The World’s Religions – Hinduism

January 21, 2009 By

I’ve heard from many sources that the book to read for an impartial look into the major religions and their teachings is The World’s Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions by Huston Smith.

The first section of Smith’s book outlines what we can expect the book to be, and what we can expect it not to be. Before we even get to this chapter, however, we can anticipate much of this book just from its subtitle: Our Great Wisdom Traditions. Smith clearly believes first, that religions are great; second, that they impart wisdom; and third, that they are traditions and, being great traditions, will be highly valued. We can see that one of Smith’s value assumptions is that tradition is important, a view that often diminishes the importance of individuality.

To his credit, Smith acknowledges this in Chapter 1. He states that his aim is to “embrace the world,” “take religion seriously,” and is “an effort to communicate.” He states that religions are an attempt to address the divine, that each does so in its own voice, and the purpose of the book is to listen to each of these voices. Further, “the empowering theology and metaphysical truths of the world’s religions are … inspired.” (p. 5)

He further acknowledges that the book ignores the negative aspects of any religion, that the book is not a balanced account of its subject because it is a book about values. He tries to defend this with an analogy. “Probably as much bad music as good has been composed in the course of human history, but we do not expect courses in music appreciation to give it equal attention.” (p. 4) Very weak analogy, as bad music didn’t start the Inquisition, create the caste system in India, or convince people to become suicide bombers. Besides, many music appreciation courses will at least address bad music, because knowing why something is bad can help you in determining what is good. Smith’s rosy look at the religions he discusses might benefit from a more critical eye.

The other assumption the reader has to consider, one that Smith does not acknowledge, is the author’s obvious Christian leanings. On the first page of Chapter 1, he states that he “attended” a Christian service, yet “observed” a service of a non-Christian religion. This subtle difference speaks volumes. In one he was a participant, while in the other he was clearly an observer. There is more evidence of this bias in the next chapter, Hinduism.

Hinduism

Smith states that if Hinduism could be summed up in one phrase or affirmation, it would be “You can have what you want.” The tricky part is discovering what exactly it is that you want. Hinduism believes there are four basic desires that appear in sequence, usually across many human lives of the same soul, or jiva.

The first desire is pleasure, the hedonistic pursuit of nothing but personal pleasure. Of this, we soon tire, and move on to the second desire, worldly success. In this stage we want wealth, fame, and power. Soon, we realize this too is fleeting, and we move on to duty. Duty to family, duty to community, we can define our lives by our service to those around us.

At this stage, many people stop, thinking that this may be what is important. But, eventually every jiva tires of this and asks, “Is this all there is?” This, according to Smith, is the birth of religion. It also moves us to the fourth desire, liberation. In this, we desire infinite being, infinite knowledge, and infinite bliss. We already have these things within us, but they are buried beneath layers of nearly eternal distraction that were created by the first three desires. Hinduism is peeling away these layers and reaching the infinite within us, called Brahman (also called the God-head, or just plain God, by Smith).

If this is the great wisdom tradition that has come out of a culture that has been contemplating human existence for thousands of years, frankly, I am a little disappointed. These 4 desires could simply be translated as the four stages of a human’s life. The first stage is childhood, where we don’t think beyond our immediate needs and do everything possible to fulfill them. The worldly success stage is young adulthood, where we try to forge our way in the world, make a name and career for ourselves. The third stage is when we have established ourselves and now begin to settle down and make a family, and contribute some of our wealth back to the community. The final stage is when we no longer care so much about the worldly material possessions, and start to contemplate our inevitable death. This is when we start looking for infinite being (freedom from death), infinite knowledge (an answer to all of the philosophical questions that we have been unable to answer during our lives), and infinite bliss (an escape from the pain, frustration, and boredom that is much of life).

Not surprising then, that this is where Smith claims the “Birth of Religion” occurs. Of course this is where it occurs, because religion promises all of these things, if you only think as its proponents think. Religion claims to have the answers to all of the questions that terrify us as we approach our inevitable mortality. This is the time people look for non-rational explanations, because the thought of their life just blinking out is often too overwhelming for them .

One redeeming aspect of Hinduism is the belief that there are “many paths up the mountain.” Further, “those who circle the mountain, trying to bring others around to their paths, are not climbing.” (p. 73) Unfortunately, this kind of tolerance is quickly overshadowed when one takes a look at the caste system.

