What’s a quality blog without bestowing some lessons about life and the pursuit of happiness on you? Exactly. So here are four blog posts with a total of 46 lessons and things to enrich your life.

Day 200: 5 Lessons from the part-time writer by Harmony Hasbrook on 100 Days or More

Read this because: You love writing and think that it wouldn’t be too bad to do on a daily basis. Except that passion always changes another shade when it goes from the “passion” bucket into “work,” unless you make a conscious effort to make sure that it never loses its appeal.

How to Live Vicariously through Yourself by Steve Kamb on Nerd Fitness

Read this because: Someone that you used to know did some amazing, ballsy thing that you never expected them to or went somewhere awesome and it completely changed their life for the better.  And every time you think about what they did you think, “I wish I could do that!”

You can.

I really like Steve’s approach to live vicariously through yourself as a way to stop wishing that you could do something and start doing it. Going to try this one out myself.

25 Years of Havoc Making and 25 Revelations or Things I Wish I Did Differently – A Quarter Life Crisis in Review by Alexandar Heyne on Milk the Pigeon

Read this because: Everyone is or has been in that weird 20-something phase of trying to figure out what the heck we’re doing on Earth and how we’re going to make the most of our lives. One of my favorite bloggers, Alexander, just turned 25 and has shared a list of 25-things he wished he knew before this birthday. Unfortunately you can’t help not knowing what you don’t know, but according to this list, he’s got big plans for how he’s going to use this knowledge now, and you can too.

15 More Things You Should Do Before You Turn 30 by Ryan O’Connell on Thought Catalog

Read this because: You’ve just turned 25 and there’s a whole lot more mischief you can create before you turn 30.

What did you read this week?

Photo Credit: inju

Two years ago I was a wannabe blogger. The kind who want a blog so desperately that it paralyzed me from picking out a theme and sitting down to do the hard work – writing. So with the help of my husband, I slapped a landing page on my domain with a gorgeous (and accurate) ticker. I set an arbitrary date for launch, and I watched the months, weeks, days, and hours disappear.

Then, hours before I was supposed to launch, I did what most people do when they’re faced with a deadline – I freaked out. Lucky for me, John was still there to hold my hand. He helped me decide on a theme that would work, add a little branding, and got it live. Then he went to bed, while I stayed up to write my first post.

The date was a Sunday, February 14th, 2010, and I didn’t crawl into bed until 6am the following morning.

But I wrote, edited, and published my first post. My blog went live, and I tweeted, and then caught up on my sleep.

When I woke up, my life changed.

There were tweets, comments, and mentions galore. I remember going over to a friend’s house for dinner on that evening and checking the most comments for the first time – there were fifteen.

Oh. My. God. People were actually reading my brand new blog.

And they liked what I had to say.

My legs went weak. I felt like I was going to throw up.

But I didn’t.

Instead I calmed down and replied to those tweets and those comments. I thanked my new readers – people who heard my excitement about launching a blog in the past and were thrilled that lamiki.com was finally live.

I became a blogger.

Over the course of the past two years, I have thought, I have written, and I have published. Through this blog I have met people, landed some amazing jobs, and built some deep relationships. Blogging, and this identity that is “lamiki” has helped me open doors that I never knew existed before.

lamiki is an acronym that stands for my full name, and out of that I have found an identity, a brand, that is 100% me. (more…)

In college, my screenwriting professor said that down in LA, every other person has a screen play in their back pocket. In these days of the hipster generation, I’d say that every other person has a startup, a side-project, or even a business that they’re working on in their spare time. And in tech communities like Seattle, I’d say that’s every person.

Ideas are everywhere. And the Internet makes it so easy to turn a ‘hobby’ into a business.

Are you a habitual side project starter?

You are full of ideas. You look at the world and problems that need fixing. And you know exactly how to do it.

You think up new projects and jump on them.  When you start, it’s like you’ve caught a fever — you brainstorm, purchase the domain name, snag the Twitter handle, and tell everyone you know about what you’re working on. You can’t be stopped.

But then it happens again. You get a new idea and it’s better than the one before.  You place your current project on hold or abandon it entirely.

The cycle repeats itself.

Question, are you jumping from project to project, because:

1. You haven’t found that ‘one’ project that you really, really, really want to focus on?
2. You believe that you can work on every single project at the same time (or switch as you follow your folly)?
3. You don’t have the confidence that any of your ideas are ‘good enough’ to succeed?

