The JackB

"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx

Archives for January 2015

Experience The Joys Of Blog Maintenance

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blog maintenance

My friend Brian asked for the rules of blogging and I thought about what kind of answer to give because the comment could be seen as serious, insouciant or otherwise.

I expect he’ll understand my reflecting on the meaning of his comment and appreciate how a fellow storyteller likes to dig into how people communicate.

It is not always about snark, sarcasm or trying to prop ourselves by demeaning and diminishing others. Sometimes it is just looking at the layers and letters.

Some might not appreciate that or enjoy expanding your vocabulary with words you’ll rarely use but this blogging thing isn’t for everyone.

The Joy Of Not Knowing

This is all stream of consciousness but if you ask me about the joy of not knowing I would tell you about it and how it leads to the nirvana of knowledge.

Sounds sort of hokey but if you are someone who enjoys learning about stuff there is joy in education. We are not talking about the kind where you regurgitate information without understanding or appreciation.

This is tied into learning things that light a fire in your belly, stuff that ignites passion.

It is a subjective question, what drives your passion and makes you crave more information.

Ask me to list those items and I’ll give you a long list of things I wish to know more about. I’ll tell you I want to live to be at least a 1,000 because I’ll need that long to explore being a doctor, scientist, teacher, writer and musician.

I’ll tell you I want to take time to build cars, planes and trains. I want to tinker with them all, test different configurations and see what works best.

Give me time and I’ll talk about learning how to work with wood and discuss my appreciation of real craftsmen.

With a good 300 years to work with I figure I might have a decent shot at solving some major diseases and maybe come up with very fine wine or beer.

And let’s not forget how much time could be devoted to writing and the tales that could be told, so much to do and so little time to do it in.

Experience The Joys Of Blog Maintenance

After almost eleven years of blogging and almost 10,000 posts there are lots of things that need to be done around the blog to make sure it runs as I would like it to.

There are posts that aren’t formatted as I wish, links that no longer work and an assortment of other odds and ends to be tended to.

Every time I start to dig into it I find myself feeling a mix of joy, embarrassment and frustration.

There are posts that I am proud of, ones that make me cringe and plugins that suddenly stop working. Sometimes they do so with little affect upon the blog and sometimes they blow the whole damn thing up.

You can attribute my ability to blow the damn thing up with being the impetus for learning HTML and CSS. I am not fluent in either but I have gained enough knowledge there to become dangerous or to at least have a sense of what questions I should ask.

I don’t mind doing the research to figure out how to fix things but given a chance to avoid the problem I would prefer to do things to prevent the problems from occurring.

Knowledge
I have been rich and I have been poor, been somewhere in between those things too.

The night I realized I was going to have to sell my house I made a decision to make sure that education would be the bedrock of all I would build in the future.

I would focus on becoming a knowledge broker because once I had it there was no one who could take it from me. Didn’t have to worry about whether the company I worked for was well run or managed poorly.

Didn’t matter whether I won the lottery or lost my last time playing cards in Vegas because the key to the vault would be contained inside my head.

What About That Formula for Blogging?

Ask me what a man/woman/child needs to be a successful blogger and I’ll tell you they need to be curious, passionate and interested in sharing that with others.

I’ll tell you if they can figure out how to share their joy and their interest with others in a way that allows the reader a chance to sense and feel what they experience, well they’ll probably be able to say they are onto something.

One of the big tricks is making sure you sustain your effort. Build a good foundation and you’ll have a castle that will stand for years and after you are gone might still be of interest to tourists.

Take the fast and easy route and you risk creating a house of cards that isn’t capable of withstanding a soft breeze.

Don’t quite know we reached this point or how I went from the start to the finish but I kind of enjoyed the journey, maybe you did too.

Bad Things Happen When You Get Bored With Blogging

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bored with blogging

There were three priests, five rabbis and a Buddhist monk and myself standing at the bar in Downtown Los Angeles. We were gathered for the Interfaith Social Media Smackdown and the bar made for a nice place to hang out in between sessions.

It might sound like an odd sort of combination to you, but social media is being used by everyone these days so it made sense for us to schedule a chance to talk about the most effective tools and platforms for the various clergymen to use to look after their respective flocks.

All of that made perfect sense to me. What I couldn’t reconcile was how my ex girlfriend had also dated not just one, but two of the priests. Of course back then the “fathers” hadn’t been pledged to god, but that wasn’t what threw me. What I couldn’t figure out was how I fit in the equation.

