3by9

Dare to explore

The other night I watched 50 Cent on Ustream. At first I was a bit dubious and some parts were challenging to listen to (because the audio quality deteriorated) but in the end I’m glad I watched him. I’m not a 50 Cent fan but I went from not particularly liking him from being neutral and having some respect for him in areas.

That would have never have happened listening to his music.
That probably wouldn’t have happened looking at an interview.
It happened because he was chilling, talking to his audience and his crew (Banks was there along with another guy I can’t remember what his name is).

Unfortunately for the other two (Banks and what’s his name) I walked away with a negative impression. So bad of a negative impression I don’t see how they could turn it around. See, it goes both ways. If you have an opportunity to interact with your audience by all means do so but all people aren’t meant to do that.

Back to 50 Cent, he made some very good points which is why he “won” some of my respect. He talked about business, handling business, not wanting to carry people to their success, how people change when they get money, talked about some of the business decisions he made, how current trends impact the music industry, etc. He talked about life, how people are supposed to transition and grow up (and how Banks wasn’t doing that), how there is much to experience and the different cultures he experienced.

I’m still tripping I watched 50 Cent. Not only watched it once, I went back a day or two later and watched it again. Actually I listened to it the majority of the time (while working) because they were just sitting there talking. When someone sent me the link I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. He has a social site and I suppose the streams and videos will be apart of that site. I don’t like the site and I’ll probably write an article ripping it apart later but he was honest why he was doing it: so he wouldn’t need other social network sites.

But, I had to be open to the idea of watching 50 Cent in the first place. The notion of trying and not letting the perceptions I had get in the way. I’m glad I did.

Be open to trying new things. You might discover you like things you never thought you would.

There’s no other love…than your site(s)

We changed the posting schedule. Mike is on Monday. Scrivs is on Wednesday. Tyme is on Friday. Today’s my day! Let’s do this…

The following are lyrics from a song called Got Me Going by Day 26:

there’s no other love
there’s nobody else I’m thinking of
only a baby as special
how could I ever forget you
and let the moment slip away
we’ve been here for a while
and I just wanna take you away
you got me doing things I never do
I can’t stop feenin and dreaming about you
and about your love it feels so real to me
you know what to say
and you know just what to do
come get me
whatcha got for me
I wanna see
I’ve been waiting way too long
got me losing my cool
don’t know what I’m gonna do
you got me going

The song is about a man’s love for a woman but it can be applied to love in general. One person loves another person very much and wants to take it to another level. Further in the song they say “just let me be, be all that you need” because after waiting, the struggles, etc. it’s time to move forward - together. Passion, excitement, endurance, commitment, loyalty - the song has it all. Now that we have an understanding about love and passion, I’m about to apply this to writing online…because I’m smooth like that.

Passion shows…

It is somewhat easy to tell when someone is passionate about their writing and those that are doing it because it’s “the thing”. Those blogging because it’s the hot new thing are experiencing a crush with blogging. Bloggers that are expressing and sharing their passions are like the excerpted lyrics above.

When a person loves or is passionate about their blogging it shows. The person does not have to say, “I love to blog!” for it to show just like a person doesn’t have to say “I love you” for the person he or she loves to know it or know when someone loves you in return. Actions speak louder than words. Actions speak when there is silence.

The person that is passionate about their writing will embrace all aspects of it. The blogger will pick a decent host (to the best of their ability) and, if he or she encounters hosting problems, will rectify the situation. The person who is passionate about their content (meaning their content is important) will take steps to back it up in case something goes wrong. The person who is passionate about their blog will tweak it in an attempt to improve it. This does not mean the person will morph into a designer but the blog will look like a well-cared lawn - some look better than others but one can tell when a lawn is being maintained and when it is not.

When a person is passionate about their writing and cares about their users the blog will have the features a user would look for: about page, easy to subscribe to the blog, perhaps options to subscribe depending on the target audience, contact page, easy navigation, tags and or categories, interact with readers, etc. The content will be published when promised and the presentation of the content matters to ensure the user is able to easily read their content.

Round 6: May 7th, 2008

9rules has a new round coming up. When I look at blogs I look for the passion and love to show on the blog. When I load a blog in my browser and I’m puzzled about the direction of the blog, confused while reading an article what the author is trying to say or look at a site and my corneas are damaged because the site has colors that should be a sin to put together, I remember when I felt a lack of desire to blog and was blogging for reasons other than passion - and it showed. One of the reasons why we do not accept new blogs into 9rules is because so many people are excited about blogging and dive in, only to bow out a couple of months later.

