor or help me in various ways, and I’m taking a few of them up on those offers.

The confusing part is that I don’t yet know enough about music to discern what would be wise to learn and in what order, so I’m just going with whatever seems interesting in the moment. That’s working fine so far, and I’m learning something new every day. I’m also raising my awareness of what I don’t comprehend yet, which is helping me figure out what I may wish to study down the road.

While I’ve often written about using 30-day trials for installing new habits, I’m doing this trial to explore and learn, not to condition a new habit. This approach has been very helpful. There’s a lot about music that still confuses me, but I don’t find it frustrating. It’s an adventurous sort of confusion. I feel a bit like an inquisitive toddler: What’s this? What can you do with that? Show me how this part works!

My initial plan was to spend 1-2 hours per day learning music. In practice I’ve been averaging more than that. One day last week I put in 8+ hours, and I probably invested a good 4 hours yesterday.

With this trial I’m not going to fuss over the time investment since it hasn’t been difficult to get myself to take action. I’m in a good flow right now, my motivation to learn remains his, my environment has been extremely supportive, and I have plenty of social accountability to keep going. As I do with my writing, I’ll stick with this flow of inspiration however it shows up.

Learning in Public

When some people want to develop new skills, they often do so quietly at first, exploring new interests in private without telling many people. This is especially common if they feel others might judge them.

I recommend the opposite approach, as I mentioned in Broadcast Your Desires. When you open up and tell the whole world your intention as if it’s the greatest idea you’ve ever had in your life, a few things will typically happen.

First, many people won’t care one way or another. But you’ll have made those people aware of your interests, and if they stumble upon something that may help you (coincidentally or synchronistically), they may share it with you. These leads can be helpful, so why not invite them?

Some examples include:

• By the way, just thought I’d mention that the music store near your house is having a big sale this weekend.
• By the way, we have an old keyboard we don’t need. It’s not the greatest, but it works. You can have it for free if you want it.
• By the way, my aunt is a music teacher and says she’d be happy to give you a free lesson.

If you keep quiet, you won’t receive these leads. By broadcasting your desires openly, you create new pathways for information and opportunities to flow to you.

Secondly, some people may respond negatively to your new pursuit. That’s also fine. Just don’t give your power away. Hold your ground with such people. They may try to talk you out of it, but if it’s something you want, don’t let them. I like to regard negative feedback as a test to see if I’m really serious. The more doubtful I am about a particular decision, the more resistance shows up in the form of people telling me I’m making a mistake.

Some negative resistance can be useful. It can strengthen your resolve and help you clarify whether you really want what you claim to want. When you finally commit, resistance greatly diminishes. Often it stops showing up. Other people can tell you’re committed, so they don’t bother trying to derail you since they know they don’t stand a chance. Even when some resistance does show up, it’s no match for your iron resolve, so it just bounces off you.

If you worry that you’re making a mistake, the world will reflect that worry back to you. If you stop second guessing yourself and direct the full force of your power in the direction of your desires, that resistance dries up.

Lastly, some people will actively support you in your new direction. Like attracts like. When you broadcast your desires, you’ll come into resonance with powerful new vibes that will attract different people to you. This can happen so quickly that it will make your head spin. Lately it seems like almost everyone I connect with now is a musician of some sort.

Try not to resist these social shifts when they show up. They’re supposed to happen. You’re not going to dive into some new venture and not see shifts in your social circle. Some shifting is inevitable. Embrace that dynamic. Let the naysayers complain themselves right out of your reality. Let the supportive people move closer to you. You’ll be much happier if you relax and flow with these shifts. Don’t get clingy with the past, and don’t try to force anyone to approve of your new direction if they seem resistant.

If you’re unwilling to broadcast your new intention shamelessly and publicly, how strong is your intention anyway? Your reality responds to your entire vibe, not just one selected aspect of it. If you’re holding back, your vibe is corrupted by inner resistance, fear, timidity, etc. What the universe will reflect back to you will be just as stunted.

Interestingly, with this music trial I haven’t seen much, if any, resistance. Some people are neutral about it of course, but I haven’t seen anyone screaming “No, you idiot! Don’t do that!” That’s a refreshing change. Perhaps more resistance will show up when 10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job gets put to music.

We could say this isn’t a particularly contentious trial, but if some resistance does show up, I probably wouldn’t notice it. My energy is too focused on moving forward, and I’m having way too much fun on this path, especially when it comes to connecting with musicians.

From Unconscious Incompetence to Conscious Incompetence

When I began this trial, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. There was a lot about music that I wasn’t even aware of. Now I’m gradually gaining awareness of what I don’t know. That’s a positive step forward.

This increase in awareness is helping me figure out what I want to learn. As I see it, there are two big pieces I’d like to understand better.

The first element is learning how to actually write a very basic musical piece, something that could be played with a single instrument like keyboards or a guitar, with or without vocals. I can play a simple song like Mary Had a Little Lamb, but I don’t yet know how to put notes in a sequence together to create something original that sounds good.

Some musicians suggest that I should start by studying music theory. Others advise me not to bother with theory right now — just dive in and try to play something, and I’ll learn what works through trial and error. I suspect that both approaches could work. I don’t know enough to predict which approach will work best for me, so I’m actually going to explore both paths simultaneously… at least till I can gain a better sense of where each path might lead.

The major goal in this area, which may take longer than this trial, would be to create an original composition on my own. It doesn’t have to be stunning, but I’d love to be able to create and play one basic song from beginning to end, most likely with a keyboard.

The second element I’d like to learn is how to construct compositions with many different layers, especially in the genre of electronic music. I’m gradually getting a sense of the different pieces of a composition, but I don’t know how to do very much yet when it comes to creating interesting arrangements.

A major achievement in this area would be if I could learn how to engineer something similar the songs on Depeche Mode’s Violator album, which is more than 20 years old. I’ve heard that album many times and listened to it again this morning, but this time I heard the songs with fresh ears. I noticed details I hadn’t paid attention to before. I was struck by what masterpieces of composition some of those songs are — songs like Personal Jesus, Halo, Enjoy the Silence, and Policy of Truth. They’re just so rich and complex. If I could someday learn how to create pieces like these, even if they don’t sound nearly as professional, that would be amazing.