How did a nice Jewish girl turn two nice Catholic boys into priests and not have any impact upon me. During two years of dating I might have called out the lord’s name once or twice but it was never tied into a thought about becoming a rabbi.

The Post Really Starts Here

If you have made it this far I must confess that I made up the part about the Interfaith Social Media Smackdown and virtually everything that goes with it.

What I didn’t make up is having spent time in bars with some rabbis and that is because I have friends who are rabbis, but we are not going to talk about that now.

Rather we are going to spend a few moments talking about what happens when you get bored with blogging. It is far more common than many people might realize.

Causes

There are multiple causes for boredom in blogging but I would suspect that most of the time it happens for one of the following reasons:

  1. You don’t know why you are blogging and consequently you are sort of wandering around the blogosphere without much purpose.
  2. You have pigeonholed yourself into one niche and reached a point where you can’t come up with new material.

Blogging can be a grind. This is a marathon and not a sprint. The best and most successful bloggers are almost always those who able to sustain their efforts over the long haul.

When you lock yourself into only writing about one small niche and are afraid or unwilling to move from it you have to work harder to maintain your interest level. It doesn’t matter how much you love writing about the great woolly weevil and it’s exceptional weaving because sooner or later you’ll reach saturation and feel like you have said almost all there is to say.

Boredom Is Bad For Your Blog

Boredom is bad for your blog because it impacts your writing and your readers suffer. You won’t always hit a home run with every post but boredom will make it much harder to get a hit.

Part of the reason I mix things up here and get “creative” with headlines is because it helps prevent boredom and because I am ever curious to see what impact my words have.

Sometimes I stir it up just to see who responds to things like How To Use Your Oral Skills To Please Others. A while back I wrote a post called 69 Reasons Why Fathers Make Better Lovers and got a boatload of traffic and emails from it.

It was real engagement and many of the conversations were about social media. I found it to be interesting.

But Does It Add Value

I have to tell you I hate reading 1,933,432 posts about your content must always add value. You must always educate your reader or make them laugh, blah, blah, blah.

I hate it because it leads to sterile posts that have no passion or personality. Sometimes you have to shuck that aside and suggest that the reason the person you are writing about is so uptight is because they haven’t been laid properly in a decade.

Sometimes you need to ask your reader to imagine their grandparents having sex because you need to wake them up. It is not done to disgust them. It is done to make them wake up because they have just read 1,933,432 posts about how to be a better blogger and they are bored.

The Bottom Line

To me the bottom line is simple, have fun. If you have fun with blogging it will come out in your posts and your comments. This is a good thing.

People want to see your personality and to feel your passion. They like being around happy people. Any time you can make people smile and feel good you are providing value that is immeasurable and important.

And now I have to go think about writing more about the Interfaith Social Media Smackdown because that has real potential.

Editor’s note: We run a green blog so this is a recycled post. I’m not bored with blogging, but sometimes the blog maintenance gets old. More on that in a post to come.

Dads & Daughters Are Different

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I want her to internalize this.
I want my daughter to always remember this.

She is 10.5 going on 30 and an expert on many things that her father knows nothing about including many that he is better informed than she realizes.

This girl of mine is in many ways a female version of me. I see her as proof that there is a genetic component to certain traits.

She is a natural storyteller, a very fine writer and is quick witted.  The girl loves to laugh and is as much of a clown as her father.

My daughter is a daredevil who loves roller coasters, will climb anything and is a fierce competitor on the soccer field. It makes her angry when her teammates give up or don’t try hard.

In many ways it is simple for me to speak with her about all sorts of stuff because I understand where she is coming from. I get it. It makes sense.

And then come the moments where there I don’t and I feel like I am staring across the gender chasm trying to figure out how it got to be so big, so fast.

Dads & Daughters Are Different

I am privileged and lucky to have good kids. Happy to be close with them and have worked hard to make sure they know they can come to me about anything.

It is something I started when they were quite young because I knew a day would come when more serious stuff would appear and I wanted to do my best to have a relationship that made them comfortable long before it.

That has already paid off because when they are upset they often seek me out to ask for my advice or opinion on whatever it is.

But sometimes this is where I discover how different dads and daughters can be from fathers and sons.

Because sometimes the stories about the interaction between my daughter and other girls just makes me shake my head in wonder because I don’t always get it.

I try to.

I do my best to understand but the dynamic between girls and women is very different from men.

Don’t misunderstand, I am not making a value judgment here I am just pointing out that sometimes the things that girls/women get irritated about aren’t things I normally notice.

You won’t hear me talk about whether someone made a face at me or hear me provide as many details in a story about who said what to who.