Smith does not go into great detail about how it works, but basically defines the 4 major castes (Brahmin, managers, artisans, and workers) and offers a sort of defense of it. When told that maybe people might have ambitions greater than what their caste allows, a defender states, “What you would like is not the point. The question is what people actually are.” (p. 56) Meaning, of course, that most people would rather be told what to do than have to think for themselves. The fact that castes are considered to be self-governing would seem to belie that statement. Who acts as the administrator of the Worker caste? If they are all drones and none of them are able to be burdened with management and administration, how could they possibly rule themselves? Wouldn’t it be sheer anarchy? Every time I think about the caste system it makes my blood boil. Smith is far too tolerant of caste, especially after having stated that he would not discuss the bad about religions. This implicitly means that he thinks the caste system is good, or at least of value.

I have real questions about Smith. Throughout the chapter, he makes Christian references to saints and the bible, consistently equates Brahman with capital G God, and states that the many gods present in Hinduism are merely incarnations of the same single God. Whether this is because it is true, or because this is the way Smith interprets it is hard to say. For all I know, he could be thinking that all religions are just various aspects of Christianity, and therefore he relates everything back to his Christian frame of reference.

I have taken a break from the book for a while, as I will need the time to digest each section on each religion. At this point, I don’t think Smith can be considered the last word on any of these religions. I’m not even sure he should be considered the first word.

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Ye Olde Pram Shoppe

January 15, 2009 By

(cross-posted at domestic father)

Sally, CJ, and I recently spent some time in England. While there, we wanted to look at some strollers. The dollar was strong, and CJ is quickly out-growing her current MacLaren-Graco hybrid. Apparently, there are a few European models that Sally thought would work well, and we might be able to get them for less than we could here.

Just before we left, reader Tim Lovell pointed me to an article on the BBC website that he found to be curious. The lead-in was typically sensational:

Children who are put in buggies which leave them facing away from their parent could have their development undermined, a study has suggested.

Though we currently use a parent-facing stroller, it is purely by accident: it was the only one we could find that accommodated our Graco infant car seat. But, of course, I was ready to read something that would assure me that our purely random decision had been the best for CJ. This was not the article for such assurances.

While I will not do a complete dissection of the study (Esther at Mainstream Parenting Resources has already done a brilliant job of that), I thought one of the quotes from the lead researcher was telling.

If babies are spending significant amounts of time in a baby buggy that undermines their ability to communicate easily with their parent, at an age when the brain is developing more than it will ever again in life, then this has to impact negatively on their development.

She seems to have reached a conclusion, and decided to conduct a study to support it.

Armed with this study and my skepticism, I was now ready to go pram shopping. Or buggy shopping. Or is it push-chair shopping? I never did get that right while we were there, the differences between prams, buggies, push-chairs, and strollers. Just when I thought I had it, someone would politely correct me with one of the other terms, causing me to just give up and call them strollers while pushing my fists back and forth in front of me.

In Oxford, we headed to a store that had been recommended by friends. I was wary when we walked in, thinking that we would be upsold to a parent-facing stroller because of this study. As Tim said to me in his email,

I think the only buggies that can be configured for face-to-face, at least in the UK, are made by Bugaboo and these are very expensive. I’ve got one and it cost more than my first car!

What an excellent opportunity to sell concerned parents the more expensive stroller! I was ready for her, though.

After some confusion about what we wanted to see, ultimately resolved by my two-fisted pantomime, the saleswoman showed us to the strollers. Sally found one she liked, one she knew wasn’t sold in the US, and asked to see it. The woman handed Sally a catalog, turned to the proper page, then took the demo model down from the high shelf. It was pink.

“Does it come in a color other than pink?”

“Oh, yes,” answered the woman, leaning in to point at the catalog. “It also comes in black, silver, and wozzabee.”

Wozzabee? Sally must have noticed my eyebrows were in the middle of my forehead, for she gently whispered into my ear,

“Wasabi.”

Oh, green. OK. I like green. For some reason I was picturing some sort of boomerang pattern.

More important than the color, though, this stroller was front-facing, away from the parent. Sally liked it, I liked it, but they didn’t have the color we wanted.

“Well, we do have some others that are similar to that one,” said the saleswoman.

Here it comes, I thought, she’s going to upsell us to the parent-facer.

She stopped in front of a forward-facer. “This one has all of the same features and is actually a bit cheaper.”

Cheaper? Maybe she hadn’t heard of the study.