For a modest step in this direction, I’d be delighted if I could figure out how to engineer much simpler songs like Depeche Mode’s See You or Just Can’t Get Enough. I think I would learn a lot from studying them in more depth. What would it take to learn how to create something with similar structural elements. Those songs aren’t particularly complicated by today’s standards, and surely the technology and software of today is far more capable than what was available 30+ years ago. I don’t know how long it would take me to achieve such a goal, but at least this gives me something to work towards.

I know there’s a major skill component when it comes to making music that sounds good, but at this point I’m more interested in the how-to aspects. There’s so much I don’t even know how to do yet. I can’t concern myself with trying to do things at high quality when I don’t even know how to do them poorly.

If I could learn enough to make a piss-poor version of a song similar to Just Can’t Get Enough, then perhaps I could eventually figure out how to create a piss-poor version of something like Enjoy the Silence. And then once I’ve figured that out, I can work on getting good.

So far I’ve been working solely in GarageBand on my Mac, and much of my time has been devoted to learning the software. I also bought an inexpensive Akai MIDI controller, based on some musicians’ recommendations. It’s about the size of my laptop’s keyboard and connects to my Mac via USB. The Akai gives me a compact interface for inputting some notes and tweaking parameters. It only arrived yesterday, so I haven’t had much time to play with it yet, but it’s another step ahead. I can always get something bigger and more robust down the road, but for now simplicity is good.

My daughter also graciously loaned me her 61-key synth keyboard. It has no external outputs, but we played around with it together on the weekend. She’s good at playing by ear and enjoyed the challenge of deciphering some early Depeche Mode songs like Photographic, Strangelove, and Never Let Me Down Again.

Having Fun as a Newbie

Several people have asked if I’d be willing to share some of my early music creations as I go through this trial. Sure, that sounds like a nice idea, especially if it helps or inspires others who are interested in learning music as well.

A few people suggested that I use SoundCloud, which is a popular music-sharing site. I’ve never used it before, but apparently it’s similar to YouTube, except that on SoundCloud people share audio instead of video. You can play the audio through your browser, and it works on mobile devices too. You can also comment on the pieces, although I think you need to have a free account there to do that.

I set up a SoundCloud account yesterday and posted a couple of clips so far, both of which I created in GarageBand. You can find them on my SoundCloud page here: soundcloud.com/stevepavlina.

The 12-second piece is just me messing around with loops in GarageBand. I wasn’t trying to compose anything musical. I did this mainly to learn the software and to figure out how to export an MP3. So be warned it’s pretty hideous! Hope you like the Brontosaurus wail at the beginning.

The 2-minute piece is something I created yesterday, also using GarageBand loops. This was another learning experiment, but it was also my first attempt to create something that sounded like actual music. It’s pretty basic, and there are only 5 tracks, but I learned a lot by creating it. It took me about 2 hours to make it: about 45 minutes to get the basic structure going, plus 75 minutes of tweaking. I probably could have created this in half the time if I was more skilled in using GarageBand.

I really enjoyed making this second piece. I have no education in musical theory or composition, so I just picked some loops and arranged them in sequences that sounded moderately interesting. I also learned how to do fades with the surf sounds at the beginning and end of the song.

Since SoundCloud will host up to 2 hours of audio for free, I can use it to post more clips as I go along. Just don’t expect anything on a regular schedule.

I’ve already received some encouraging feedback and helpful suggestions from musically experienced people on what I can do to improve my next attempt.

Dive In and Play

I know I have a lot to learn about music, and I’m glad I’m finally taking action on this. I’m approaching this trial as a form of play, so there’s really no way to fail.

Based on where I was when I began this trial, I feel I’ve already made tremendous progress. In a little over a week, I learned to use GarageBand well enough to create a short piece of music. I’ve never done anything like that before. So I’m celebrating these little achievements.

Update: I made a couple more songs today. You can listen to the latest one here:

Wanderlust – Enhanced by Steve Pavlina

Read related articles:

• Music Trial Recap
• Learning Music – Day 12
• 30-Day Trial of Learning Music
• Learning Music – Day 11
• Creating Abundance – Video
• Video Interview on Raw Foods, Social Support, and More
• Self Development Video Interview

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Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Is it possible to enjoy a financially abundant living as an artist (the word artist being used in the most general sense)? Or is this simply an unrealistic dream?

Of course it’s possible. Many people have done it before. But is it realistic for you? Well… that depends. The honest answer is: probably not. What it takes to succeed as an artist isn’t such a mystery these days. The real question is whether or not you’re willing to do what it takes to get there. If you’re like most people, you aren’t willing. So if you want to succeed as an artist, you must elevate your standards well beyond the level of those who are willing to give up.

Starving artists may be more common and cliché than financially successful artists, but as you’ll discover in this article, there are some very good reasons for that. For starters, artistic skill alone isn’t enough to guarantee financial success.

There are many challenges on the path to financially sustainable artistic nirvana, and all of them have solutions. Successful artists are willing to apply those solutions; unsuccessful artists typically aren’t.

Here are a number of guidelines for transitioning from creating art as a hobby into a financially lucrative profession:

Get Your Financial Beliefs in Order

Do you harbor any beliefs such as these?

• Great art and money don’t mix.
• It’s noble to be a starving artist.
• Artists who make tons of money are sell-outs.
• Money corrupts true creative expression.

If your thoughts have been infected by such limiting beliefs, even a little, consider how this will affect your efforts to earn serious income from your work. These beliefs are financially retarded. With such mental baggage, you’ll miss too many opportunities to generate income from your art. In fact, you probably won’t even notice them. These beliefs will cause you to behave stupidly.

Consider upgrading your beliefs to something along these lines:

• Money can help fuel creative expression.
• Creativity is free; paintbrushes aren’t.
• Great art is financially valuable; surely the artist deserves a fair share.
• Artists who make lots of money have good business sense.
• Great art deserves great financial support.
• Art is a creative endeavor, but it’s also a business.
• Fans are nice, but customers pay the bills.

It’s a lot easier to generate income from your art if you hold beliefs that support income generation instead of demonizing it. If you’re going to attach some kind of meaning to earning income from your art (an event which is largely meaningless from a cosmic perspective), then at least apply a meaning that will support you on your path instead of creating imaginary roadblocks.