If my son has an issue with a kid at school it usually consists of “Johnny was a jerk. He did this.”

That makes sense to me. I understand that.

What I sometimes wonder about is how my daughter can talk about how Katie was a jerk and include a 20 minute story about all sorts of stuff that proves Katie is mean to not just her but other girls.

If I try to show I heard her by saying Katie is mean because she is not nice and she excludes other girls I am sometimes told that I only got part of it and then the other 20 minutes of the story comes back into it.

This frustrates me a little because I don’t want my daughter to think I am not taking her seriously or don’t care but sometimes there is a disconnect there for me.

I figure that it doesn’t exist the same way with my son because I remember being a 14 year-old boy and though I didn’t have all of the electronics they do now the interpersonal stuff is the same.

What I Want My Daughter To Internalize

When my daughter was young I didn’t freak out if people gave her pink items or “girl toys.” That gender neutral stuff always made me shake my head.

She loved playing with dolls and doing all of the traditional girly stuff. But she enjoyed playing with Legos, building trains with Thomas and if you get in her way on the soccer field she’ll try to run you over to get to the ball.

One of the many things I want her to internalize is the message in that Eleanor Roosevelt quote. I want her to recognize her self worth and understand it is not based upon what other people think, what clothes she wears, where she lives, goes to school or any of that other stuff.

I want her to look in the mirror and always love herself because she understands she is special. I want her to recognize I love her and her older brother differently but equally.

They are different people. I don’t expect or need them to be the same.

courage

Add the words above to the mix.

Some hours ago I sat on the floor in her room and listened to her tell me about some of her dreams and her fears and smiled because my girl dreams big.

I love that and hope she never loses it.

When she told me about some people have told her she is silly to have these dreams I paraphrased my buddy Ralph and told her about how many people have tried to crush my dreams.

I may not always follow everything but this I know. There are always people who think they have the right to demean, diminish or marginalize our dreams.

Our job is to protect our dreams and remember that it is up to us to decide whether we should let those words affect us.

I hope she heard me but if not I’ll be around to listen and share my advice any time she wants.  I just wish she’d honor my request to stop growing up so fast.

How To Make Hard Decisions Easier

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Decisions

Forty-five minutes ago I sat on the floor and told that 14 year-old son of mine I am sorry I didn’t get more time with my great-grandparents but especially my paternal great-grandfather.

He was the only great-grandfather I got to meet so it is possible I am not giving my maternal one enough credit, but we go on what we know as much as what we think we do.

So I choose him, a man who shared the same last name as I do, but stood 6 feet tall, had blonde hair and blue eyes.

Did I mention I am 5’10, have black hair and hazelish-green eyes?

Can You Trust Your Memory?

Since he died when I was around eight my memories are not as solid as I would like them to be and most of what I know is what I have heard, the bits I remember and the photos I have.

The point of all this is I am curious about what we share in common besides genetic material and our lineage. I know there is more, I know there are some expressions he passed down that have come into my possession. 

I am curious about what kind of man he was and would have liked to have had the opportunity to hear his thoughts and ideas about life.

Would a man who left Europe so that he wouldn’t have to run from the Cossacks or be conscripted into the army think of my challenges as being silly and relatively easy or would he feel otherwise.

What counsel would he give? Would his words help or would he shrug his shoulders and tell me it was up to me to figure it out.

Based upon the my father, uncles and grandfather I say he would tell me he couldn’t tell me what to do and that some of the challenges I have face are mine alone to figure out.

Like Old Al said above, I feel certain this is what he would say but I don’t know if it is.

Certainty would be nice but life doesn’t come with guarantees, manual or handbooks. All I have to inspire me to keep moving is knowing when it comes to overcoming adversity and challenges I have a perfect record.

C’mon Dad

That teenager of mine says I am manipulating the truth and that I haven’t got a perfect record because there are moments I have failed.

I smile and tell him he is partially correct. In school I failed a test or two and in life I have had a few things not go my way.

Had to sell my house because his high flying father was brought low by the recession. Got fired a time or two, quit a job and moved around a bit and have dealt with a bit of uncertainty.

But I told him I don’t see these things as he does because he looks at life from a very narrow perspective because he hasn’t lived as long or done as much as I have.

He doesn’t know the details about why dad won’t put his life on Slideshare but he does know something about the mission for 2015.

possibility

What he doesn’t know is how many of the decisions I have made and are making are based upon this gut feeling I am following.

He doesn’t know how I stare at Einstein’s quote and think about how badly I want to know so that I can make the right decision but I don’t talk about that with him.