“Did you hear about the study they recently did in Scotland?” I asked. “Apparently some researcher found that the buggies that make the baby face the parent are supposedly better for children because they foster parent-child communication.”

She smiled back at me, relaxing a little bit. In a succinct statement, worthy of the greatest of skeptics, she said,

“I suppose they’ve got to study something, haven’t they?”

Filed Under: converse Tagged With: , ,

Lost Finds Story

December 1, 2008 By

Maybe I was a little too hard on JJ Abrams in my last post. After all, he is telling stories for television, and television requires viewers to keep watching. On network television, shows that keep viewers watching stay on as long as they can continue doing that. It is rare for a show on one of the major networks to end just because the story has been told.

The creators of Lost have maintained that they have known the entire story since the pilot episode. This is utter nonsense. In 2005, the first season, Damon Lindeloff, one of the producers/writers said in an interview:

Every mystery that we present on the show? What is the monster? Where does Ethan come from? Why hasn’t Claire had her baby yet?? All those are questions that we know the answers to.

He follows that up by saying

As the show progresses it won’t venture too far into science fiction as its mysteries unfold. We’re still trying to be … firmly ensconced in the world of science fact. I don’t think we’ve shown anything on the show yet … that has no rational explanation in the real world that we all function within. We certainly hint at psychic phenomena, happenstance and … things being in a place where they probably shouldn’t be. But nothing is flat-out impossible. There are no spaceships. There isn’t any time travel.

Anyone who watched last season knows they’ve tossed that out the window. Which of course means that he could not have known how the past season ended at the time of the interview. Which means they didn’t know the whole story while they were telling it.

In a group interview for Nightline in 2006 Abrams as much as admits this.

And we kept getting these calls: “You have to shoot an ending so we can air this as a movie.” And we asked, “Well, what’s the end? How do you end it?” It’s sort of the beginning of something. We didn’t know how to wrap it up. How do you do it?

These guys are good enough storytellers to know all of this. They know they needed an end. Stringing out the story will only frustrate the audience. The third member of the team, Carlton Cuse said in the same interview,

Certainly Twin Peaks was a cautionary tale in terms of basically frustrating an audience by never giving any answers and/or by also focusing on one central mystery and putting so much emphasis on that mystery that once that mystery is solved — in that case “Who killed Laura Palmer?” — then everyone’s interest in the show goes away.

And, in fairness to these guys, they understand all of this. They know you cannot have a good multi-season arc unless you know when and how it ends. As Lindeloff said in the New York Times,

We didn’t know whether the mythology we constructed had to last two more seasons or seven more seasons. And that was driving us crazy because we didn’t know how fast it was going to play out…. the pragmatic reality of the network television business is we don’t own the show. We don’t get to decide when the show ends.

And, Carlton Cuse said

It’s time for us to find an endpoint to the show. It’s a struggle for us, because we don’t know if we have three years, four years or more to go. If we had an endpoint, then we could figure out where everything goes.

Well, they now have that endpoint. ABC announced that the 2009-2010 season will be the last for Lost. I’ve started watching again, because it means they know how many episodes are left, and can write out the rest accordingly.

They had a beginning, which they nailed. They tried to tell the middle, and started to flag. They now have an end and we can all watch as the whole story gets told.

Lets just hope that Abrams and crew know how to show us what’s in the box. Otherwise they’re all box and no gift.

Filed Under: converse Tagged With:

Story Secrets

November 25, 2008 By

One quick way to know the story your reading is being spun by an inferior storyteller? Secrets.

Is there a character, or worse, more than one character, who has a secret? Do they let someone else in the story know they have a secret, but won’t reveal it? Is this secret crucial for the protagonist to move towards his goal?

Cheap. Suspense.

The storyteller is doing this so you know there is a secret, and wants you to keep reading the story to find out what it is. Though I’ve seen this in some bad suspense novels, I see it far more often on television.

The classic example is The X-Files, where Mulder kept getting a little closer to the Big Answer, only to have the rug pulled out from under him every time. He was Charlie Brown and Cancer Man was Lucy holding the football. Viewers, and maybe even Chris Carter, tired of this and eventually the show spiraled downward off the air.

Of shows that are still on the air, 24 does this constantly (at least they did when I still watched it, in the first 2 or 3 seasons). Someone knows something that Jack needs to know, but they won’t tell him until he does something for them first. This keeps the reader on the hook until the next secret comes along.

Good storytellers avoid this. They build suspense by making you wonder what a character is going to do, not what a character knows. By only making a character’s knowledge interesting, the storyteller has neglected to make the character interesting.

There is one storyteller working today who walks the line between these worlds, though more often on the side of the secrets. JJ Abrams, producer of Alias, Lost, and Fringe, takes pride in this style of storytelling. In his TED Talk, (JJ Abrams: The Mystery Box), he appears onstage with a box. He explains that this was a box of mystery prizes he ordered from the back of a comic book when he was a kid, and has never opened it. He says that the mystery of what’s in the box is far better than what is actually in the box. Unfortunately, his storytelling reflects this as well.

In his new show Fringe, the main character is haunted by her dead lover/partner who apparently knows stuff. When she asks him what’s going on, he replies, “I can’t tell you now.” Now. He can’t tell her now. Because if he did, we would know also, and then what would keep us coming back week after week?

And this is the point. Television requires people to keep watching the show week after week. Storytellers like an arc. Combine these two factors, and you have a badly designed story. An arc that never resolves itself, and eventually wears out the storyreader.

Abrams biggest show, Lost, is an example of this. I went digging around in old interviews and found some interesting information about the development of the show. But, I’m out of time right now, so I need you to come back next week before I can tell you what I learned.

(See how cheap that is?)

Filed Under: converse Tagged With:

Storytelling and Storyreading

November 19, 2008 By
  • tell :
    1. to relate in detail
  • read:
    1. to receive or take in the sense of
    2. to interpret the meaning or significance of

Thus storytelling is the relating in detail of a story, and storyreading is taking in the sense of a story and interpreting its meaning or significance.

I am a storyreader.

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Last Meta Post for a Long Time

November 14, 2008 By

As you can probably see, I’ve done some upgrades around here. Most of them were so I can see how it would look at domestic father (evenlake is Blanche to DF’s Baby Jane), but I ended up keeping a few of them. (evenlake gets a snazzy new logo out of the deal.)

I also did some long-overdue upgrades, things that you won’t necessarily notice, but make life better for me.

I’ve added a Contact form, so it’s easier to get in touch with me, if you feel the need.

Another new feature is the email subscription option. If you want to receive my posts via email, simply click on the “Email” option under Subscriptions, and you will be directed to Feedburner to enter your email address.

Finally, I am expanding my online empire presence. I’ve started to become a little more active at Twitter under the name evenlake, but am still just a rookie and don’t really know what the hell I’m doing. I am also experimenting with lifestreaming, though I prefer my name for it: netstreaming. I’m not really streaming my entire life, just my internet part of it. So if the idea of knowing what book I added to LibraryThing, or what I just listened to on iTunes really excites you, then head on over to evenlake.net to see just how vain I really am. (Seriously, though, I’m using it to learn a few things about website design and Yahoo pipes. It gets kind of messy somedays, as it is definitely in the experimental stage.)

Thanks for your patience, and I really hope this is the last of the test and meta posting for a very long time.

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Everything Is A Story, Redux

November 13, 2008 By

When I was in the corporate world, my personal bête noire was PowerPoint. It is a massive timesink, and its potential to cause great boredom is limitless. 99% of all presentations I’ve seen, and I’ve seen a lot, were simply bulleted versions of what the speaker was saying. But, oh the time said speaker spent noodling that deck, deciding on diamonds versus dots, or bold versus italic. Inevitably, there would be printouts of the deck for everyone, which always made me wonder why they didn’t just email me the printout, then use the presentation time to just answer questions about the deck, rather than walking everyone through it. Instead we are given the same information three times in three formats.

During one major project, I made my opinion of PowerPoint so well-known that whenever someone started up a presentation, all eyes turned to me. When we went to a major software vendor’s Silicone Valley headquarters, and they showed us their software as static PowerPoint slides, I started to ask if we were going to be able to see the actual software. My CFO held me back, and laid into them far worse than I would have ever done.

After I started consulting, I had to work with sales reps directly, and few people love PowerPoint as much as salespeople (except for maybe consultants). I watched one salesman take two weeks to build a deck, then panic when the client asked him a question in the middle of the presentation. He broke out into a sweat, and forgot how to advance the slide. Another salesman had a deck that was so out-dated that prospects would point out errors in it during presentations, yet he continued to use it for the few remaining months I worked with him. I once had a project manager who used the same deck for years, but still read aloud directly from his notes in order to avoid going off script and messing up the whole presentation.

All of these problems are based in one basic emotion: fear. If PowerPoint is good for one thing, it is being a mask. Most presentations are given in darkened rooms, and people in the audience are watching the screen rather than the person speaking. It takes the focus off the speaker and re-directs it at something else. It is a classic magician’s trick, usually done so the viewer will not notice the performer pulling something out of a sleeve. But with PowerPoint, it is done so the viewer will not notice the wet spots under the arms, or the flop sweat on the speaker’s upper lip. PowerPoint is a crutch for bad public speakers.

The problem is that most companies think it makes people better public speakers.

I was frequently asked, when I expressed my opinion about PowerPoint, what I would do instead. My answer was always the same: uninstall it from every machine, and give everyone a copy of Henning Nelms’ Magic and Showmanship . I have owned at least three copies of this book, and have given them all away to friends and colleagues. Though its main focus is on teaching would-be magicians how to create a compelling stage presence, it is invaluable for anyone who wants to create a story to present to an audience.

Inevitably, these people would then ask me, what does that have to do with PowerPoint and presentations? My answer, again, was always the same: Everything is a story.

From the formation of the Himalayas to the pile of leaves on your front stoop, from the history of humanity to the sparrow chirping on your windowsill, all of these things have stories, are stories. Whether or not the story is interesting is in the presentation. Though I have seen PowerPoint used in a compelling way once or twice, it is not something that makes anyone’s presentations better. It is simply a tool. Only by understanding what we want to do can we do it well. Put me in the New Yankee Workshop with a pile of lumber, and I’ll build a pretty crappy bookshelf. Teach me carpentry, and with some simple tools and that same pile of lumber, I’ll build a better one.

Give a consultant a laptop and a script, and PowerPoint quickly becomes PowerNap. Give an accountant some basic storytelling skills and an awareness of narrative, and a budget variance report can be, well, not uninteresting.

What the hell does this have to do with anything? Did this suddenly become a corporate blog? Hardly. Everything is a story. Understanding the basic tools and techniques of storytelling allows one to extract meaning from the profound or the mundane, from the Big Bang or the balance sheet

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What Is My Obsession?

November 3, 2008 By

“Find your obsession.”

Tough words, from Merlin Mann. Tough for me anyway.

I have never been one to obsess about any one thing for very long. This world is far too interesting and life is far too short to devote myself to one tiny sliver of a sliver of it. I learn about one thing, and after it increases my knowledge of the world, I usually move on to another subject.

Many other people do the same thing, and, when I started this blog, I thought this was its topic: learning about learning. But that really doesn’t interest me. I don’t really care how I learn, except for how I might do it better or faster. Instead, I launched it as a story about learning, how learning about the world can change someone. That, I realized, was the arc of my blog.

Though I had an arc, I still didn’t have the topic, the obsession. What about those subjects I consistently spend time with, those things that are a regular part of my life? Reading and writing have been constants; I’ve been doing both as long as I can remember. I started birding 10 years ago and I still make it out into the bush several times a year. In the past 18 months, critical thinking (the subject of my other site) has become a more prominent part of my life. But I would call none of these obsessions. They are tools to help me understand the other subjects.

What, then, did all of the items on my list have in common? Why would I have selected those things, why were they important? When I made the list, and when I have subsequently amended it, I thought the items on it would enable me to understand what it was to be human at the beginning of the 21st century. But, I knew there was more to it, an undercurrent beneath all of the items, something I couldn’t quite see.

In order to find it, I had to find the obsession. To do that, I asked, “What is my weakness? What do I find it difficult to stop doing?”

Until a few years ago, I finished every book I read, and never walked out of a movie or changed the channel before the end of the TV show. Though I have started edging away from this compulsion, I can count on one hand the total number of books I’ve left unfinished and movies I’ve walked out of.

This was my weakness: I have to finish a story.

I looked back over the list, and I saw it. Every item was about story. Either a story of my own life, or a tool to help me see a bigger story.

Shit.

I was left with a personal blog about story and narrative. Like thousands of other blogs.

I looked again, and realized there was something more, though. All of the items were pieces of a big picture. They are an attempt to uncover the story of being human, a mini-story trying to find the truth of the mega-story.

I’m left with being one infinitesimal story about trying to understand The Story.

The Story is my obsession.

Filed Under: converse Tagged With: ,

So Much for Windows

October 27, 2008 By

During this change, I decided that I would re-focus my other site, meaning I would ignore all of the expert advice: it would still be user-friendly, but my focus would be on writing, not traffic. No lists, no emphasis on social media, and no linking to the same thing everyone else is. It’s working out well; I’m receiving more positive feedback and am enjoying doing it.

At the same time, I decided to make this blog the anti-blog. I turned off comments, I use tags that only make sense to me, my categories are kind of confusing, and I am not in any way focused into an identifiable niche.

And, I have gone back on my word. I wrote early on in this blog that I was going to be an All-Windows or All-Google guy. I felt that Microsoft took other peoples great ideas, made them less great, but also made them cheaper and easier to use. Then I got a Vista machine.

Vista is as annoying as everyone says it is. I get random re-boots, unpredictable screen savers, and very little backwards compatibility. The day before CJ was born, Sally bought me a new MacBook as a poke present and I haven’t looked back. I switched my hosting from Windows to Linux, installed WordPress and have never been happier with my whole computer situation.

The difference is simple: My Mac is stable, and established Linux programs are well-supported and inexpensive. These were things I tried to debunk in my earlier post, but I didn’t even convince myself.

After comfortably breaking every rule for this blog, I could not have been happier. If it meant I was the only one who ever read it, that’s fine. The only thing left to do was to discover my obsession.

Filed Under: meta Tagged With:

Different Strategy

October 22, 2008 By

Merlin Mann has several sites, but he is most well-known for 43Folders, a blog about personal productivity. The subject is something I actually find a little loathsome, only because I know people who are into this sort of thing and they spend more time refining their “system” than actually accomplishing anything. (This is a common problem, acknowledged by most productivity gurus.)

Earlier this year, I stumbled across his site accidentally, while looking for an index card wallet. (I have used 3×5 cards for note taking since high-school, and was looking for a different way to carry them.) Mann is the creator, or at least coiner, of the Hipster PDA, a stack of 3×5 cards held together with a binder clip.

Though I decided against the binder clip, I continued reading his site. When I found him, he seemed to be going through a transitional period. Fewer of his posts were about productivity, and he started to write more freely outside of this niche. I liked it enough to add him to my Feed Reader.

Then, at about the same time I was having reservations about blogging, he took a radically different approach. On his personal blog, he posted something titled simply, better.

Politics, celebrity gossip, business headlines, tech punditry, odd news, and user-generated content.

These are the chew toys that have made me sad and tired and cynical.

It is his polemic against the state of blogging. He is tired of first-draft opinions and an infinitude of links to the same old things. He wants things to change, and he’s starting with himself. Writing of his own endeavors, he says,

All I know right now is that I want to do all of it better. Everything better. Better, better.

Shockingly, he then began to smelt the golden calf: he changed the focus of his website, a website that was a large portion of his family’s income. In a retrospective post titled 4 Years he admits his role in creating a web that he dislikes.

By 2007, an increasingly large number of mornings would find me staring, dead-eyed, at del.icio.us or Digg or reddit, feeling queasy as I wondered what possible role, how ever small, my stupid blog might have had in helping inspire 1,000 hucksters to try their hand at half-assing a living from pretending to help strangers — while providing their quarry an unapologetically infinite source of pointless procrastination in the bargain.

He talks about the change he wants in his post Gears Shifting,

…if you share my feeling that real “productivity” means a lot more than index cards, lists of links, and endless, free bus rides for bored tourists, I think you’ll enjoy and benefit from the change.

And, finally, he sums it all up, in Time, Attention, and Creative Work:

I’m done with “productivity” as a personal fetish or hobby. There are countless sites that are all too happy to vend stroke material for your joyless addiction to puns about procrastination and systems for generating more taxonomically satisfying meta-work….

This is now a site for people who want to finish things that they care about — but who still occasionally need help, inspiration, and the courage to push all the bullshit off their work table. This is about clearing that space every day, and then using it to do cool stuff that makes you proud….

I want you to visit here, get what you need, then get the hell back to work.

Now I was listening. A blogger who was actually telling me to leave his site? On his personal blog, he posted a talk he did at some blogger conference, called How to Blog. Where all of those other how-to experts tell you how to do the easiest things, Mann addressed the hardest part: writing something worth reading. He writes

Here’s everything I know about blogging in one slide: Find your obsession. Every day, explain it to one person you respect. Edit everything, skip shortcuts, and try not to be a dick. Get better.

Everything else is unimportant or easily learned.

After reading this, I realized evenlake needed to change. I turned off comments, stopped caring about traffic, and resolved to post more often. And I started to define my obsession. That was the difficult part.

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