Beliefs are infectious, so choose your friends carefully. If you regularly hang out with people who harbor negative beliefs about combining art and money, they’ll just drag you down. It’s fine to associate with them now and then, but be very careful about inviting them into your inner circle.

Seek Out People Who Are Already Succeeding

Art is a social field, and so is business. The business of art — any kind of art — is hugely social. Insiders have it way easier than outsiders, so aim to be an insider. Don’t even think about trying to go it alone.

Financially successful artists are generally happy to share their “secrets” of success, including how they make money from their work. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Make every effort to meet such people and hang out with them. Join clubs or trade associations, join forums, attend conferences, and find other ways to socialize with successful artists in your field. It’s not that difficult, but it does require that you make an effort. You’ll make some networking mistakes along the way, but eventually you’ll figure it out. Read through the extensive How to Network With Busy People series to get a better sense of how to do this.

I suggest that you identify a certain income goal — something modest — and target people who are earning close to that. If you’re making no money as an artist, it may be hard to relate to the advice of someone who’s earning $1M per year. You’ll have a better shot of understanding and applying the advice of someone who’s earning $30-50K per year. Then when you get to that level, meet with people who are earning $100K per year, and notice what they do differently. And keep stepping up from there.

If you always hang out with artists who are making the same or less money than you, I hope you like eating at Taco Bell.

When you meet successful artists, don’t do the fanboy/fangirl thing. It’s best not to even utter the word fan because it sounds too much like stalker, and it steers the conversation in the direction of putting the artist on a pedestal, which really isn’t going to help you. Aim to be friendly, interested, and respectfully curious, but assume equal standing as human beings. Artists are generally very comfortable discussing their work, so a great opener is to ask a specific question about their work. Feel free to pick their brains, but don’t bleed them dry.

Being passive ensures dismal results. Push yourself to go outside and meet people. Take some social risks. If you dork-out now and then, it’s not the end of the world. You’ll recover.

During my computer games business days, I was having coffee with my lawyer on a patio in Century City (a business district next to Beverly Hills). He suddenly turns and yells to a guy walking down the street, “Bill!” Turns out it was William Shatner, who was working with my lawyer on a book deal. Shatner approached us for a friendly conversation, and being a 20-something Trekkie, I dorked out — not too much but enough to feel self-conscious about it afterwards. I learned to be much less dorky around such people after that.

Successful artists in any field typically know each other. They may not get to spend a lot of time together, but they often meet in person as a consequence of moving in similar circles. If you want to become a successful artist, it’s wise to prepare yourself for this. The key is that it must eventually feel normal to you. If it seems like a big deal, you’ll push it away.

Networking with other pros in your field is good business. Most of the income I’ve earned from my creative work (writing, speaking, computer games, etc) has resulted from business deals that came through my network. Other people brought me those opportunities. This isn’t unusual. Money flows through people.

As an unknown artist in any field, it’s difficult to get much exposure for your work. But if you have many friends who will help get the word out, it’s no longer so difficult.

Networking gives you the chicken and the egg at the same time. You can receive income-generating ideas and opportunities as well as exposure, without needing one to get the other.

Create Art That People Want

Think of your favorite music group. Would you respect them more if they created music you didn’t like?

When you spend money on art, is it because the artist was super creative, or is it simply because you like what they created?

Most likely you aren’t spending too much money on creative work that you don’t like. When you pull out your wallet, it’s because you like the work — or at least you expect to like it.

This doesn’t mean that the artist created the work for you (or for people like you), but it does mean that if the artist wants to get paid, there needs to be some alignment between their creativity and what people are willing to pay for.

It’s absolutely fine to create art that no one else will appreciate. Do that now and then. Just don’t expect to pay the bills with such an approach.

If you want to generate income from your art, then pay attention to what people are buying in your field. What’s in demand?

You’ll likely find that you can just as easily create works that align with trending demand but which still give you plenty of room for self-expression. These constraints are not inherently in conflict. You can choose and instead of either-or.

This article, for instance, is one that I felt inspired to write, and I’m enjoying the process of creating it, but it isn’t merely a gratuitous personal journal entry. It’s an article that I expect will provide some value to certain people. It’s art, but it’s also socially purposeful.

Sometimes people will want you to express yourself in ways you aren’t willing to deliver. Feel free to say no. Sometimes you’ll want to express yourself in ways people don’t care about. Feel free to do that. But when you want to generate income from your work, focus on the area of overlap between what people want and how you enjoy expressing your creativity. Then you can enjoy your work and pay your bills too.

If you’re going to be stubborn about this, then be prepared to see much less talented artists whizzing past you financially.

You may not control the waves of public desire, but you can still surf them.

Publish or Perish

Creating art isn’t enough. To be a financially successful artist, you must get into the habit of publishing art.

Many amateur artists amass sizable collections of half-finished pieces. The pros often do this too, but the pros get into the habit of finishing and publishing their work.

I know from experience that if I create and leave something in a half finished state, and I go more than a few days without working on it, it’s dead. The inspiration is gone. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, it’s easier to start and finish a new piece than it is to rez and finish the old one. A half finished piece isn’t 50% done; it’s more like -50% done. To finish a half-done piece weeks later may take 150% of the effort of creating a new piece from scratch.

If I start writing a blog post, and I get it 60% finished, but I get interrupted and can’t get back to it for a week, I’ll virutally never finish it up and publish it. I’ll just delete it and move on. If it’s 90%+ done, or if I just need to give it an editing pass, then I’ll likely finish it, but if I can’t cross the finish line with ease, it’s a dead work that will never see the light of day.

I’ve learned how important it is to kill my unfinished work and let it be dead. I don’t save it or let it linger in my drafts folder. I put it out of its misery and kill it for good. Then when I look at my portfolio of creative work, I see 1000+ finished and published creative works: mostly articles but also computer games, speeches, workshops, a book, a poem, and some podcasts. I don’t think of unpublished works as being part of my portfolio. If I didn’t complete and publish them shortly after conception, they’re dead to me.

This may sound overly harsh, but what’s the alternative? Amass an ever-growing collection of partially finished pieces? How do you feel when you think about that monstrous pile of unfinished work? It’s draining, distracting, and demotivating, isn’t it? It’s clutter that weighs on you.