Don’t talk about it because right now I want him to focus to learning how to make hard and easy decisions based upon logic and reason.

That teenage brain isn’t fully formed yet so I don’t want him to apply skills he hasn’t developed yet.

What that means is that some of the gut decisions I make include a ton of outside data called experience. It involves my being able to look at experiences and add a dash of judgment and insight into it and feel relatively confident that I am getting it done.

Still it doesn’t eliminate how much of this is me dwelling in possibility and trusting my gut to not lead me astray. I can’t live as I did any more. Can’t do as I have done because that man died a fiery death.

Burned out, choked out and buried.

This man is making different choices. This man has decided to take chances he once refused to take and make moves he once feared because it is time.

There is no more holding up a finger to try to figure out which way the wind blows or if it is going to rain.
weatherman

I am on the tail end of one path and the start of a new one. Sometimes I have to remind myself of that because I want to stick that finger up in the air.

But my heart and my gut tell me I am doing the right thing and that even though I have stepped out of my comfort zone it is going to all work out.

I couldn’t have done this before because my attitude was too close to the one Bruce Wayne has in the clip below. I was certain I knew all that I needed to know so making some of these choices was silly.

Logic and reason made it clear I was right.

Except age and experience makes me think maybe I wasn’t.

I wonder if my great-grandfather could have been my Alfred…

What Is Your Mission For 2015?

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painting and poetry
If it doesn’t move you or make you feel something than what is the point.

A thousand and a eleven years ago when I was a new blogger who was blindly following his way I didn’t think to use photos in my posts.

I could blame it upon the rudimentary tools Blogger provided us with but it would indicate more thought about how to tell a story than I used.

This is not to say I never used photos because I did but they were tied into the posts in a different way than I use them now.

Today I look for pictures and quotes that add layers to the tales I try to tell whereas then they were more like dressing on a salad, sometimes adding spice and sometimes hiding stale lettuce.

Tumult, Turmoil & A New Year

It would be false to say I have never had goals but until recently I wasn’t the kind of person who would write them down.

It felt too structured and too rigid to me to map out my life like that. I always felt like it would take away some of my spirit and the easy going guy I thought of myself as would choke.

Much of the past five or six years has been filled with turmoil, tumult and a double dose of stress. There have been sleepless nights and moments where I wondered when my breaking point would come but it never did.

Maybe it is because I am a Taurus. Maybe it is because I am nuts or maybe it is because I listened to a line in Rocky Balboa and took it seriously.

But it ain’t about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward.

I heard that and rallied. I heard that and told myself that I could take the hits and keep moving forward.

And I did.

I took pride in it.

Took a beating and kept going because I needed to do it as both a father and a man.

I took on the big challenges in my life and solved almost every one of them. Figured out answers and solutions and just when I thought I had managed to pull us over the hump it fell apart…again.

That was brutal and among the hardest things I have had to deal with. I couldn’t spent hours trying to figure out how it happened so that I could avoid making the same mistakes again.

And then somewhere in the midst of it all I thought about what I would say if one day my children faced similar circumstances and I heard myself tell them not to be foolish.

Why take the beating if you can avoid it. There is no need or reason to do it. There is no benefit in it.

Be smarter.

Some people have secret feelings.
Some people have secret feelings.

That has been me.

I wasted more time on being sad, frustrated and angry than I like to think about.

But somewhere in there I figured out that I could use those feelings for my writing. .

Somewhere during one of those moments I decided if I could use those hard moments to become a better writer than I would feel better about that time and it wouldn’t seem like such a waste.

And I decided I would have a better chance to avoid revisiting some of this crap by coming at life in a different way. I decided it was time to write down my goals and try to be more specific in what I wanted.

Don’t get me wrong, I knew what I wanted and what I was trying to do but I figured there was no harm in taking a different approach.

What Is Your Mission For 2015?

They tell me good bloggers build their blogs by using you more than I so let’s make this our mission.

We are on a mission of growth, change and opportunity.

In my world that means a continued focus on finding work that feeds my creative soul. In a perfect world it would mean I got paid to blog and write about whatever my heart desires.

Since we don’t live in a perfect world it means I’ll continue to be a professional storyteller. I’ll continue to take work as a writer and marketer. I’ll continue to spend time on the blog trying to find ways to become a better writer and a better storyteller.

It means I want to do as da Vinci suggests, write words that paint a picture you can see, hear and feel.

In a perfect world my writing would include painting, singing and music. It might even dare I say include dance because part of the point of this is finding a way to empty the contents of my heart and soul and touch someone while doing so.

