No Comments
by Jake Mogul on March 4th, 2010
I am not a tidy person. Clutter is the most obvious thing you would notice if you walked into the bedroom/office I have worked out of since I was 14 and in this challenge it is that place that I will aim to declutter. Working and playing and sleeping in the same room is something most teenagers and young adults have to do. But sometime between being 16 and being 22, I realized that the room had far more uses and purposes than it had space and equipment to cater for. And what you find starts happening is a form of microliving – open plan living taken to an extreme.
One corner of the room is an office, another corner is the sleeping area. There’s a music area in between. And a library near the door that is, by even the most conservative of estimates, going to overpopulate the shelves it has been allotted in the very near future. But of course the office – when you have to deal with companies house and the HMRC – starts producing tonnes of paperwork, which creates a need for files, which creates a need for more shelves.
Combine all of that with my blatant lack of organization and the result is what most parents and teachers around the country would refer to as a pig sty. Throughout my childhood, my messiness (there, I’ve said it), created a timeless reason for my mother to shout at me, but now, it has finally become a problem for me. I have reached a time in my life where I hate mess. I think it started a few weeks ago when I attended a film-making seminar in London. The hotel I stayed in that weekend was so clean and tidy and I liked it. Why couldn’t my own living quarters be like this? Largely because I don’t pay a Polish woman to come in at 11 o clock every morning to make my bed, change my towels and throw out all the crap I have accumulated the previous day.
A few days later began my tidiness challenge. Could I keep my living quarters tidy for 28 days? And if I could, how would this impact on my life? Read the rest of this entry »
VN:F [1.8.4_1055]
Rating: 0.0/5 (0 votes cast)
No Comments
by Jake Mogul on January 31st, 2010
Creative block: You sit down in front of the computer and you’ve decided that you are going to write. Or maybe you need to write. That assignment, that report, that screenplay, that short story needs to get written. It needs to happen and there is not much time left and you need to do it now. You had an idea, which seemed brilliant this morning when it first graced your grey cells, but now that it has been around for a few hours and you have had a chance to compare it with other ideas, you are no longer sure it is worth pursuing. In fact, you are quite sure that it will be a fruitless waste of time and a mediocre piece of work at best.
And you just sit there, staring at the flashing cursor on the screen.
This will be a situation familiar to virtually everybody who has ever tried to write for long periods: You feel like you just can’t come up with anything to write about. And the harder you try, the worse it gets. And it doesn’t have to be writing. It can happen the same with music or magic or comedy or inventing or anything that involves creativity (even blogging!). You just can’t come up with anything. Sure, you get tired and frustrated thinking about it, but you just cannot seem to conquer the blank page.
Idea evaluation is a technique that I have begun using which has allowed me to produce the content I have been required to produce at the time I have been required to produce it. And in this article, I’m going to share with you how I do it. Read the rest of this entry »
VN:F [1.8.4_1055]
Rating: 0.0/5 (0 votes cast)
No Comments
by Jake Mogul on January 21st, 2010
Sometimes things just don’t work out. It is a fact. No amount of coaching, training and self help literature can make any of us impervious to the eventuality that whatever we are doing, however well laid the plan is, sometimes things just don’t work out the way we want them to. And in the face of failure, staying motivated, keeping the faith, plough through and continuing to take action can be difficult.
I guess the motivational cliche is the quote of Thomas Edison, American inventor, scientist and business man who invented the light bulb … eventually. It famously took him more than a thousand attempts to create the device that we all know today. And after one thousand attempts, the press of the time accused him of failing, to which he famously answered, “I did not fail. I have successfully found 1000 ways not to make a light bulb.”*
Talk about reframing! To be unsuccessful at your goal one thousand times and still be undeterred from acheiving it would take an enormous amount of self belief and confidence. Most people do not have that much.
The important thing to remember at times of deferred success is that failure is a stepping stone to success provided that you learn from your failure, figure out why it was a failure and do not make the same mistake next time. There are only a finite number of mistakes you can make when trying to achieve a goal. As long as you attempt the task n+1 times, success should be guaranteed!
*I’m a stickler for correctness of information, so I’ll state from the outset that this quote may not be word for word correct. It has been requoted and misquoted so many times that it was impossible to find a source of the quote that I could rely on. Nonetheless, the meaning conveyed is the same.
VN:F [1.8.4_1055]
Rating: 0.0/5 (0 votes cast)
No Comments
by Jake Mogul on January 11th, 2010
If you want more money the most obvious thing to do is get a job. But the vast majority of jobs involve trading time for money. If we do not enjoy the jobs we do, if they are not a calling for us, then the trade of time for money is more than just a trade, it is a sacrifice and a sacrifice that the vast majority of people make because they think that there is no choice. But in today’s modern world there are several ways in which you can generate income without making such a sizeable sacrifice of your time. Read the rest of this entry »
VN:F [1.8.4_1055]
Rating: 0.0/5 (0 votes cast)
No Comments
by Jake Mogul on January 4th, 2010
Last week marked the beginning of a new year and a new decade. In the first 24 hours of 2010 the usual torrent of text messages came from virtually everybody in my phone book. One of them referred to the next ten years as “the teenies”, in the same vein as the twenties and thirties.
I want to begin 2010 the same way I begin every year: with a manifesto; a wish list, a list of action items and ambitions, and this year I’m going to post that manifesto on my blog (because now I have a blog. Last year, I did not).