If you’re thinking about stuff you need to finish up from the past, then your creativity isn’t focused on the present. Creativity is limitless and abundant. There’s no need to tie it to past obligations. Thinking that there’s value to be extracted from partially finished work is a result of scarcity thinking. If there was major value in finishing those pieces, you’d have finished them long ago.

Chalk up the value of those partially finished pieces to the learning experience you got from them. If you wouldn’t get much growth from finishing them, let them die. Focus your attention on the sweet spot of artistry by creating works that provide value to others and provide growth experiences for you. Your creative energies must be focused on the present, which is the only place where you can create. Don’t allow your creativity to be drained by past regrets and obligations. The flow is here and now. The wave that passed you by is gone. Don’t go swimming after it. Just ride the next wave. And there’s always a next wave.

You could say that publishing is an unnatural process. A creative work is never really done — it’s abandoned. You can keep polishing and refining a piece indefinitely, but at some point you have to declare it done and move on. If I ever feel that I published an article too soon, I’ll give it an extra editing pass after it’s posted (that’s a nice thing about publishing online). Sometimes I over-polish a piece that probably didn’t warrant so much attention. It takes time to calibrate and get a feel for when a piece is ready to publish, and there’s no right or wrong solution per se. It’s mainly a matter of trial and error and experience.

When I begin a new creative work, it’s a race to the finish line to get it published. I need to express the ideas quickly and tune out distractions till the piece is done and released. Friends who’ve been around me when I’m designing a workshop, for instance, will know how single-minded I can be during such times. Even if I’m ahead of schedule, I can scarcely pay attention to anything but the workshop. My energy is focused on bringing everything to completion. I can pay attention to other things when the workshop is over.

I find it best to work on one major creative piece at a time. I try not to start something new until the previous piece is done. I can make some exceptions like writing a blog post in the midst of a bigger project like designing a workshop, but I want to avoid creating more loose ends. I wouldn’t want to design two workshops at the same time, for instance.

Visibility First, Then Income

If you want to become a successful artist, you’ll need to get your art into people’s hands (or eyes, ears, etc). If the art is hidden in your closet or buried on your hard drive, don’t expect it to generate much income.

I recommend that you focus on visibility first, and don’t worry so much about generating income at first. If you aren’t very visible, you probably won’t be able to earn more than a pittance anyway. But if you can gain visibility and sustain it for the long run, then it’s much easier to generate abundant income.

A good strategy for creating visibility is to give your work away for free. Spread it as widely as possible. Encourage people to share it with no restrictions. If you can manage it, favor media that encourages sharing without costing you anything — i.e. anything that can be put into digital form.

Show your work to anyone who might be interested in it. Give your art as much state time as you can. If you aren’t willing to do this, don’t expect your art leap onto the stage and market itself. Being timid about promoting your work will hurt you financially; don’t pretend it won’t.

If you give your work away for free or otherwise procure lots of stage time for it, and people don’t seem to appreciate it, consider the possibility that your work (1) isn’t very good, or (2) isn’t what people want. This happens to just about everyone. Everybody falls the first time. Keep refining your creative output until you strike something that people appreciate enough to share.

Once your visibility is high enough, then start charging for your work.

Commit to Excellence

Mediocre artists are broke artists.

Don’t settle for mediocre. Put in the hours and years it takes to become outstanding. If you want to become an overnight success, spend a decade building your skills first.

There’s little income to be made from most art forms except for those who commit to excellence. Such fields are simply too crowded and too competitive. The good news, however, is that most people in these fields are just dabblers. They aren’t serious about it. Rest assured they’ll give up within a year or two and go back to working at Starbucks, only to be replaced by people with even less experience. There’s a lot of churn at the bottom.

Consider the field of music, for instance. There are millions of wannabe musicians, but only a small percentage of them are committed to becoming truly outstanding. They’ll practice a little here and there, and they might dream of great success, but at the end of the day, they’d rather watch TV than invest an extra hour or two in practice. These people aren’t your competition. If you stick with your craft for 3+ years, you’ll be well beyond the majority of them, and they’ll never match your skill.

Persistence is your friend. With persistence you can easily outlast 99% of the people in your field. The longer you stick with your craft, the more the gains begin to pile up: a growing portfolio, a growing network of peers, and a growing fan base. As these aspects improve over time, it gets harder to fail, and it becomes easier to generate income. You have more work to leverage for income generation. You have a larger network to bring you opportunities. And you have more fans who could become customers.

If, however, you go around switching fields every year or two, you’ll have a hard time building a financially sustainable practice. If you’re unwilling to commit to long-term mastery, you’ll be denied access to its rewards. You can still switch fields if you really want to, but there’s a price for doing so.

It may be true that 99% of artists within a particular field aren’t making much money. But that’s largely because those 99% aren’t any good at it. The top 1% get paid because they’re the ones who put in those 10,000 hours to become world class.

Are you willing to commit yourself to joining that top 1%? Do you love your art so much that you’ll invest 10,000 hours into it? That’s about 5 years working full-time. If you aren’t willing to make that kind of commitment, well… Starbucks is hiring.

If 99% of artists in your field won’t become financially successful, then you’d better commit to bypassing that 99% if you wish to avoid their fate.

I realize this might sound like a very difficult challenge, but the truth is that it’s actually easier to make such a commitment in the long run. It only appears more difficult in the beginning. Think of it like this. The time is going to pass anyway. Someday that distant future will become your present reality. Now imagine that your future self is reflecting upon the decisions you made today, decisions that greatly influenced his/her results in life. Is that future you shaking his/her head in disgust or smiling in appreciation?

One reason I kicked off my 30-day trial of learning music is that I’ve been thinking about where I’d like to be at age 50 (I turned 40 earlier this year). I have the sense that my 50-year old self would really appreciate it he had some serious musical ability to enjoy during his 50s. He’s not too particular about which instrument(s), but he’d be disappointed if he had to enter his 50s with no musical skills to speak of. He’s glad I developed my writing and speaking skills to such an extent, and he can count on their continued development, but he’d be even happier if he could express himself through music as well.

I’m not at the point where I’m willing to commit a decade to learning music, but a 30-day trial is a good starter commitment. I’m enjoying it so far, and I’ll likely commit beyond that point, but for now an exploratory approach is best since I wouldn’t even know what kind of long-term commitment to make yet. Even as I conduct this 30-day trial, however, I’m approaching it with the mindset that I might be initiating a new thread of skill building that could last for decades. This long view sharpens my short-term decisions. I’m willing to embrace the awkward phase of being a newbie, since I know it’s a stepping stone to building new skills I can enjoy for years to come.

