Fall In Love With Writing (Again)

This is not my normal ‘type’ of post.  It’s not really a review either.  It is more of an ‘homage’ to good design and hard work.  Read on.

About two years ago I put a tiny bit of funding into a Kickstarter project being developed by John Saddington.  (By the way, if you want a textbook on how to run a Kickstarter study the blog posts on that Kickstarter link I just shared).  Pressgram was John’s attempt to allow users to tell beautiful stories through photography, but without having to give up any rights or confer any third-party ownership.  It was a gorgeous app, but to be fair, it was an ambitious project that was always going to have a hard time against the big boys in the room.  Pressgram has now closed down, but I have the t-shirt to prove I was there.

Desk, a publishing app for OS X is what has occupied John’s time since the last project (aside from Ironyard, speaking engagements, family, etc.).  3,146 hours to be exact, over the past year.

The result?  Simplicity.  Elegance.  Beauty.  Technical accomplishment (full formatting, HTML / Markdown / media capability baked in).  Desk is a product that will encourage you to start blogging, or, perhaps, get you to start writing again.

Moments

Did you make it past my last post on the Chromebook? Not my best blogging moment at all, but I wrote it because of a conversation over Christmas, and it resulted in a great conversation this past weekend. Read on.

Sunrise Moment

It’s no secret that I have struggled with my writing lately. Lately being, oh, the last several months. I had a weekly goal to publish my ‘musings’ and I started to slip. A skipped week easily becomes months of no posts.

Over Christmas I was at a party with good friends. Kids dashed everywhere, friends who had not seen each other in a long while caught up with each other. It was a perfectly lovely evening. As I wandered about I started chatting with a lawyer friend. Well, in reality he started chatting with me.

Why don’t you write your blog anymore?” I really did not know what to say, eventually stammered out something like, “You know about my blog?” My friend said that, yes, he was a subscriber, that he liked my take on things, my writing ‘voice’, and that he had noticed that it had been a while since I had written a post. I was floored. I had no idea that some of what I said here had an impact in a positive or thought-provoking way with anyone, and certainly if it did I never thought it important enough that it would be noticed if I stopped a while. I left inspired to write.

Am I A Writer?

Today I felt that I was an imposter.  I attended my first writers group meeting.  There.  I said it.  It feels good letting the world know I faked my way into this group of people who did not know me and assumed I was, like them, a writer.  Did I make it through the hour without being found out?  Read on.

bigstock-Vintage-typewriter-with-Once-u-49849949

CayWriters, according to their Facebook page, is a community of writers who live in the Cayman Islands and offer support and encouragement to each other, share resources, and provide feedback. I have tried to get to a meeting for months but travel or other events kept getting in the way.  Today was my first opportunity to sneak into this group who really are actually writing.  My plan was to sit in the back.  Observe. Listen.

Dammit!

Know When to Switch Off

I try to write about topics related to leadership and productivity. Normally this means that I end up banging out posts before or after work, and on weekends. I call it ‘captured time‘. I enjoy the process, but I never stopped to think that sometimes what I enjoy may be considered and encroachment into the total switch off time of others. This realization came to me while driving with my daughter to go spend some daddy-daughter time by the fountain at Camana Bay. Read on.

Taylor

We had an hour to kill waiting to pick up my son, Ryan, from an activity so Taylor and I decided to go and chill for a bit and watch the kids play in the fountain. As we drove there together my normal Sunday blogging ideas (or lack thereof) started to invade my mind. What was I going to write about? How was I ever going to find the time, what with this non-productive visit to the park and all?

Post Roundup (My 10 Platform Recaps In One Fun Post)

During the Platform Conference in Franklin, TN, I took a crazy amount of notes. In the two weeks after the conference I posted recaps of all the presentations. Looking back on it, they are a bit hard to find so this, for your convenience, is a roundup of the 10 posts in my epic recap series. As I noted in one of the first recaps, this information in no way replaces the experience of actually being there. Please, if any of this information resonates with you, go ahead and make the commitment to attend the next Platform Conference or find out where any of these presenters are speaking and make it your mission to get there and interact with them. They are all delightful, caring, generous people who succeed because they genuinely want you to succeed.

All presenters have their websites and featured resources linked in their individual recap post. For ease of following them on Twitter I have linked each name below to their twitter feed.  Thus the first link is the twitter feed for the speaker, and the second is to my blog post recapping that speaker.  Enjoy, and please take a moment to comment here on this roundup post or directly in any of the individual posts that may have spoken to you.