Last night I felt this incredible surge of energy in my heart. It came immediately after recognizing that sometimes writing is difficult for me, but that I could become someone who’s easily able to write about even the most hard to articulate topics. It was this feeling that my writing could take me anywhere. That by developing my ability to write I could remove the barrier between my personal experience and the world.

After I hit this point of excitement, I thought of people like Bill Simmons (comedic sports writer and founder of grantland.com) who took their ability to write and capture an audience and eventually turned it into an empire. He once hosted Nate Silver (the guy who used big data to correctly predict who would win all 50 states in the 2012 US presidential election) on a podcast, and they talked about how strange it was to go from writing a column to being someone who’s on TV and all of a sudden has an amazing outlet to reach people. I see myself being able to do that; but instead of writing about sports in an entertaining way, or data in a useful way, I’m writing about our individual capacity to create the world around us. My writing could help you change your perspective on something you personally create, rather than something you merely observe.

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When Desire Returns a Phone Call You Forgot You Made

by Josh Billings on April 23, 2013

Yesterday morning I awoke to an intriguing email from a long-time reader and trusted friend:

I feel compelled to tell you that you should be building a following, if you’re not already, in the form of a mailing list. Just write something free(like a PDF) that people would want to get in exchange for giving you their email address, set it up using Aweber.com which costs like $10/month, put it on your website/facebook/forums, and then just send out a few inspiring lines to them 2-3 times a week or whenever you get inspired until you have something to sell. You do not need in any way to know what that will be, you just need to start list building ASAP. It takes a while to build a good size list (I’ve been working on mine for almost 2 years and it’s only at about 5,000 people) so there’s no reason to wait to do it. [click to continue…]

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Creating a Space Where “I” Can Be “Me”

April 20, 2013

It’s been six months and one week since I last posted a personal growth article on this site. During that time, I’ve actually shared quite a bit through Facebook and other forums, but never felt inspired to share that content or expand upon it via my blog. In examining why, I realized that I’d set [...]

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2013 Oscar Pool Spreadsheets

February 24, 2013

Last year I posted my 2012 Oscar Pool Spreadsheets a day before the event and it created the biggest traffic spike in this blog’s modest history. This year I’ve taken all the fun and originality of those old printable spreadsheet and recast them into fully automated entry and score keeping spreadsheets that allow you to [...]

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Join My 2013 Oscar Pool

February 21, 2013

Deadline to join pushed back to 5:00PM central. You still have time to make your picks and have a kick ass evening! Here’s how the pool works: Download the spreadsheet and decide which pools you want to play. Fill out the entry forms for the pools you want to play. Email your spreadsheet to the [...]

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2013 Oscar Pool Preview Now Available

February 17, 2013

Spreadsheets now complete available. Click here to check out the blog post!

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