Get to Know Your Customers, and Serve Them

If you want to be financially successful in any field, not just art, then sales are very important. Without sales, there’s no income, and without income, it’s hard to sustain yourself as an artist. If you can maintain strong sales, then even if you screw up almost everything else, you’re still going to have a sustainable art practice. Strong sales are very forgiving of mistakes. Weak sales aren’t.

Fortunately, selling needn’t be pushy or manipulative. If you create work that aligns with what people want, then selling is largely a matter of letting people know that you have something that will please them. If, on the other hand, you have to do a lot of convincing to get people to open their wallets, then the problem is likely the art itself.

Earlier this year I went to a local art fair. I walked past a lot of art that didn’t resonate with me, but then I stumbled upon an artist from Arizona who had a collection I really liked. I have an affinity for Southwestern art, especially pieces depicting bears and eagles. This artist had some really unique copper pieces, and I bought one of them. It currently hangs above the fireplace in my living room. He did his part to help sell the piece — very softly — but it was mostly a “you had me at hello” situation. The main act of selling he did was to envision, design, and create a piece that someone like me would appreciate.

If you want to create art to sell, it’s wise to know why someone would actually buy it. If you haven’t a clue or if you assume you’ll figure out how to sell it later, best of luck with that.

Selling is often treated as a discipline unto itself, but for a serious artist, selling is an integral part of the creative process. Selling begins with the question, Who would most appreciate this? Ideally this question should be asked before you start a new creative project. Determine who will buy your work and why. Who’s the buyer? Does such a person actually exist? How do you know?

If at all possible, meet your customers (or at least your potential customers) face to face. Talking to your customers about what they want is perhaps the best source for your sales education.

At my workshops I like to spend many extra hours talking to attendees outside the workshop itself. On the first day as people are arriving, I greet them with hugs. I stick around during breaks, at lunch, and at the end of each day to talk to people. Partly I do this because I enjoy it — these are interesting people to connect with. But I also do it to better understand them. Who are they? Why did they attend this workshop? What else can I help them with?

It’s important for me to create workshops that give me plenty of freedom for creative expression, but it’s also important to give people what they desire, especially if I want my workshops to be financially sustainable.

Respect the role of money in your artistic endeavors, but don’t put money on a pedestal. Money is lubrication to grease the wheels of your artistic endeavors. You’re always free to create art for art’s sake, even if it won’t pay the bills, but if you want to get paid, then create art to sell.

Canadian actor Michael Ironside said in an interview that he accepts some acting roles for the money (Robocop being a good example), while other roles he performs for the soul. I make similar choices. Sometimes I write articles that I expect will boost traffic or generate income, while other times I write purely for the sheer enjoyment of being creative. And sometimes I get the best of both worlds. This variety is very nice.

Creating art to sell doesn’t equate to selling out. In my opinion the sell-outs are the artists who spend more time complaining than they do creating. If you create art to sell, then you can spend a lot more time creating art for the sheer joy of creating, and once you’ve built up the sales side of your practice, you may find that there are buyers for anything you create.

Buy Art

As a corollary to the above, when you see art you like, buy it. Yes, with money.

Get into the habit of financially supporting artists whose work you appreciate. Don’t do the piracy thing. Piracy is rooted in scarcity thinking, and it’s disrespectful of the artists. The beliefs that justify piracy are at odds with the beliefs that will help you generate sustainable income from your art.

By piracy I’m referring to illegally obtaining something that isn’t free. That which is given freely is a different animal. All of my blog posts and podcasts are uncopyrighted, for instance, so you can translate, republish, or share them however you wish, and it wouldn’t be piracy. But if you do this with copyrighted works without the artist’s permission, that’s piracy.

When I first began developing my own computer games, I was still into pirating games and other software. I realized that if I expected people to buy my software instead of just pirating it, it made sense for me to get my own house in order. So I stopped pirating, and I began purchasing what I wanted. If I wasn’t willing to purchase it, and if it wasn’t free, I did without.

Making that transition was easier than I thought, and it felt really good. I observed that I appreciated what I purchased more than I did when I pirated it. I also became more selective about what I consumed and less impulsive. My computer was easier to manage. I felt better about myself knowing that I was helping to support other people’s creative work. I felt like I was partnering with them in some fashion.

If you want others to financially support you as an artist, take a good look at yourself in the mirror. Are you an avid supporter of other people’s creative work? Do you readily purchase art that you appreciate?

Like many people I have a sizable collection of media, especially music. None of it is pirated. When I scroll through my collection, I not only see a lot of art that I enjoy, but I also see a list of artists that I’ve helped support financially. It’s comforting to know that Alan Wilder will never run out of hair gel.

I know it’s tempting to try to justify piracy. Don’t go there. You can claim that everything digital should be free, but such beliefs are at odds with those who choose not to release their work for free. Some people would still appreciate fair payment for their work. If you’re going to demonize them for making such choices, realize that you’re also necessarily demonizing the part of you that would like to make money from your creative work. That incongruency will surely come back to haunt you; usually it will show up in the form of self-sabotage.

When you support other artists financially, you reinforce the belief that you deserve to be financially supported. That’s an important belief to have if you wish to succeed as an artist.

Although it might seem more difficult to pay for work you could easily pirate, in the long run it’s easier than the alternative. If you wish others to respect your work and to pay for it, then have the integrity to show this much respect to other artists. Respect their right to ask for payment. If you feel their prices are unreasonable, don’t patronize them.

Supporting other people’s creative work can also be good motivation to increase your own income. I rather like spending money on books, seminars, music, and other art forms. This tells me that the more money I earn, the more I can support other creative people.

Learn to Handle Criticism

In any creative field, you’ll find plenty of people willing to assume the role of critic, largely because it’s easier to criticize art than to create it. Sometimes critics can be helpful by providing specific ideas for improvement, but they rarely bother to do so. More often they approach art with a sense of entitlement combined with undercurrents of bitterness, resentment, and envy.

