In my everlasting quest to produce create produce create I sometimes feel the need to put something out there despite not having any particular burning topics to talk about.

Sometimes I read a thing and it sounds deep and interesting, and maybe I won’t even understand it all, but I will feel like I should be into it and supportive of it, regardless of how much I actually agree. I feel like I should agree, so I make a blog post about the thing and it just feels all wrong and forced. As if I’m pretending to be somebody else which is always one of the things people say you shouldn’t do.

I really think you can tell the difference between posts from the heart and posts made of fart. The former might be more silly but it’s definitely more me. When I struggle to get behind my own blog posts you know there is something wrong.

I saw recently a video by Google about “Project Glass”, their vision of the near-future in which augmented reality technology has graduated from that little box in your pocket and is now literally right in front of your eyes (and until synthetic eyeballs are available, the well-sighted will be forced to wear zero-strength hipster specs).

So this is the next landmark we’re going for, huh? Information about anything, anywhere. I’m not going to complain about that, I think the Internet has done wonders for the spread of free information and I guess if you want a non-stop constant flow of information then… good!

So now we’ll all be plugged into Google all the time, constantly chatting to each other over Google+, creating and uploading videos on-the-fly. If you don’t like reality (and let’s face it, most of us have niggles about it) you can simply switch over to its virtual clone.

But dragging the human race one step closer to the zombie apocalypse isn’t the reason I wanted to write this article.  I wanted to talk specifically about Google Inc.

I’ve grown steadily more disaffected with Google over the years, and that is because of their incredible power and monopoly. For a long time now, those who want quality web search really don’t have much choice but to go to one of a few web giants. And now as Google starts getting its slick, greasy fingers into more and more pies – video hosting, social networking and navigation to name but a few – it becomes increasingly difficult to find good alternatives.

And why would you want alternatives? I don’t think that’s an important question, the fact is that anybody might have a good reason to dislike Google’s behaviour, contacts or products. And such a person would not have much choice available to them.

It’s important to note here that it’s not just a problem with Google though.

Take social networking for example; most major social networking websites are closed systems. If you want to talk to your friends online they must use the same website; and of course they will, because everyone else they know is on there. To not sign up is to be left out of the social loop. Smaller alternative networks are unlikely to work unless you manage to convince most of your friends to use it too, which is likely to be an up-hill struggle. If they refuse to join then you are back to the choice of using the big name or nothing at all. You have a choice but it’s ineffectual and hollow.

The ideal solution to this seems to be that networks all run on open protocols; everyone you know could exist on a different social network, but all be interconnected. In reality there are limited people with the time and ability to develop such websites, and many of them are already clustered and focused on building the major players of the current paradigm.

So, while we’ve achieved distribution of knowledge, it’s the people with the knowledge that are concentrated.

The class will be small and informal, and will cover the following topics:

• Creating an HTML document
• What are tags, elements & attributes?
• Introduction to doctype, html, head and body, and other common and useful tags
• How and where to find helpful resources

Time permitting I’ll also cover more, including history and a short introduction to CSS, for adding style and colour.

It’ll be held at The Third Age Centre in Southampton, where computers will be available (though if you’d rather bring your own laptop please feel free).

If you’re interested please leave a comment or send me an email – neonpaul@gmail.com

Thanks!

So the question falls to you: is there anything you’d like me to blog about? Things I’ve written in the past that you’d like me to expand on? Things you’re interested in that I can research? Please give me as many suggestions as you can muster!

In the first part of my story I developed an unhealthy interest in personal development blogs. Then life turned,  I got a house I liked, had some good friends, found a job, and everything was fine. I did not need blogs at all.

Fast forward 18 months.

Still in the same job, in the same house, and to be honest I’m feeling stagnant. I don’t want to be in this situation any more, and I’m dreaming. I want a better job, more freedom, a more interesting life! This is the point where I relapse and go back on the blogs.

And it’s Jonathan Mead that catches my heart this time. I notice his blog seems to have changed somewhat, many of the articles just seem to be thinly-veiled advertisements for his coaching program, but again I sit on my cynicism and recall the image of him I have as the cool cowboy, living the high-life in Portland with loads of cash, women and fast cars– no, wait, that’s not right…

Well anyway, my workplace tell me they have to let me go and with the end of my job looming I am desperate to do anything that frees me from having to go back on the mental torture device that is jobseekers’ allowance. Come on Jon, you have to save me!