It’s hard to think of original content and that is where passion gives an edge. The person that is passionate about their blog will come up with original content, will track down that interview, will confirm whether a lead is accurate, will take extra care creating a tutorial, writing a review, explaining design or programming elements, etc. The extra effort isn’t a chore, it can be a joy, something exciting and fun. It’s an essential part of the process.

I hope if I look at your blog for Round 6, the passion shows. If you don’t feel the passion or the love for blogging, why are you doing it?

Want to improve? Admit you suck.

It’s not a secret I play World of Warcraft. I look at a lot of PVP movies because I want to improve in that area. There is a PVP movie that is perfect to explain the point of this article. A guy makes a video series called I Suck at PVP. He plays a Mage and he shows how he loses a fight (approximately 5:30 into the video), explains what he did wrong, then does the fight again (fixing what he did wrong) and shows a successful fight (against opponents he shouldn’t be able to win against). Evertras has this basic approach when he starts a fight:

• You can win every fight.
• If you lose it’s your fault, not the game.
• Don’t beat yourself up over losing.
• Look back at the fight that was just lost. What could you have done differently.

Can he really win every fight? No, but he has an optimistic (and realistic) attitude. If he is up against an opponent that is better geared than he is, odds are he will lose but the reality: he could have had equal gear. Who’s fault is it that he doesn’t? Instead of beating himself up over it, he’ll grind to get better gear (if he is under geared), see what else he could improve from the mistakes he made, and try again.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if we could do that with life? When something doesn’t work, see why it failed, then do it again? We can…

Of course, it means learning from our experiences and other people’s experiences.

You can’t go back and redo the past (that’s important to note - what’s done is done) but it is possible to make sure the mistakes from the past don’t re-appear in the future. I don’t play a Mage in WoW but I suck at PVP. Yeah I said it, I suck at PVP. Admitting it is one of the first things I need to do to correct the situation.

Instead of whining like a little bitch that my character won’t do what I want it to do.

The other (harder) part is putting in the time and effort needed to correct the situation. Hahaha it means losing for a while to win the bigger battles later. I can’t put into words how much I hate to lose but a girl has to do what a girl has to do. Tyme wants to be a PVP Queen so I have work to do.

What Does This Mean to You?

No one is perfect, there is always room for improvement. Many times the opportunity is there to avoid a situation from happening if one would open their eyes to what happened previously (or to others) and correct the situation. If you have a blog on technology, you’ve had it for over a year, you submit your entries to Digg, Reddit, etc. and your articles never make it to the front page is it because the Digg community is “mean” or your articles aren’t as good as the others submitted that day?

If you want to start a business and your main competition admitted that although successful, they would have went in a different direction, why would you start a business following the same path the competition took without safe-guarding against those hurdles?

If you know people are getting fired for the things they put online for public consumption, why would you put yourself (potentially) in the same position?

Just like in PVP, the people who win the fight think smarter (and yes, take advantage of their opponent’s weakness). In life those who succeed think smarter (and don’t repeat mistakes they are already aware of).

Stop Following Everybody, Stop Information Diarrhea, Start Being Interesting, Start Thinking For Yourself

This post is dedicated to people who feel that in order to be the most informed they can be, they need to hear all information from all parties at all times of the day across all mediums. It’s a fallacy. It makes you unproductive. It dilutes your opinions. Stop doing it. And stop perpetuating it.

FriendFeed and Socialthing are services that let you facilitate information overload and you should stay away from them. Yes, many people I know use these services, and I’m saying they’re bad for your mental health. The reason they are bad is because they trick you into thinking that each item you read is useful and important to understanding what your “friend” is currently thinking & doing when you don’t need to know everything that your “friend” is currently thinking & doing. Granted, posting your inner thought process as a human being into Twitter is the culprit for this type of informational diarrhea, so tell your friends (and yourself) to stop doing that as well. I don’t care what you’re thinking about at the moment, what you’re contemplating, when you’re done contemplating, what you’ve decided to do, any of that. None of that is interesting and the publication of such information furthers the trends of Twitter streams being uninteresting and annoying.

People that write blog entries — when they have nothing interesting to say — just so that they can say they blogged today are the same types of people who post random thoughts to Twitter just because they know those thoughts will get blasted out to all their followers. This is a horrible practice and it needs to stop. Push your ego and vanity aside and only publish things that are interesting. Remember that with the advent of FriendFeed and Socialthing, your posts are replicated to the screens of many others, so make sure your words matter.