Recent years have required me to do things that were not really me so I want 2010 to be all about reclaiming myself and my life. Getting back in contact with childhood dreams and being true to myself. And as hairy-fairy as some of that sounds, I believe it is true that to be truly happy, you have to be the person that you would be if there was nobody else to judge you for it.
So, here we go, in priority order… Read the rest of this entry »
VN:F [1.8.4_1055]
Rating: 5.0/5 (1 vote cast)
No Comments
by Jake Mogul on January 1st, 2010
It’s that time of year again! After a couple of weeks of turkey and TV, it’s time to look forward to the year ahead and think about how we intend to improve ourselves and our lives over the coming year. Every year millions of people make New Year’s Resolutions to change personal behaviours, kick habits and realize dreams. But every year, after less than 60 days, most people have surrendered to the world, admitted defeat and put it off until next year.
Whether you aim to stop smoking, exercise more, lose weight or just simply enjoy life more, in this article, I’d like to share with you some killer techniques I’ve gathered over the years on first, how to make a New Year’s Resolution and second, how to maximize your chances of keeping it. Read the rest of this entry »
VN:F [1.8.4_1055]
Rating: 4.0/5 (1 vote cast)
No Comments
by Jake Mogul on December 11th, 2009
I think a lot. And I was raised to believe a lot of concepts and paradigms that didn’t really make a lot of sense to me. I never really dared say it out loud but I was always a little doubtful about various social constructs and the nature of working life. Then, one day, quite by chance, I came across a book – The Four Hour Work Week – a title which instantly appealed to me, because I was one of the living dead who didn’t want to waste his life working.
When I read The Four Hour Work Week, my life changed.If nothing else, it was proof of one thing: there was another human being in the world that thought the same way I did. And, further, he’d actually gone out and proved it. When I finished the book, I knew I was not deluded. I was simply a minority thinker.
I’ve always wondered whether quoting books in a blog is legal, because isn’t the book content copyrighted? But Tim does it all the time on his own blog, so I’m sure he won’t mind me doing it here. The parts in bold are in my opinion the real gems and parts I agree with the most. Read the rest of this entry »
VN:F [1.8.4_1055]
Rating: 0.0/5 (0 votes cast)
No Comments
by Jake Mogul on December 6th, 2009
The media will have you believe that all successful entrepreneurs are high school drop outs. None of them ever went to university because they weren’t academic. Instead they possessed some intangible sort of “street savvy” that you cannot learn, but have to be born with. They all started out very young selling sweets to other kids at school and were probably dislexic.
Doug Richard finished high school, went to university and never did anything entrepreneurial until his mid 20s. He was seriously disadvantaged, he jokes. And yet, despite all the odds being against him, he still managed to create a software company and sell it to IBM several years later for £710 million.
Doug Richard, former star of BBC’s Dragons’ Den, while plugging his School For Startups, spoke like Dr House on business, about where his ideas come from, his biggest mistakes and how to know if your business idea has what it takes to make you millions. Read the rest of this entry »
VN:F [1.8.4_1055]
Rating: 5.0/5 (1 vote cast)
No Comments
by Jake Mogul on November 29th, 2009
3s MiFi Modem
I have an addiction. And the extent of my addiction has recently come to my attention. My name is Jake and I am addicted to the Internet. Whether it’s so that I can blog, or tweet or run my websites, I don’t like to be away from the online world for too long.
To satisfy this unrelenting craving I decided to invest in a Sony Vaio P Series portable PC. This is a small and easily portable laptop that has built in mobile broadband connectivity. The result would be that I never needed to be offline ever again.
But I never bought it.
Why?
I went to the Sony Centre with my Chinese friend Kelvin so that we could negotiate like chinamen and get the £800 netbook for closer to £500. And there’s no doubt that Kelvin is good at saving money. But in this case it turned out that his approach to saving money was to find an alternative route to the same functionality.
What I ended up with was a 3 portable modem with MiFi. This is a small device about the size of a small mobile phone which can connect to the Internet much like a mobile dongle. But the difference is there are no wires. It promises to create a miniature wireless network that several netbooks, or iTouches can connect to at the same time. But does it work? Read the rest of this entry »
VN:F [1.8.4_1055]
Rating: 0.0/5 (0 votes cast)
No Comments
by Jake Mogul on November 15th, 2009
It was bad. It was really bad. The numbers spoke for themselves. We were spending hundreds of pounds a week on Pay Per Click adverts, trying desperately to get targeted traffic to the website and after only a couple of days we had seen it: the ads weren’t the problem. The site was. Over half the traffic was leaving the website instantly. We had to take action, and we had to make a decision fast.
When your ship is sinking it can be difficult to be honest and objective. But I had to be.
I took a step back. I knew it was nothing personal. There had to be something wrong with the website. And when I took a look at it myself after so long, the answer was obvious. If it wasn’t my website, I would probably have bounced too. We made two changes.
What were the results?
An overnight decrease in bounce rate by 50%. And that wasn’t all, because as bounce rate went down, page views went through the roof. Actions increased. Goal conversions increased. And only three days later, the income started rolling in.
Here’s how we did it… Read the rest of this entry »
VN:F [1.8.4_1055]
Rating: 0.0/5 (0 votes cast)
