Tag Archives: life

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An Announcement

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I’ve written over 100 posts. That’s quite a few. They range quite a few topics. Some have been more popular than others. Some have been picked up by other sites. I have more subscribers than I could have ever imagined three months ago. My blog has been viewed around 4000 times in the past four months.

There has been dialogue. Sometimes people disagree. Sometimes people agree. Sometimes people encourage. It’s been really positive.

For the past four months, I have posted nearly every day. That’s pretty crazy. I still don’t fully understand how I managed to do that. With your support and patience, mostly.

But here’s a confession. I want to be a writer. I legitimately want to have a book someday or be an essayist or something like that.

This blog has gained much momentum. But I also recognize that I am not doing anything crazy here. I’m making some observations and trying to write about them honestly. Book deals don’t magically fall out of the sky for that sort of thing. Other, more popular blogs, do it better than me or have been doing it longer.

And so here’s the announcement: I’m going to try my hand at submitting to other blogs. Other popular blogs. What that means for this blog is that I will generate new content Sunday through Thursday, post an oldie but a goodie on Friday, and then take Saturday off. That gives me Friday and Saturday to work on posts for other sites.

Here’s what I think you should do. On Friday and Saturday, I think you should work on making your dreams come true, too. Because that would be cool.

If you want to keep up to date on what I am doing on the internet (and want to know when and where I am guest-blogging), you can follow me on Twitter! Thanks for coming on this journey with me.

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Two Incomplete Problems with Living a Better Story

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At the start of the year, I wrote a post about telling a better story. It’s a hard task. There are two problems that I’ve run across already. I have a blog so I get to share these things. It’s a nice arrangement.

1) I should take every opportunity to tell a good story. I was listening to The Moth, one of my favorite podcasts, today. The Moth is a series that features true stories told live without notes, and it’s awesome. Today, I listened to a story from Salman Rushdie, best-selling author of several novels including The Satanic Verses. His story took place while he was working on Verses. He ended up getting writer’s block and traveled to Nicaragua to “experience a revolution.” His story was about war and about the inequality that existed in that country. But he told it with an insane amount of humor and poise, and I had two thoughts: First, should he really be telling the story like that? Shouldn’t he be talking about how horrible it was and how bad war is and all that? But then I realized that this story was decades in the past. Humanity needs to laugh at itself. Second, sometimes we need to tell a sad story happily.

I started thinking about what my life would be like if I stopped dealing in failure and started dealing in success. What if, instead of talking about how many things Freud got wrong, I talked about all of the things he got right? I suppose people would start to call me a Freudian, but perhaps that’s just because they don’t understand.

2) To tell a better story, you have to know who the main character is. Spoiler alert: it’s you. This is not to say you need to know exactly who you are. That’s never going to happen. This is to say that you need to know a few things about yourself and you need to live knowing those things are true. My heart is different than yours. And your heart is different than mine, and that effects how we live our lives.

If you want to know more about telling a better story, I feel like you should visit Donald Miller’s blog. All of my ideas are reflections on his.

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Asking for Help is Harder than Asking for a Date

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I like to do things myself.

In high school, I dated this girl for a while. The thing about dating someone regularly in high school is that you always have a built-in date for dances. And that’s nice.

But without fail, my parents would start hounding me about a month and a half before the dance. “How are you going to ask her?” they would ask.

I like to think that I am a creative person, but sometimes I have trouble coming up with original ideas. And at my high school, it was pretty important to ask someone to a dance originally. Fireworks were not necessary but encouraged. If you could figure out how to build a canal for gondola rides, you should do that. That sort of thing.

So a month and a half before the dance, my parents would be like, “When are you going to ask that girlfriend of yours to the dance?” I would respond that I didn’t have an idea, yet. And then they started to give me ideas. A lot of them were great. A lot of them were cute and adorable. But I refused to listen to them because I wanted to use my own ideas.

That was a noble quest, I suppose. Except one year that idea never came. And I waited too long. I asked my girlfriend to the dance one morning before school. That was it. Yawn.

This is a mistake I’ve repeated many times since then. I hate asking for help. Even when I get it into my head to ask for help, I rarely ask the kinds of questions that would benefit me. Instead, I dance around the issue, hoping that the person I’m talking to will magically read my mind. They don’t.

There are people out there with specific knowledge that you can use. These people are probably not in your immediate group of friends. We tend to encircle ourselves with people who are similar to us – single or married, student or businesswoman, parent or childless. They are great friends, certainly, but if we want specific knowledge we need to seek out people who have what we think we want. We need to talk to people who have already been through what we are going through. And then when we talk to them, we need to ask them very specific questions.

That way, we will always creatively ask the girl to the dance on time.