Matt Linderman points out the words of Ricardo Semler on minimizing your information intake:

“I estimate that the ratio of useless to relevant reading material is about 20 to 1. With that in mind, my advice is to reduce the literary inflow to a maximum of two newspapers a day, two weekly magazines, and two publications in a specialized field. Start being proud of not being aware of everything. The reward will be an opportunity to THINK.”

Seeing words past by your head from 16,000 people you follow does not make you a more competent and thoughtful being. It makes your opinions blend into everyone else’s until you have no more real opinions, you just have 16,000 things you read and you picked one to agree with. Once this happens, posting original thought to your blog is nearly impossible and you resort to the easy way out of analyzing someone else’s viewpoint because it’s easier than writing your own good article. It’s almost unbelievable to me how little original thought is now posted to blogs (if you want good original thought, head to Tyme Said and Expert Idiot) because posting a well-written and original article to a blog now is almost as foreign as RSS feeds were a few years ago.

Dealing With Information

I am subscribed to 38 feeds in Bloglines, and 8 of those are feeds from 9rules or Chawlk. I follow 65 people on Twitter but 1) I don’t have Twitter updates sent to my phone, and 2) I only visit or post to Twitter once every couple days, so there’s little overload there. I don’t use Socialthing or FriendFeed or any other similar service. I do read a lot of websites, but the act of reading them is deliberate and I actually visit the site instead of plugging it into Bloglines and seeing the titles scroll by in the mash of all other titles. When I decide to read a blog entry that I find via my Bloglines subscriptions, I click over and read it on the site.

Everything I choose to absorb into my brain is deliberate. Every topic I read about I do so because I’m honestly interested in it, not because 16,000 of my “friends” posted about it and it entered my subconscious due to visual repetition. I’m careful about what I consider to be a good source of information, and don’t succumb to the informational spew that some crave.

In short, I pay attention to things that matter to me, and don’t pay attention to things that don’t. I only write about things I care about, and don’t write about things that I don’t. If you apply these principals to the information you output and the information you input, then you’re on your way to having a perspective that’s untarnished by the informational diarrhea outputted by the masses.

There Are 100 Million Web Designers

I’m a veteran in the web design industry, which is ridiculous to say at my ripe old age of 25 (just turned 2 weeks ago) except that it’s true.

I started blogging in July 2003, back when only a few companies used CSS and people like Jeffrey Zeldman were on the frontlines of the standards brigade. I remember the days when putting together a navigation element on a page didn’t automatically mean use an unordered list, which people didn’t really use until Fall/Winter of 2002 which was when the previously-linked A List Apart article was penned. I remember when CSS Zen Garden went live in May 2003 and how excited everyone was to put together a theme (I never did, but I sure did start-and-stop a half dozen). I remember the days when Doug Bowman was the design blog king, before he took his hiatus and returned only to go to Google. I was around when Dan Cederholm redesigned FastCompany’s website (their current design looks like ass, Dan’s was far superior and also 5 years older…) which put him on the path to design stardom. I distinctly remember how popular Movable Type was and how it dominated the blog world before WordPress made a run on them.

Do you remember any of these events?

The reason I’m taking a trip down memory lane is because I’ve been thinking recently just how many web designers there are now and how much the industry has grown in the past 3-5 years. When we launched Business Logs in early Summer 2004 the concept of a design firm that focused on blogs was unheard of. There were some other blog consulting sites out there, but none that really provided high-fidelity visual design. We were the first. Now I probably have 2 dozen blog design firms in my bookmarks folder alone, and could easily name another dozen individual designers who have put together some amazing blog-based website designs. In 2004, the playing field was so small that everything was new….

….but now in 2008, you hardly see anything completely brand new in the web design industry. My partner Paul Scrivens started the very first web design gallery at CSS Vault and now there are probably over 100. Every month I probably come across a half-dozen portfolio sites that I’d consider some of the best design sites I’ve ever seen, and this happens every month! The abundance of design talent in the world right now is unbelievable, but I see the following as some consequences of this abundance:

1. It’s unbelievably hard to go from 0-60mph as a new designer just starting out. When I started I put together a blog and some great articles and I was well on my way. Now if you don’t have a blog and you don’t have a couple unbelievable articles (with equally unbelievable pageviews and linkbacks) then you’re already behind everyone else.
2. Your portfolio has to be unreal to even get noticed. I can name a half-dozen designers right now that launched their careers with a homely portfolio but still took-off in the industry. Over time they honed their skills and are now putting out fantastic work, but when they started they were still in the learning stages so to speak. If you’re a new designer about to embark in the web design industry and you launch with a decent-but-not-amazing portfolio or blog, you’re already 5 steps behind.
3. Competition for client work drives pricing down across the industry. When I designed blogs for medium-to-large sized clients in my past life, prices started at a couple thousand dollars and worked their way up. Now that there are thousands (tens of thousands?) of free WordPress themes available — and everybody uses WP now instead of Movable Type, sorry Anil — clients see that as the bargain basement and when looking for a “custom theme” (I fucking hate that term, it should die) designers have to prove their worth beyond a shadow of a doubt because at all stages of the process a client could pick a freebie design and tweak it up. I’ve been part of many threads in Notes where people ask for bids on a nice blog design and people start throwing out 3-digit quotes. Well, shit, good luck with that.

So what do you do?

You separate yourself from the pack.

Put together a nice portfolio and blog, but don’t get caught up with the one-upsmanship that all the CSS galleries perpetuate. Read more than you write (I suggest this entry to start) and absorb more than you spew out. Twitter and all the microblogging platforms give you the means to produce verbal meta-diarrhea at all times of the day but resist the urge. Pick a niche and put together a small web-based “product” that targets that niche… it doesn’t have to be anything fancy. It could be as simple as a small utility that does to-do tracking in a new way, or a nice iPhone Summerboard theme, but design the hell out of it and then blog about it. Put it in your portfolio, and then tuck it away and put together the next little product site. The successful designers I see out there now are the ones that experiment with these little types of sites, and building a site like this teaches you a lot more than you think it will.

There aren’t really 100 million web designers out there right now, but there are enough so that you’ll get drowned out unless you pick reachable goals and then execute the hell out of ‘em. Don’t try to be the next Smashing Magazine or Freelance Switch, carve out your own area and own it.

If it’s broke, fix it

Today is April Fool’s Day. The internet is going to be basically worthless today trying to determine whether an article is legitimate or a prank. So, I’m going to relay a story that happened yesterday.

Scrivs and I were playing Weewar. Someone from the Weewar team came to one of the SuperStreams, mentioned the game, and gave the three of us invites. We decided to give it a try. What is Weewar?

Weewar.com is a round based strategy game featuring real action on real maps. Up to 6 players command their colorful pixel armies against each other on the many maps available.

Scrivs started a map and we started playing. Scrivs made the first move, I made the second. Then, for me, the game slowly dived into hell. See, from the third move on I knew I was screwed, game was over but I refused to surrender so it took 11 turns for me to be defeated. Eleven turns when Scrivs knew, I knew and if anyone could watch that game knew I was extremely vulnerable early on. The writing was on the wall but I used the additional turns to learn more about the game (ok, I was stubborn but I can’t wimp out playing against Scrivs…even if I want it to be over quickly so I can attempt to whoop his ass the next round).

The ending could not be re-written.

While thinking of something to write on April Fool’s I thought about how often we know the end result and refuse to accept it. How, by not accepting the truth, time is wasted. For example, have you ever been in a relationship you know wasn’t going to work but prolonged ending it to avoid the drama? Does the end result change? No, but time is wasted. Or the project that doesn’t have your full commitment but you don’t want to withdraw because you don’t want to fail, the project “should” be a higher priority, you don’t want to disappoint anyone, [insert other excuses here]? A social networking example, how many of you have a bunch of friends that you “follow”, do not really pay attention to (for example, you only read the first page or two on your Twitter profile or really do not pay attention to your Twitter application) yet feel like you are suffering from information overload? Isn’t the writing on the wall that some people will have to be weeded out, ignored, etc?

Note that in each situation, nothing was done to improve the situation, only to maintain a scenario that one knows isn’t working out.

In my Weewar game I learned something, it was only 20 minutes, I still lost but I hope I will be better next time. Some people waste weeks, months and years prolonging the inevitable without improving the situation at all.

Unfortunately, many of those people will look back and wonder where the time went.

Glam Puts The Halt On Easy Payouts

Everyone loves getting paid for nothing, and up until this past week, Glam was paying between $3 and $5 CPM to its publishers on unsold inventory. This generated a nice, steady bit of cash for bloggers who weren’t big enough to warrant ad buyers looking their way, but not anymore:

But according to one large publisher partner to Glam, this is actually nothing more than a way for Glam to dramatically cut payments to partners. He said “While they’re spinning this as positive news, it sucks for publishers. Publishers were previously guaranteed $3 - $5 CPMs for house ads. By no longer running any house ads, that revenue dies. And, given Glam’s fill rates retwork wide are only 30%, that’s 70% of traffic (for most publishers) that’s no longer earning revenue from Glam…It’ll basically cause a 30 - 80% drop in revenue for publishers”

Paying publishers guaranteed amounts was cutting into Glam’s bottom-line in a deep way, and it was one of the causes of their $3.7M loss on $21M in revenue last year. Now that they’ve raised a bunch of new money, they’re tightening the ship and buckling down for the long haul, and that means cutting off the freebies. Giving out guaranteed payments was great at bringing the hordes of female-centric blogs into the Glam fold (and buttering them up to give good reviews whenever prodded) but now that they have the numbers and the cash, it’s time to get down to business.

This is bad news for Glam bloggers no matter how the Glam executives want to spin it. A commenter at TechCrunch echoes my opinions:

“This is a classic example of what happens when you build a network purely based on minimum revenue guarantees. Glam took on too many publishers too fast merely to get their comscore reach to the leading position in their vertical and it has become increasingly difficult for them to generate any profits with the high revenue guarantees in place.” - Link

To attract a high valuation they had to scale incredibly fast, and telling small bloggers who had previously made no income from their site that they’d get a check each month was an easy way to accomplish that feat. Now that they’ve scaled and they have the Comscore numbers, their tune has changed. It’s changed for the better for their investors, and for the worse for their smaller publishers. The medium- and larger-sized publishers won’t get hit as much because they know how to monetize their unsold Glam inventory but the smaller publishers either don’t have the know-how or the traffic, two things that led them to Glam in the first place (outsourcing ad sales to a knowledgeable third-party).

So for the smaller publishers who relied on Glam for guaranteed payments, what they do now? Do they go to another ad network (not likely) or do they enter the tough world of ad sales on their own? Now that Google click-through rates are plummeting, it puts smaller Glam publishers in a very tough spot.

Trusting Editors To Show You The Path

In last week’s podcast (posted today because I’m an idiot) we had a good discussion about editors on social sites. Much has been said on this topic, most of it negative like Wired’s piece on the Digg “bury brigade” but I have a different view: I think editors are needed.

At Chawlk clips we display what you’d normally find at social voting sites: upcoming clips and popular clips which is displayed by default. What we have that you probably won’t find anywhere else are editor picked clips — articles and links that someone hand-selected as being of value regardless of how many votes it has. We care about popular vote counts everywhere else, but here. Democracy wins some of the time.

Why do we have clips that are moved to the top of a particular section manually? Because we feel that these articles should be noticed, perhaps noticed even before they hit the popular listing. Certain links are just too good and too time-sensitive not to put right at the top from the start. At social voting sites like Digg and Reddit, I have seen numerous articles get to the front page and the description goes something like this:

Yeah so this is the 2nd time I submitted it… the first time went nowhere. 

If the article was good enough to make it to the front page the second time it was submitted, what went wrong the first time? Perhaps it was overzealous buriers, maybe it was posted at the wrong time, maybe the first 50 people who saw it were completely unrepresentative of the larger site audience, but regardless the fact is that if it hadn’t been submitted a 2nd time then that particular article would not have been displayed on the site.

Having editor-picked items work is a direct function of the trust the users have of the people who are doing the editing. If you trust people to do “the right thing” then will you trust the articles they deem important and interesting?

On the other hand, if the people you trust aren’t necessarily the editors on the site but simply other users, what do you do in that scenario? Well we have you covered there as well. Our “top friends” page only displays posts from users you’ve deemed to be your top friends and no one else: like your own personal editors. (You’ve got to be logged-in to see the page work.) So whether it’s random people you trust or your close friends, having people select and recommend things to you is important right along side what the crowd thinks.I won’t argue and say which is more important, as that’s left for you to decide.

To friend or not friend, that is the question…

“I do not know if this has happened to anybody, but this morning I log on to Facebook and I have a new friend request!” wrote 19-year-old Mike Yeamans, a sophomore at James Madison University, on one of several “No Parents on Facebook” groups that have popped up on the site. “I am excited to make a new friend so I click on the link. I could not believe what I saw. My father! This is an outrage!”

I laughed at that portion of this article. An outrage? Then I thought about for a minute. I’m grown, I can do whatever I want to do so being Facebook friends with my Mom isn’t a big deal. I don’t owe her any explanations on anything I do and I’m not doing anything that would shock her. Actually, I’m not doing anything important that she doesn’t already know. See, I’m the opposite of most people. If I go to the club there aren’t any pictures taken because here, we respect the sanctity of The Club. It’s like Vegas, what happens there stays there. If I’m in a relationship or “dating” a guy I’m not going to hide it because I’m grown. She already knows my offline friends so there honestly isn’t anything juicy for her to see. Hence, I don’t care. I realize that is not the norm. The norm, especially college age, would be this:

“Don’t get me wrong,” said Yeamans, who is a computer information systems major. “I love my parents, but there are some parts of my college experience that I want to keep to myself. I chose to go away to school so I could experience a little freedom.”

Can you imagine the situation where a parent asks for a friend request, the child rejects it and the parent says, “Well, I AM paying your tuition…”. Ouch.

Replace parent with your co-workers. Your boss. Your ex. Your in-laws. It’s coming if it hasn’t already happened to you. Again, I’m the exception to this rule. My business partners are my co-workers, our parents accept what we do (which isn’t the norm for most people), my ex’s follow what I do and know about each other and I have no in-laws. Imagine if your girl/boyfriend’s Mom wanted to be your friend, would that be a nightmare situation for you? As the article mentioned teenagers are having the same problem (but I have no problem with parents having access to what minors do). Let’s be real, when Facebook started the average parent could not join because it was for college students. The only “real” problem college students had to worry about were ex’s. It was their playground to romp around in.

It’s coming: social networks need to adapt levels of friendship because all “friends” are not created equal. Of course those with limited access will figure out they are being restricted, then what will you do?

Instead, take control of the situation. Social networks make it very easy to share your life, that doesn’t mean you should do it. Most things aren’t meant to be public.

Nothing Is Wrong, Nothing Is Right

You know the problem with people who give advice (this includes me of course)? They are all experts. They can tell you what is right and what is wrong. They know the path to success just as well as the path to failure. If you don’t listen to them you are doomed to make the same mistakes over and over and over again.

If you are going to run a company, dress professional and be respectful. Don’t wear sandals around all day or god forbid in public when you are speaking because that will show negatively against your company. Suit and tie works best.

If you are going to run a company, dress comfortable and act like you run the shit. Wear sandals if you feel that lets people know where you stand and who cares if if you go around in them all the time. Hell, after a while it might even become your trademark and something your company represents.

When doing a show you want it to be as professional as possible. People love amateur hour on YouTube, but when it comes to hour long programs be sure to replicate network television. This isn’t public access so don’t pretend it is. Telling jokes works well, but the content has to be great and on point.

When doing a show you want it to be just like you were right in the same room with your audience. Kick back on a coach and drink some beers if you want. Hell, that will probably help you relax a bit more and make things even more entertaining. In fact, people will relate to you better because they can picture themselves doing the same thing.

If you write publicly, be respectful like Scoble, not a dick like Calacanis because one is successful and the other is successful (not a typo). An even better example is to be courteous like Rubel and not arrogant like Arrington because one is successful and one is successful.

If you like sports let’s take it there. Between Marvin Harrison and Terrell Owens you have two of the greatest wide receivers to ever play the game of football. One is liked and the other is mostly liked, but both get respect and are set for life financially. How can you give advice as to which one you should be like if both are successful in their own right? I’m sure reading the examples I gave above you could picture the people I was talking about and although their methods contrasted greatly to the point of being complete opposites they are all still successful. So who’s advice would you follow?

That is the problem with advice. No matter how great it is, it doesn’t apply to everyone. Sure you should be respectful and kind towards others, but do you have to be to achieve success? Of course not, your road might be a bit tougher though. How many of you have followed a pro bloggers advice only to find out it didn’t really work for you? It just wasn’t your thing. How many men or women give advice to their friends about attracting the opposite sex only to see it backfire when the advice is applied?

I’m not saying that listening to advice is wrong. What is wrong is when we think the way someone goes about something is wrong simply because our way was different. I do it all the time when I see companies being written about and laugh when they fail and scratch my head when they succeed trying to figure out how they could do so against my better judgement and win.

If you feel you are going about things the right way and are being honest with yourself then by all means continue. There are no golden rules written in stone. If you are proven wrong down the road at least you tried and that is more than what some people can say. The road to success isn’t barren because it has been traveled many times over already, it is like that because a new one is built everyday.