A good summary of the relationship between artist and critic can be found in Teddy Roosevelt’s “Citizenship in a Republic” speech from 1910:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

What really disturbs critics is the knowledge that they don’t want to face — that they simply don’t matter. The critic is irrelevant and superfluous. History remembers the great artists, but it forgets the critics.

If you try to respect the critic, you’ll feed more power to the self-judgmental part of you, the part that says you aren’t good enough and can’t measure up. To empower your critics is to empower your self-doubt. If you want to be more prolific, then give your full attention to your artistry, and starve the critic of attention. A good way to transition is to laugh at the critical part of you. Poke fun at it. See it as the joke it truly is.

Abandoning self-criticism doesn’t mean letting go of reason and becoming blind to areas where you could stand to improve. You can still examine your work with an eye for improvement without getting bogged down by the voices of envy and resentment.

Genuine constructive criticism is what artists bestow upon themselves. Look at what you’ve created, and pay attention to your reaction. What do you think about it? How do you feel about it? Is this your best work? How could it be improved?

Feedback from others can be helpful, but such feedback rarely comes from would-be critics. Often the best feedback comes from other artists, people who understand what it’s like to play in the arena. Even then, you’ll still need to take such feedback with a grain of salt. If it makes sense to you, then use it, but don’t give it more weight than your own opinion.

Here’s some more text from that same Roosevelt speech:

There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes to second achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s realities — all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority but of weakness.

Offer your art to those who will appreciate it. You can safely ignore the critics, for history will treat them as if they never even existed. Their weakness is unworthy of your respect. Regardless of criticism, artists will continue creating art. The artists will have their cake and eat it too… while the critics scurry for the crumbs.

One of my most criticized pieces is the article 10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job (2006). Another one is 10 Reasons You Should Never Have a Religion (2008). For me these were inspired pieces that I truly enjoyed creating. Criticism of those pieces has drawn even more attention to them, making them some of the most popular works I’ve ever created — both are in the top 1% in terms of the referrals and traffic they generate. To critique such pieces, the critic is admitting that the work was impactful, so the critic is actually validating and promoting the artistry of those pieces.

In the long run the critics ultimately serve the artist’s interests, whether the critics realize it or not. The critic draws more attention to the artist’s work, which can still benefit the artist with extra publicity, even if the criticism is largely negative. A professional artist will seldom return the favor by publicizing a particular critic, however. This dynamic reflects the artist’s commitment to his/her creative expression as well as the critic’s denial of his/her creative abilities. The role of the critic may seem pitiable, but ultimately the critic serves to elevate the artist, which is good for everyone.

Appreciate Your Customers

While your critics can be safely ignored because they don’t provide any value, your customers are actively supporting your work, making it easier for you to keep doing what you love. It makes sense to support your customers in supporting you.

As an artist it’s easy to confuse your customers with your fans, but these aren’t merely different labels for the same groups. Your fans consist of anyone who appreciates your work. Your customers are the people who are financially supporting your work. These groups will likely overlap, but it isn’t unusual for an artist to have many fans who aren’t customers.

If you have lots of fans but few customers, you don’t have a financially sustainable operation.

It may seem like a wonderful thing to have lots of fans, but fans who aren’t customers can potentially hurt you more than help you, unless they’re helping to refer more customers to you. Maintaining a large fan base can consume extra time and resources. For example, if you have a website, more fans may mean more web traffic, and more web traffic means higher hosting and maintenance costs as well as more communication.

It’s wise to appreciate your fans too, but be careful about encouraging too much fandom at the expense of customers. If you want to be famous, then more fans are great, but if you want a financially sustainable lifestyle as an artist, then put your customers first. If you lose some fans but retain your customers, you can still sustain your practice. But if you lose your customers by focusing too heavily on your non-customer fans, you could see your work becoming very popular while you become very broke. It happens.

Fans may feel that by appreciating your work, they’re somehow helping you. They may believe they’re on your side. But is that really true? Love and appreciation are nice, but they won’t keep the lights turned on.

Imagine that you hosted a dinner at your house. Guests arrive empty-handed, enjoy the food you provide, and graciously thank you for it. Do you perceive that as a form of support? It may be emotionally and socially supportive, but it isn’t financially supportive. How long can you sustain this? The more you do it, the more you incur a hit of time and resources. Sure, you may end up with lots of people appreciating your cooking and your generosity, and they may gladly refer others to you, but where will that lead in the long run? By itself this isn’t a good way to sustain your artistry.

To have a financially sustainable operation, it’s fine to have fans, but you’ll also need to see a certain percentage of those fans choosing to become customers.

Some artists take this to the extreme, focusing entirely on customers and ignoring non-customer fans altogether. Others go the opposite route, treating customers and fans as equally valuable. There’s no right or wrong way to do this. It’s a matter of finding the right equilibrium for you, one that can create long-term sustainability.

I enjoy seeing a healthy ecosystem around my work that consists of many more fans that customers. It gives me a sense of optimism because I only need to see a small percentage of fans become customers to maintain financial sustainability, and I’m happy to see people enjoy my work whether they pay for it or not. My conversion rate from fans to customers is high enough that I can afford to scale up without much risk to sustainability. But I do have to make some sacrifices for this to be viable.

I can afford to hang out with workshop attendees for a few hours after a workshop. I can’t afford to give this kind of personal attention to anyone who visits my website, however, despite receiving many requests to that effect. From a financial perspective, I can’t justify investing as much time and energy in non-customer fans — I have to put more attention on serving the needs of my customers. To fans who don’t wish to become customers, this may sound disappointing, but it should be understandable.

Your non-customer fans may not like the fact that you pay more attention to your customers, and this realization may cause them to feel under-appreciated, but ultimately this is a matter of common sense. If a non-customer fan feels under-appreciated and abandons you as a result, you’ll lose the chance to someday convert them to a customer as well as the other customers they may have eventually referred, but that’s a gain that may never have been realized anyway. On the other hand, losing an existing customer is a less speculative loss and one that anyone with good business sense would work harder to prevent.

In your relationships with other artists, notice the difference between being a fan and being a patron, and start paying attention to why you make these choices as you do. This will deepen your understanding of how you wish to relate to these groups as an artist. Again, there’s no right or wrong way to do it, but you’ll find that some ways feel better to you than others.