Now that I shared my mission for 2015 I’ll invite you to share yours in the comments. And in the interim if you are unfamiliar with the speech I mentioned above here is a copy you can watch.

Would You Put Your Life On Slideshare?

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Life is meant to be enjoyed,
Life is meant to be enjoyed,

There are better headlines than Would You Put Your Life On Slideshare?

I know because I have written them.

Ask me why I used it and I’ll tell you it is because I received an email notification today that told me yet another person decided to follow me on Slideshare and that got me thinking that I really ought to do something with it.

I Haven’t Uploaded Anything Yet

Don’t rub your eyes, you read that correctly. I haven’t uploaded anything yet.

I know the guy who supports a half dozen blogs isn’t using Slideshare with this one. Whatever is his problem. Why wouldn’t he take advantage of the massive audience that it might provide him with.

Why wouldn’t he look at all of the people who have signed up to follow him on Slideshare and meet their needs by providing an upload or even some uploads.

If you have a built in audience and you don’t take advantage of it aren’t you missing an opportunity?

The answer is maybe.

I have a chunk of subscribers here who have signed up to follow my posts. Some do it via RSS, some by email and some by carrier pigeon or smoke signals.

But when I look at my stats it seems clear to me that not everyone is following my words as closely as they could be. It is not just because a once active comment section is a little bare either.

It is a gut feeling and a disturbance in The Force. Ask my old buddy Master Yoda and he’ll tell you things are off around the blogosphere.

And he’ll also tell you there is no try, just do or do not.

Would You Put Your Life On Slideshare? Or Something Else?

I’ll ignore your questions for a moment and talk about followers and subscribers first. I am not convinced that followers and subscribers are reading all they have signed up for.

I think quite a few of them are overwhelmed by material they signed up for and underwhelmed by much of the actual content so they aren’t keeping up with it all the way they could.

It begs the question of whether I have a real audience waiting for me on Slideshare or not. Active users have different sorts of behaviors on different platforms which kind of reminds me of children.

People tell me my teenager is one of the most well behaved and nicest young men they have ever met. I am glad to hear that.

Did I mention that I thought about killing him 983,928 times this past weekend. That little pisher has different behaviors too, only it varies between parents and strangers.

Hell, it sounds like he is more like me than I should like. I was a good kid most of the time but I was also hell on wheels and sometimes the apple doesn’t fall as far from the tree as it could or should.

2015 Is About Fun

My good friend Groucho is correct. If you are not having fun you are doing something wrong.

Someone made a comment to me about how serious I am and I had to shake my head because it used to be people asked me if I was ever serious.

Clearly they don’t know Jack as well as they should and clearly I am not having enough fun.

It is not especially important to me that people think I am serious or insouciant. The reason the comment caught my eye was because I recognize I didn’t have enough fun in 2014.

That is a sad comment.

Granted 2014 was filled with lots of moments that were as pleasant as colonoscopies and root canals but I am a man who knows how to take that kind of crap and make it into something silly.

Yet I realized I didn’t do that enough last year so this year I am focused on having more fun. Some of it will be slapstick, some of it will be serious and some of it will be something else but there will be more than 198,322 smiles.

Hopefully that will include some other people too because trying to smile 198,322 times will add lines and wrinkles to my face. It is ok to have a few but best not to look like a Shar-Pei.

Maybe I ought to look for something funny to put on Slideshare so that massive prospective audience will have something funny to share.

I suppose I could put my life on there but I don’t know how funny that would be. Actually it would be very funny. If I told you some of the stories about my family you’d be certain I was writing a script for some silly television show or movie.

Hell, I still might choose to become a hobo and live my life on the rails. That could make for some great blog fodder and if I take some good pictures it might make for some great slides.

But that is assuming someone would do more than must follow. That is assuming they would actually read it.

“You can’t become a better writer without doing a lot of reading and writing and part of how you find more material to write about is by getting off of your computer and living.

If you don’t spend time in the offline world you miss things. You miss moments, some important, some less so but you can’t see which is what without being there.

And that my friends is why I keep a very short list of blogs to follow. There just isn’t enough time.”-Do You Read The Blogs You Follow?

Yeah, crazy old Jack just quoted himself again but there is a rhyme and reason to it.

I am telling you about my intention, sharing real parts of life and my philosophy.  Because sometimes you recognize it is the little moments that matter and you know the great stories are best written by those who try to live them.

2015 is the year of fun and finding ways to take possibility and turn it into opportunity. Maybe you’ll read about it here or maybe you’ll see it on Slideshare.

I don’t really know because I’ll be living it.