Again I find that the articles and the free e-books aren’t enough. They’re ineffective and they feel like old news. Eventually I sign up to his next free webinar. “This is it!”, I think, “The way out!”. It means having to wake up at 2am on a work morning due to timezone differences, but no pain no gain right?

And I listen in. And it’s… interesting. But still he’s saying all these things that I pretty much already know. It’s sort of deflating. Then it comes to the Q&A section. Here we go, someone please ask something to get a real juicy nugget of practical advice from him! But nobody does, they’re all asking questions about the six month business development course he’s offering.

Suddenly I realise: this is all an elaborate advert. All of these blogs are; each and every post is a sales pitch, a brainwashing exercise to create a narrative that says “this blogger is a success, and you want their secrets, and you will gladly give them money for it because that’s the done thing and the only thing”.

WOAH.

I’ve been living in a dream world. I was mimicing the gurus, my blog posts were poorly-constructed rehashes and recycles of lifehacking advice I had picked up while trawling the blogosphere for an escape route. My writing style was diluted and fake. The best posts I had written were the ones where I had let my cynic to come out to play and written sarcastically of my obsessions.

But I was trying to become one of them, a pro-blogger. And I nearly enrolled on that course, I nearly sent off $500 of my savings to transform myself into an inauthentic, ineffective, deluded hero. And I thank the world that I didn’t.

The myth of progress

I don’t disagree entirely with the concept of personal development, nor even personal development blogs. But in most cases money becomes involved. When that happens and it turns into a business model, getting customers becomes more important than helping people, so potential clients need to be reminded of that great human responsibility to grow. And it doesn’t take too much convincing because it’s a myth that is so built into our society we don’t even notice it.

I hope that in the future this blog will rely less and less on the myths people tell me, and in turn represent my own thoughts better – for what’s the point of it otherwise? But it’s a hard journey to predict, and for now I’m just happy to tell you this story. Let’s hope there isn’t a sequel.

In my final year at university I was struggling to balance my coursework with my hobbies – my favourite of which seemingly was to sit in my room staring into nothing and alternately thinking about and trying not to think about the essay on my desk.

I had already seen the university’s counselling service about my motivational malaise without much result. In a bout of desperation I asked Google whether it had any advice. It recommended an article on a website called Zen Habits – the blog that became my first love.

Oh, it was heady days, it was! Leo Babauta’s Zen Habits was a treasure trove of articles on life management, motivation, productivity, all the things I needed! Did any of it work? Who cared! The point was that it sounded like it did. It was the answer to all my problems, I just had to ingest all the information and in time I would be the perfect, superfunctional human being. Just like Leo.

I regularly read Leo’s blog from that point onwards. Through my exams, past graduation and into the dull life of the undead unemployed. And not just Leo, now I had discovered some other bloggers too who focused on similar subjects but with different spins. Well, more blogs is more insights! I latched onto the words of quirky semi-spiritualist Havi Brooks, and rule-breaking renegade Jonathan Mead. And while I did gain some good advice, I couldn’t help but feel slightly frustrated that my life seemed to not be getting better. In some ways it felt like it was getting slowly worse.

Why? I was using the same advice that these people were giving to others, others who seemed to be flourishing in their fields. Was I not putting in enough effort? Was I doing it wrong? Maybe the good stuff, the really life-changing content, was the stuff I had to pay for. But the products were painfully expensive! How could people so benevolent be charging such high prices? This is when I started to notice the cynical part of me giving hints to be weary, critical even. That part of my mind I tried to smother, because blogs were my only hope.

It wasn’t a tussle I had to deal with for long however, because suddenly my life hit an up, and I was jerked out of the murky mud of jobseeking and parental tennancy into a life of wealth and fortune. And I really do mean fortune – I had landed a fantastic pay in a job that I didn’t really deserve just because I sort of knew a guy who owned a small business that needed a programmer.

I worked in that job for a few months, and couldn’t find the enthusiasm to keep up with any blogs any more (though I still used some of the techniques Havi had introduced to try to combat the discomfort of working a job I didn’t feel adequate to do). Eventually, with the money I earned, I quit and went travelling for a month to reboot my life, ready to move into a house with some friends and find a new job and start living happily again.

And that was that. I found a job, found a bit of purpose (or at least significant joy in my life), frequently did great things with close friends and could afford to spend most of my time pretending I was a student. And where did the blogs feature? Nowhere. I did not need them one bit. They were gone from my life entirely.

For a while.

The story continues in part 2!

Things for other people

There was a lot of stuff that I did last year not because I wanted to, but because other people wanted me to. I thought about my reputation, and about the happiness of others, before the value of my own time.

If the things you do are primarily things that other people want, you’re going to burn out much quicker than if you’re doing things you enjoy, and finding a way for that to help other people.

Fair?

Do you think that’s fair to say? Or is that stupid and selfish? Let me know in the comments!

Internet blogger Leo Babauta is a little bit of an inspiration to me. Bits of advice I picked up from his blog, Zen Habits, sort of helped me do a lot of the things I’ve done in the past couple of years, and helped me to figure out various things about myself that I’m really quite grateful for knowing.

New year’s habits.

So Leo rejects the ideas of new year’s resolutions or goals. Instead he recommends trying to get into a new habit, and relishing the journey rather than being miserable because you wish you were at the destination.

Leo Babauta, the man himself

For one thing, when you set goals, they are often arbitrary, and so you are spending all your effort working towards a basically meaningless number. And then if you don’t achieve it, you feel like you failed, even if the number was arbitrary to start with.

- Leo Babauta on goals.

Hopefully after a while you’ll feel that you’re in the groove and your new habit will be, well, habitual. Then you can effortlessly continue doing that thing for the rest of your life – and get into another new habit using the same method.

Failproof.

I love this idea because its focus is naturally on where you are now as opposed to goals, that demand you be at a certain place within a certain amount of time, regardless of what happens in between now and then – and can put an unnecessary stress in your mind.

And if you drop the habit? Well you’ve still made progress, you’ve failed gracefully (it’s a good thing- more about this in a later post!), and you don’t feel bad about not meeting some imaginary quota.

Bingo!

So my first habit of 2012 is the one Leo’s proposed in his most recent post – start off 5 minutes of exercise per day, increasing by 5 minutes whenever I stop feeling the burn.

Dudes:

Do you think you could apply this to your own resolutions? What are some things you might give a go? Did you have a good new year’s eve?

Home sweet home

I’m at my Dad’s house for Christmas this year. I sat down with my brother Adam today and we both tried to come up with lists of what we did this year.

Adam’s currently studying for his GCSEs and at first he wasn’t sure he had any accomplishments other than having a good round of mock exams.

But we had a good think and came up with a bunch of other things he’s done. Trampolining, making music, work experience, arts and crafts, all sorts of things.

Value yourself

No matter how boring you think your life is, there are always things you can be proud of. However small it is.

And if there really genuinely isn’t anything? Here’s a secret: it doesn’t even matter. Some people love making lists, but you don’t need reams of achievements and goals to feel like you have any value. Just meet yourself where you are.

On the other hand

On the other hand if you’re the type of person who tends to steam ahead, then become down and disillusioned when you burn out, stopping to look at where you’ve come from can be a really uplifting activity, and can help to give you some direction for the future. Meeting yourself where you are.

Your List

So I’d like to hear from you now. What are some of the things you’ve done in the past year? They don’t have to be big things, they can be tiny little things, as long as you feel good that you’ve done them. Just drop them there into the comments!

What a load of bollocks.

Step one: buy boat.

If you want to cut loose from the moorings that keep you from drifting out to sea, make sure you’ve got a course planned first. Make sure you have a structure. This is different from um-ing and ah-ing, this is moving without rushing it.

Think about this: What free time to you have at the moment? What are you doing with it? What if that free time expanded to every waking hour of your day and you did exactly the same things?

Depending on your answer you may want to try and re-arrange your life without making big changes first.

But then again what do I know? I’m just a blogger.