Socializing with fans and customers can be very enjoyable. It’s wonderful to connect with people who have shared interests, and you’ll generally find such people to be very friendly. After all, you’ve already earned their appreciation. But it’s crucial to maintain reasonable boundaries and balance these connections within the context of your life as a whole. It’s all too easy to overdo it, feel overwhelmed by too many people trying to connect with you at the same time, and actually end up resenting the attention. If left unchecked, you could end up sabotaging the very success you’ve been seeking.

So appreciate your fans, and appreciate your customers, but safeguard your boundaries. As your work becomes more popular, you’ll need to pay more attention to maintaining your sacred creative space. Don’t allow your fans, customers, or anyone else to encroach upon that. Your connection to the creator-god within you (however you may define it) must not be derailed. In the long run, your fans and customers will forgive you for not being as available as they might like… as long as you keep creating.

Learn to Surf

As your artistic practice matures, managing your relationships with fans and customers — along with all the other relationships in your life (family, friends, business partners, etc) — can be one of the trickiest aspects of your practice to get right. You only have so much time and attention to devote to each of these groups, and there are consequences for being too giving as well as for being too stingy. These challenges can be exacerbated as your popularity increases. The shifting populations of fans, customers, and business contacts will keep throwing you out of equilibrium, and solutions that worked for you last year may seem utterly broken this year.

The best advice I can give is to accept that your equilibrium is a moving target. Fortunately you have some say in the matter. If you want to be more social, take action by inviting new connections. If you’re feeling socially overwhelmed and need some privacy, feel free to back off.

I’ve learned that the more often I blog, the more incoming communication I receive. If I have a backlog of communication and need a break, the best thing I can do is to stop blogging so much. When things really get overwhelming, I can disable my contact form or take a break from social media. Then when I’m ready to be more social, I can start blogging more often, and I can more actively invite people to connect.

I have made more screw-ups in this area than I can count, but with each passing year, I develop a better understanding of where my equilibrium is, and I know how important it is to go with the flow. Sometimes the flow takes me in a very social direction. Other times I feel an intense desire to be alone and turn within. The biggest mistakes I’ve made were the result of failing to honor and accept where the flow was going — i.e. trying to be social when I really wanted to be alone in my creator space, or forcing myself to create when I’d much rather be around people and share love and laughter. As it turned out, the balance I sought was never a static state where I could run essentially the same patterns week after week. Balance looks more like a sine wave, constantly oscillating from one extreme to the other. And to make it even more complicated, there are smaller sub-oscillations that combine with those larger oscillations.

Imagine trying to balance a basketball on your finger. If you try to keep your hand totally rigid, the ball quickly falls. To balance the ball you must be in constant motion, making continuous adjustments based on what the ball is doing. This is how it feels to balance the creative and the social aspects of art. Inspiration never sits still; it is always in motion. Either you’re diving more deeply into your private creator space, or you’re opening yourself to more social connections. The key, as I’ve learned, is not to resist these oscillations. Instead, learn to ride them like waves, much like a surfer.

Another metaphor for thinking about balance — perhaps a better one than surfing — is to think of your artistic life as a song. Consider that your life is a combination of rhythm, melody, harmony, etc. A song is always in motion, but it isn’t chaotic or random — there’s a structure to it. That structure may be complex and difficult to grasp, but it’s there nonetheless. Notice where the song of your life wants flow next. Notice when you’re trying to force it to go in a direction that doesn’t feel right. What might be the next notes in the progression? If you can sense the structure of the song and develop a feel for where it wants to go, you’ll find it easier to cultivate a fulfilling life-work balance as an artist.

* * *

The bottom line is that making a sustainable living as an artist is doable. It doesn’t require a miracle, nor does it mandate putting money ahead of artistic expression. It does, however, require some intelligent choices and a genuine commitment. For those who are committed to the mastery of their craft for the long haul, ensuring the financial sustainability of one’s work is a worthwhile and achievable goal.

Invite the universe to express itself through you, and do your best to get out of its way. It will support you on this path if you’re committed; otherwise it will bring you every manner of obstacle to validate your lack of commitment.

The question being put to you now is: Will you do it? Will you step into the arena? Will you know the great enthusiasms and the great devotions? Or will you sit in the stands as a spectator… or a critic?

Is your future self looking back on this day with intense appreciation and gratitude… or with disappointment and regret?

Read related articles:

• Love Your Customers
• How to Create a Fulfilling Career
• Working for Free
• Completion vs. Perfection
• Business Planning
• You Are Self-Employed
• 10 Myths About Self-Employment

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Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Many people who are new to entrepreneurship approach the world of business in some rather funky ways. Quite often they come up with solutions first — or at least what they think is a solution. Then they try to convince people to buy, hoping that those people will somehow see the value in their solutions.

That’s a recipe for glorious failure.

Sure it could work sometimes, especially if you have millions of marketing dollars to help create demand, but for small businesses it’s not a very wise approach. For a sustainable business you’ll want to see some evidence of genuine demand for what you’re going to sell — ideally before you go through all the work of starting a business or creating a new product or service.

Many amazing businesses have been launched because someone noticed an existing problem or some kind of demand for a solution or improvement, and they found a way to fulfill that demand reasonably well.

When I started my computer games business in 1994, I didn’t know if there was any demand for what I was creating. I created some games, but hardly anyone bought them.

Then I went to a game development conference where one of the co-founders of a very successful company explained in plain English the difference between creating games that sell well vs. creating games that don’t.

He said it came down to creating games that people clearly wanted to buy vs. creating games that the development team wanted to create. These goals aren’t necessarily in conflict. He explained how his company went from struggling for 8 years in a row to finally creating some mega-hits. They started paying attention to what kinds of games people really wanted to buy. Then they created games in those genres. Their games sold millions of copies.

It’s not rocket science, but it sure makes a difference.

I applied this advice on a fairly small scale, and my games business did much better. I targeted genres where I saw more demand than supply, and so I didn’t have to push so hard on the marketing front. I mainly just had to get the word out that my games would satisfy a particular type of player. And within a matter of months, those players were flocking to my website.

Erin’s intuitive reading business did well because people were already asking her for advice. People had been asking her for readings since she was a teenager. She mainly had to say yes to what was already showing up. When she began offering readings professionally, people began signing up right away. She got so much business that she had to go through several rounds of price increases until she reached a reasonable equilibrium.

