Hacking Your Passions

Can the choice of a font really lead to better grades in school? It appears there may be something to the notion.

I didn’t go into this hoping to try and make any claims against academic integrity here; I can’t imagine this is something that a professor would do knowingly.

What I’m not opposed to saying, however, is that the style used in an essay certainly seems to influence grading tendencies, even if that is at an unconcious level. I think that it’s possible that a person sees a Serif font and thinks “proper, academic”, and sees a Sans font and thinks “focus is on the style, not the substance; must lack integrity”. Maybe.

While we’re on the subject of why to blog, here are a few from this list of 33 more reasons that I definitely connect with:

4.) A blog is a great way to make a difference and raise awareness about certain topics mass media ignores or would rather not discuss

14.) Posting on a blog is a great way to get regular feedback in your niche and on your ideas

17.) Regularly posting to your blog can allow you to focus more on your passions and dreams

25.) Many bloggers have turned their blogs into published books, who knows you might end up with your own book one day

29.) Sharing some of your life lessons on a blog is a great way of giving back to the community

I like this list of characters created to exemplify different kinds of speakers you want to avoid being - but the best part, to me, is it was created to pass the time while surviving a bad presentation.

One of my favorites to read about (and least favorite to experience firsthand):

Oscar Overtime (Thomas Too-much): Oscar is in some ways the extreme opposite of Umberto - he prepares way more material than he has time to deliver. Consequently he ends up going over his allotted time. He’s mastered the art of ignoring frantic signals from meeting moderators and cues from annoyed audiences. He’s prepared all that wonderful material and he’s going to deliver it (all), come what may.

What I like about Oscar is that the core of the problem, like so many bad presentations, is he had himself in mind when he made the presentation - yet the point of a presentation is your audience, not you.

Over at Lifehack they have an article up about the reasons blogging will improve your 2008. Curious, especially in light of my attempt to blog 961 posts this month, I decided to scroll through their reasons and see how many match my own. On a scale of 1-5, 5 being a strong match to one of my own goals, here’s how they match up:

• Track progress - 2
• Get feedback - 3
• Share knowledge - 4
• Meet like-minded people - 3
• Running Resume - 1
• Family Links - 1
• Creative pastime - 4
• Stay sharp - 5
• Make money - 3
• Develop writing skills - 5

I learned two new words today - anaphora and epiphora.

• Anaphora -  The deliberate repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of several successive verses, clauses, or paragraphs; for example, “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills” (Winston S. Churchill)
• Epiphora - the repeated use of the same word or word pattern as a rhetorical device; for example, “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as child.” (I Corinthians 13.11)

I ran into the first (and then through Googling stumbled on the other) as I read this article at Garr Reynold’s Presentation Zen site regarding the recent concession speech Barack Obama gave in New Hampshire. Your perception of him as future leader of the free world potential aside, he can definitely give great presentation.

I’m always on the hunt for good sources of inspirational quotes, especially more obscure ones I may not have come across on twenty quote sites already. This list of 50 inspirational quotes contains many that are new to me, including a few I really enjoyed:

• “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” - Dr. Wayne Dyer
• “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” - Thomas A Edison
• “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.” - Winston Churchill

“If less is more, then nothing is everything.” - from the blog article The Zen of Attraction by Graham English

This is a really nice summary of many things I try to make sure are in my heart and habits from day to day. I’m particularly passionate about:

Promise Nothing
Just do what you most enjoy doing.
Hidden benefit: You will always over-deliver.

Why do we sometimes behave in dumb or irrational ways?

The answer quite often is because of other people - something social psychologists have comprehensively shown.

The studies linked to within the article go on to delve deeply into this concept, but what a lot comes down to for me is this: you are not what people call you, you are what you answer to. You have the choice, in every situation and interaction: are you going to be in control of you, or are you going to leave control of you to someone else? You have control, power beyond what anyone else realizes, to be the best you possible. That we all have so much potential is what brings me some of my strongest hope. That we squander so much of our potential is what brings me some of my greatest sorrow and feeling of loss.

This nice, well thought out tool by David Seah to determine and visually represent the worth of accomplishing a particular goal versus the others on your list, so as to prioritize time more effectively. I’ve created similar tools in Excel for my personal use, and certainly his criteria don’t work very well for the things I care about tracking, but the concept, idea, and execution is really nicely put together, and I love the way the points are tracked.

Lifehack.org holds within its grasp the penultimate blog post on how to make the most of to do lists - how to write them, how to make them work, how to keep doing them and make it a habit. I’ll be spending some time digging through this entry.

Also, for those who joke about people who spend so much time doing lists instead of just doing the things on them - an hour spent planning saves ten in execution. It’s not just about making sure you remember everything, it’s prioritizing and making sure nothing is missed, and that you aren’t spending an hour now doing something when in half an hour something is due that would only take fifteen minutes. Or as a coworker once put it, it’s about putting out the fire that’s closest to burning you.