Pazzardous Material Vol 26

Pazzardous Material Vol 26  – the week’s posts on a single page (most recent at the bottom):
 

Papua New Guinea

A phrase I’ve come across online is ‘location independence’.

It means being able to work anywhere you want to, whether that’s Pinner, Poplar or Papua New Guinea. As long as you’ve got an internet connection and a laptop or even just a smartphone, you’re in business.

It’s one reason why internet marketing has intrigued me so much since 2006.

It’s a new industry enabled by a modern way of working that’s becoming increasingly attractive for growing numbers of people around the world.

Sadly, though, schools don’t teach kids how to become location independent when they’re older, which is partly why I want to share my knowledge. If just one person, young or old, is able to start a business for themselves or promote their work or share their hobby because of knowledge I’ve gained and stories I can tell, I’ll be delighted.

What I know isn’t definitive by any means, despite all my just-in-case learning. And because things change so quickly online, what I have to share might not even be the most up-to-date.

But I might be able to help you or someone close to you, especially if you or they…

  • Want to start a new career as a freelancer
  • Are looking for a job and want to try different methods to achieve better results
  • Want to build an audience online for your work (I’m very much at the start of building mine – even after all these years – so you can learn from my mistakes)
  • Are interested in how people make money online so you or your kids can too

My audience is small but through fortune and hard work I am able to work where I choose, and for that I’ve very grateful.

 

Come Together

Collaboration is easier and cheaper than ever before.

Building a business with colleagues based in Scotland, hundreds of miles from where I live, is easy with WhatsApp, email and a spreadsheet or two.

When self-publishing, an editor in Brisbane, a designer in Cornwall and an expert formatter in Lancashire help to make my books available to the world.

For one-off tasks I can go to Fiverr.com and hire someone who could be anywhere on the planet. And I can ask for the contributions of people in any industry – who I’ve never met – to help me produce content.

No matter what you’re creating, working with others is the way forward.

 

Human Behaviour

Worldviews are complicated and vary as much as people themselves.

They determine why we do the things we do, and can be based on the philosophies, beliefs, emotions, understanding, intentions, morals, knowledge or values (or a combination of these) of a person, business, authority or group.

And they matter in the context of the internet:

  • Why do you get spam or phishing emails? Because the sender has a worldview made up of particular morals and intentions that deem it acceptable to mislead and defraud people
  • Why might the big social media companies allow material to stay on their platforms when authorities plea for them to take it down? Possibly because those companies profit from their users’ attention. Their worldview, it could be argued, attaches a greater importance to profit than what others see as ‘the right thing to do’
  • Why might governments want their citizens to hear some voices and opinions more than others?
  • Why do I share what I know about the internet and running a small business and self-publishing?
  • Why is Wikipedia free?
  • Why might Amazon’s customer service be better than Google’s?

We – people businesses, authorities and groups – do the things we do because of how we see the world, and what we want from it or to do with it.

 

Misery Business

As I wrote yesterday, worldviews motivate our actions. Social media companies’ actions are driven by profit – like any other business’s – and that means they want our attention (to sell to their advertisers).

Lots of attention = lots of profit.

The live-streaming of some of the recent attack in New Zealand led to an attention free-for-all, as people raced to share the content.

Blocking it isn’t easy (“harder than taking down copyrighted movies” I read recently), even for those companies who’d like to when their thirst for attention might actually be eclipsed by their need to ‘do the right thing’:

But the problem has been exacerbated by ‘legacy’ or ’traditional’ media companies who couldn’t resist trying to nab some of the attention that was up for grabs:


 

Refuse to be Denied

I’m listening to an audiobook at the moment called The Artist’s Journey by Steven Pressfield.

Pressfield’s famous for talking about what he calls resistance: the thinking that conspires to stop us from producing creative work and sharing it with the world.

He first talked about it in his book The War of Art and it’s something I touched on in Mr Lizard. He’s an excerpt from my book (written for younger teenagers) that helps define resistance, which I think is helpful when trying to build a business or produce creative work you’re proud of and then share it:

It’s that feeling you have when you are trying to get somewhere or achieve something and you’re doing great but then you walk smack bang into a mental barrier.
 
It might be a little voice in your head telling you that you are no good, or that what you are doing is pointless or too hard.
 
Or it might be a gut feeling that seems so strong that it could physically stop you in your tracks.
 
There is a reason for this little voice, and it’s a good one.
 
A lot of the time, we don’t think as human beings. A lot of the time, we think like an animal thinks in the jungle.
 
And all that animal wants to do is survive, eat and make little animals.
 
When that animal is faced with something new or something which is clearly a problem for it, it often does one of two things. It often either fights or takes flight.
 
In other words, the animal tackles the threat it feels or it runs away.
 
We have that way of thinking, and the human way of thinking, and they confuse us all and can sometimes even cause us to have arguments with the people around us.
 
As you get older, mental barriers can stop you from being creative or inventive because being creative and putting what we’ve made out into the public leaves us with a feeling of vulnerability.
 
We have no idea how the thing we’ve made is going to go down with people.
 
That little animal’s voice inside our head wants us to stay safe. The older we get, the more it seems to want us to keep our creativity to ourselves so that other people don’t laugh at us or think we’re ridiculous or our boss doesn’t fire us.
 
This is pretty normal and happens to everyone but if you train your brain to keep thinking things through, then you might just open yourself up to a world of discovery and learning.
 
In a society where we are taught to think and behave like everyone else, this kind of creative freedom can take a lot of courage, strength and insight.

 

French Kiss

Learning a new language doesn’t come easily to me, especially at 47. It might have been slightly less painful when I was a teenager and learning about La Rochelle and how to ask the way to beach in French.

Last year, I thought I’d have a stab at learning a bit of Spanish.

I turned to a couple of apps and a YouTube video that had been watched a million times. That must be good, I figured.

While my Spanish remains no better than Manuel’s English, there was a suggestion in that video that changed my thinking on language-learning:

Aim for communication rather than perfection.

That resonated with me partly because I was keen to learn Spanish and partly because it’s also a great way to deal with resistance, which I wrote about yesterday. Done is indeed better than perfect.

 

Paranoimia

I lie in bed some nights and the very last thing I do before I go to sleep feels wrong, wasteful and shameful.

I’m on Instagram or, more likely, Twitter, just catching up on the last word on the day, grabbing hold of one, two or twenty more opinions before I switch off and slide into the land of nod.

Why don’t I read the book that’s right there, beside me, waiting to be read? The book that’s been on my ‘to read’ list for months.

Fomo. Probably. A fear of missing out.

Eventually, I make Twitter disappear, hurriedly turn off wifi and switch on flight mode with a single tap while feeling grubby, knowing that I’ve just fed my mind some shit just when it’s got hours and hours to process it.

Why didn’t I feed it something useful to work with overnight?

Because social media is brilliantly effective, which is sometimes unfortunate.

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