Tape Noise Diary

Calibration

Steve Pavlina writes an in depth post about the process of improving skills and getting better overall. He’s terming it “calibration” and he defines it as “the process of progressively refining your thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors until you shift your equilibrium to the point where you can consistently achieve the results you desire.” He goes through many examples like socializing, martial arts, and even blogging, to show that’s it’s all a matter of constant readjusting and letting go of the “newbie fear”. 

This is one great tip he gives on blogging:

One of the worst things you can do in blogging is to write in such a manner that will offend no one. If you don’t offend or challenge anyone, you’re probably writing content that isn’t very memorable or meaningful. If you write what people expect, their minds won’t store it. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any highly successful bloggers that don’t have multiple negative rants written about them somewhere. All of them piss people off. Most of them aren’t intentionally trying to upset people. It’s just that upsetting people seems to be a natural consequence of the calibration required for blogging success.

The post is not for people with short attention spans.

Real Advice Hurts

Merlin Mann talks about the problem with tips and basically the oxymoronic nature of needing to constantly read tips to improve at X endeavor. He writes:

We can’t get good at something solely by reading about it. And we’ll never make giant leaps in any endeavor by treating it like a snack food that we munch on whenever we’re getting bored. You get good at something by doing it repeatedly. And by listening to specific criticism from people who are already good at what you do. And by a dedication to getting better, even when it’s inconvenient and may not involve a handy bulleted list.

Haste, Scorned: Blogging at a Snails Pace

The majority of popular blogs publish over 50 posts on a daily basis. The reason is simply mathematical: the more content, the more readers. But the problem with that is that much of the content is time based and literally news. Nothing inherently wrong with that of course, but for people that are not necessarily in it for the money, that kind of approach of posting everything that seemed relevant that day, will hurt you more than benefit you.

There’s apparently a movement going on called “Slow Blogging” and even though I wouldn’t encourage something like posting once a month, (that’s being on the other extreme. Unless you’re already famous, at that pace the internet will easily forget you)  I advise many to follow the tenets of “Slow Blogging”:

A Slow Blog Manifesto, written in 2006 by Todd Sieling, a technology consultant from Vancouver, British Columbia, laid out the movement’s tenets. “Slow Blogging is a rejection of immediacy,” he wrote. “It is an affirmation that not all things worth reading are written quickly.” (Nor, because of a lack of traffic, is Mr. Sieling writing this blog at all these days.) Ms. Ganley, who recently left her job as a writing instructor at Middlebury College, compares slow blogging to meditation. It’s “being quiet for a moment before you write,” she said, “and not having what you write be the first thing that comes out of your head.”