If you want a sustainable business, it’s important to pay attention to demand. What do people want and need? What problems are they having? What sort of help are they looking for?

Quite often you’ll find things you love doing, but nobody else cares to pay for it. That’s fine. Enjoy those activities as your side hobbies. The demand may change in a decade or two.

Other times you’ll notice demand for something, but you’ll have no personal interest in helping out. That’s fine too. Let someone else fulfill those needs.

If you’re open to creating a sustainable business, be on the lookout for evidence of demand that you’d enjoy servicing.

When I started my personal development business, it was largely in response to existing demand. Before I ever wrote my first blog post, people were already emailing me every week with productivity questions, small business questions, motivation questions, etc. It wasn’t a stretch for me to say yes to that because I enjoyed writing about personal growth. But I didn’t start the website and hope the demand would be there. I saw clear evidence that the demand was already there before I started. I said yes to what was already showing up.

Marketing such a business is a lot easier than marketing a business where the demand is unclear. If the demand is already there, then marketing is mainly a matter of letting people know that a solution or service exists and that it may satisfy them.

But if there’s little or no demand, then marketing amounts to trying to convince people they need something, and they may very well disagree. That kind of marketing is a struggle, especially for a small business without a huge marketing budget.

Demand doesn’t have to be personal for it to matter. People don’t have to be asking you to solve their problems. They just have to be asking for a solution.

If you’ve started a small business, and it seems like an uphill battle to generate sales, could it be that you’re providing something hardly anyone wants? If that’s the case, try not to see it as a personal failure. It happens often. It’s all part of the entrepreneurial calibration process. You’ll eventually figure out that sales matter, and it’s easier to generate sales by cooperatively giving people what they want as opposed to trying to convince them to want what you’ve decided to give.

Read related articles:

• Succeeding by Helping Others Succeed
• How to Raise Your Hourly Rate
• Working for Free
• How NOT to Build a Successful Online Business
• Business Planning
• What Is Your Value?
• Marketing From Your Conscience

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Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

The Subjective Reality Workshop this past weekend was very rewarding. I smile when I think back on all the amazing people who came together to explore SR as a group. After doing 6 Conscious Growth Workshops in a row, it was a special experience to deliver a new workshop this time.

This was the first time I’ve talked about subjective reality in depth with more than a few people. I really loved the energy of this particular group. With about half of the attendees being alumni from previous CGWs, it felt like a big family reunion.

We officially ended at 4pm on Sunday, but I didn’t leave the meeting room until about 6:30. Many people hung around afterwards to ask more questions, share stories, and to offer feedback and suggestions. A few people told me afterwards that they were sad to see it end and would have loved to go for 4-5 days instead of just 3 days. I can see how SRW could be extended into a longer workshop. At present there are no specific plans to do another one, but I’m open to it happening sometime in 2012.

Personal growth workshops can provide intense transformational experiences for those who attend them, including the facilitator. It typically takes me about a week to make sense of how each workshop impacted me, but I’m already seeing how SRW’s lessons are unfolding, so I wanted to share some about that. This shouldn’t be a surprise to those who attended the workshop, since I already discussed this with the group on Sunday.

For quite a while I’ve been thinking about exploring music in some fashion, such as learning to play an instrument. This isn’t something I’ve really explored before, so I have very little experience. When it comes to music, I don’t even know what I don’t know, nor do I have a clear sense of what I’d enjoy, so I’m not in a position to set a crisp goal or to define a particular desired result.

The more I ponder it, the more my reality keeps affirming that this is a path worthy of exploration. In lieu of contemplating it for a few more years, I’ve decided to commit to a 30-day trial of exploring and learning about music for 1-2 hours per day.

My musical knowledge is so limited that I wouldn’t even know how to map out what to do each day, so I’ll simply follow the guidance that shows up as I go along, whether it comes in the form of inspiration, a seemingly logical next step, or help from others who are musically inclined.

The trial is already underway in fact. I started on Monday, so this is Day 2. So far I’ve spent some time sharing this intention, I read a little about music theory online and discussed it with some people, and I bookmarked some resources that people shared with me. I installed a couple of keyboard simulator apps on my iPad, and I ran Garage Band for the first time (pre-installed on my MacBook Pro) to poke around with it. I installed a 1.2 GB file of loops for it when the program prompted me to do so.

This is a totally exploratory trial. I have no set agenda or end goal in mind. I simply want to learn more about music, both mentally and experientially. I’m not attached to any particular outcome here.

Some people asked what kind of instrument I might like to learn, but I can’t answer that with any certainty. If I had to choose, I’d say that I feel most drawn to learning to create some kind of compositions with computer software. I don’t feel drawn to learn the guitar, piano, or any specific physical instrument.

My favorite style of music is electronic, so the computer seems like a logical choice for exploring that. Depeche Mode is by far my favorite band of all time, and I probably listen to their music more than all other groups combined. Some other favorites include New Order, Erasure, Duran Duran, Anything Box, Sting, The Smiths, Enya, Pet Shop Boys, REM, and The Cure.

If I were going to learn how to compose something on my own, electronic would be my preference.

Other than being able to play a few simple songs on a keyboard like Mary Had a Little Lamb and some basic recorder lessons in grammar school 30 years ago, I haven’t learned how to play any instruments.

I’m left-handed, so I’m not sure if that makes it much different to learn to play a keyboard or piano than it would be for a right-hander.

Several musicians have already shared some advice and tips on where to begin, so I imagine I may spend a few days just exploring various resources people have suggested — reading articles, learning some music theory, trying out software, and messing around a bit. I’ll see how it goes.

I probably won’t blog about this day by day, but I’m happy to share some updates along the way if I think I have something interesting to share.

One reason I’m doing this is to explore another way to express myself creatively. Music seems like a good choice for that.

For now I’m committing to a 30-day trial for education and exploration, so I can learn a little something about music and invite new learning experiences into my life. I expect that this will be an interesting path to explore regardless of what, if anything, I might be able to learn and accomplish in only 30 days.

Read related articles:

• Music Trial Recap
• Learning Music – Day 9
• Learning Music – Day 11
• Learning Music – Day 12
• Weaknesses That Matter, Weaknesses That Don’t
• Suggestions for Future 30-Day Trials
• Gearing Up for CGW #6

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Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina