1. Passion With Crush It!

    At first I wasn’t aware of who Gary Vaynerchuk was until one day the Tumblr Staff proudly announced that he had chosen the platform to power his site.

    After a couple of weeks of following his story, watching his videos, appreciating his gained fame as the host of Wine Library TV and admiring his approach to personal branding and business, I then fully understood the “why” and “how” behind his much deserved success and popularity.

    The moment I heard he had published a book, I could not have purchased it even faster than through the Kindle and I haven’t put it down since then. Crush It! is an inspirational/business type of read that guides you through the steps of what you can do if you have a passion for something and how to go about to monetize the heck out of it.

    The real one ingredient you need is to identify that subject you obsessively care about, so that it functions as a catalyst to inspire you to move from doing something you’re probably doing now and absolutely hate. It’s about tackling that “someday” thought that we all have without ignoring our current responsibilities.

    Regardless of the profession, the one common response you’ll get when asking someone who in our eyes are absolutely successful is that they have a passion for what they do. Sounds cliché but if every professional athlete, singer or chef has the same to say, it’s because the statement is accentuated with nothing but truth.

    I can’t highly recommend this book enough and if you need a little nudge to convince how great it is, I suggest you give his Web 2.0 Expo talk a view. Until then, I leave you with this encouraging passage from the book:

    Live your passion. What does that mean, anyway? It means that when you get up for work every morning, every single morning, you are pumped because you get to talk about or work with or do the thing that interests you the most in the world.

    You don’t live for vacations because you don’t need a break from what you’re doing—working, playing, and relaxing are one and the same. You don’t even pay attention to how many hours you’re working because to you, it’s not really work. You’re making money, but you’d do whatever it is you’re doing for free.

    Does this sound like you? Are you living, or just earning a living? You spend so much time at work, why waste it doing anything other than what you love most? Life is too short for that. You owe it to yourself to make a massive change for the better, and all you have to do is go online and start using the tools waiting for you there.

    2 years ago  /  1 note

  2. Great Articles With You

    A while back Emmet Connolly shared his decision of taking all those unread articles from Instapaper that he had accumulated, how he converted them into a PDF, uploaded it to Lulu.com and ordered a single book to have and enjoy at his leisure. A great addition to the coffe table if you will.

    Needless to say, he had a genuine interest in the pieces that got printed and I can admit to having collected a slew of well written articles myself from bloggers that I admire and have had the pleasure of interacting with.

    Bookmarking or flagging them on an RSS readers seems like an appropriate way to indicate they signify something to you but having them with you at all times represents an even greater respect to content that drips passion and that by reading them it inspires you to instill the same in your writing.

    Content To GoPhotograph of the many online articles on my Kindle.

    As a Kindle owner, I’m interested in doing any extensive reading on the device since I carry with me at all times anyway, so lately I’ve been transferring my favorite reads to it by using the wonderful RekindleIT service.

    RekindleIT is an exciting new way to read any content on the web on your Amazon Kindle.

    Using our simple tools, you can instantly send a web page from your web browser or iPhone for reading on your Amazon Kindle. It’s simple, free, and opens up a whole new world of content for the Kindle.

    Setup is painless and by using a friendly bookmarklet, the transfer happens wirelessly for a minimal charge or you can do it manually via USB cable. Either way, just make sure to grab the printer-friendly version of an article.

    In no particular order, here’s what I consider a mere sample of the many articles that live in my Kindle:

    2 years ago  /  3 notes

  3. This Thing with Magazines

    For as long as we have coffee tables, people will always find things to occupy that empty space with and towards the end of the month, a magazine is what you will find on mine. It’s interesting to think if people can still develop a relationship with magazines because our gratification from picking one up at a bookstore can either be instant or worthless so if you subscribe to one, you’re saying that you discovered more than just “surface level” content worth reading.

    I’ve cut down my magazine subscription to just one (Wired Magazine) and I purposely don’t unwrap it until I’m sure I’m going to dedicate my time reading it as much as I do a good book or blog. Sitting quietly to dim lights and a soothing beverage sets the tone for a clear purpose to read. You recite the word’s silently to pull out more value in the them, you digest the grammar and you scribble notes to reference passages that set off ideas to further analyze.

    In a sense, magazines are very comparable to people - they each posses a certain oddity and quality that put together who they are and while not all publications resonate with everyone, there’s one that manages to slip in a special spot that creates this new way of thinking for you.

    Perhaps it sounds a little too philosophical but I’ve manage to follow this reasoning when buying magazines or anything that requires for me to set some time to read. Some pieces just warrant browsing while others are to be lost in thought with. I don’t consider myself a scholar in any specific discipline but there’s nothing more impactful that an article offering perspective and amplifying on a topic you thought you knew all about already.

    One Pet Peeve

    I have to say that the one aspect of reading magazines that drives me crazy is that I can’t always seem to be satisfied with what’s written and correct me if I’m wrong but I think it’s something that anyone involved in a “creating profession” goes through.

    You finish an article and can’t seem to move on because now you start paying attention to what font was used, how it was laid out, what color palette was implemented, the depth-of-field in the photograph if any and all these elements that add value to what you just read become equally amplified in importance.

    So yes, call me crazy but I think about all these little things when opening up a magazine that I receive which is why I like to think I’ve establish a relationship already with it; hence the time I like to set aside to enjoy it.

    2 years ago  /  Notes

  4. Keeping the Kindle focus

    I think it’s normal to expect every handheld device to have capability to explore the web with a full featured browser, to keep you entertained with classic games, to keep you connected with every social network there’s is to possibly join and these qualities are the ones a friend expected to get when he tinkered with my Kindle 2.

    The concept is nothing different from what an iPhone would do and I found myself agreeing with what he expected for about a two seconds until I retracted my nod and rethought about why I bought the device.

    Granted the Kindle does allow you to browser the web but it’s limited to text-based sites and uploading MP3s is openly possible but if that’s all you look forward in doing with the device, my question would be at what point would the reading take place? Obviously he isn’t much of a reader, hence the lack of priority in what the device is intended to do.

    The Kindle is an amazing gadget with a first-class purpose to get you to fail to think about anything else but the book that you have in front of you. There is no little alert message telling you about Twitter replies you received, no minuscule envelope icon of new incoming mail or anything distracting that you can think of to get you away from reading. When you look at the screen, everything else really does become meaningless.

    With all these rumors about Apple releasing a tablet for 2010, Amazon has little desire in feeling they need to redirect the Kindle to cater towards activities that take precedence while waiting on a crowded line. Any upgrades should only improve on the act of reading and any aesthetic changes wouldn’t be too shabby either.

    Abhi over at Kindle Review points out what killer features the Kindle 3 would need to make it special:

    • Speech To Text and Journalling.
    • TouchScreen and Game Changing usability changes (think Swype for really good text input).
    • ePub support and PDF Support.
    • 3rd party Kindle App Store, with some solid Apps at launch (calendar, address book, calculator, to-do lists).
    • A drastic jump in page turning speeds and screen resolution. This is actually rather unlikely.

    It’s very easy to get distracted and the only device I own that does not make me go down that path is the Kindle. It’s the lack of what conventional handheld devices are inherently popular for that make this device special.

    2 years ago  /  Notes