Stop juggling side projects. Commit.

Projects, like goals, are most successful when you focus on one or two at a time. That way you can make an honest, full-blown effort at seeing one of those ideas through before choosing to go all the way or jump ship.

You need to specialize and focus on one project at a time. It’s why top companies focus their entire business on one thing, either having the best price, the best quality product, or the best service than anyone else in their industry. It’s why Zappos is known for great customer service, Southwest Airlines for price, and Apple for product (though the fan boys do help).

If you juggle too many projects at one time, you’re bound to drop one or keep them in the air at half mast. And multitasking may be bad for your brain.

If you’re constantly starting new projects, stop. Pick one and start working on it. Follow your curiosity and see where it goes. It might be everything you hoped it would be or it might be an utter failure. If it’s the latter, then scrap it and move on to the next one.

You may be surprised by what happens when you focus.

Photo credit: ryantron.

There are two kinds of end of the year/New Year blog posts to write. The first is a reflection of the previous year – everything you did, everything you didn’t, what you’re proud of, and what you’re not. And the second is a laundry list of “do’s” and “don’ts” for how to make the next year rock much harder than the last.

And then there’s a third, which doesn’t reveal anything about the writer but gives you, the reader, a map of how you can stick to your resolutions for the first time ever.

Why New Year’s Resolutions Don’t Work Out

New Year’s Resolutions are like plans – you write them for how you’re feeling (usually fat) at that time (post-holidays) for the future (that has yet to be written) – and they never work out. They look great on paper, but horrible in execution because they all lack one thing – foresight and the understanding that you have to sacrifice something to accomplish what you need (and the ability to adjust to continue the momentum).

Instead of resolutions or plans, I make goals. I did this unknowingly as I entered 2010 and consciously as I entered 2011. I met the three goals I set in 2010 but not all of the goals I set for myself in 2011. While all of this past year’s goals looked great in December 2010, by mid-2011, an imbalance between work and life happened and parts of those goals were prioritized while others were not. Plus I set too many goals.

I don’t feel like 2011 was a failure, but just plain weird. In the Christmas letter John and I sent to our family, I summarized the year as one of “change,” and by God, if that isn’t true.

2011 started with a lot of oomph, passion, and excitement as things were set in place that I had been working hard towards achieving in the previous year and a half. But I got burnt out early, outgrew that opportunity faster than I imagined, and a new opportunity revealed itself and I jumped on it. If 2011 was a shape it would look like a giant “U” with a big, deep dip in the middle.

A New Template for Plotting World Domination in 2012

Earlier this week, my husband and I spent the evening working through Benny Hsu of Get Busy Living’s 2011 Year in Review Worksheet. What I like about his template is it focuses on how the previous year ended so you can reflect on what you’re proud of, what you accomplished, what you learned, what didn’t work, and where you’d like to see yourself in the future.

Benny’s worksheet helps you see where you want to go by reviewing where you came. It’s similar to racing a car – they say that you should look at where you want the car to go, not at the wall that you don’t want to run into.

Goals, plans, and strategies are the same way – look at where you want to go, not where you don’t want to go. (more…)

There’s a cat on my desk and she’s growling at the cat on my floor that is sniffing around and has been worried about her all day. He, the cat on the floor, is about to be attacked by the cat on my desk.

I am in the middle of the battlefield trying to write my third-to-last blog post for National Blog Posting Month and I am dangerously close to turning this blog into a diary.

Damnit.

It’s funny. Again, I’m staring at my content calendar that has been telling me to write a post about the etymology of certain words and I really don’t want to write it. I don’t want to write it because I don’t have my point of view on that post fully thought out. I don’t want to write it because I have another blog post to write that has a more time sensitive publication date that I am (apparently) way more interested in than the deadline of this post that is midnight o’clock.

Isn’t it funny how the thing we want to do is never the thing that we want to be doing?

And Minnie, the cat on my desk, just chased Vito, the cat who is not on my desk. She has chased him because he is in her space – the space formerly known of as my office.

I guess I should be thrilled by this attack. Not because she attacked the Vito but because she’s sick. In case you were wondering, the worst way to start off a post-holiday week is in the veterinary’s office; the same office that put down the first cat that you and your husband and you owned together in your adult life nine months prior. And you’re there, alone, with your new kitty who just this last weekend you convinced your husband that you would like to keep.

No wonder I felt really wonky day today.

Minnie’s an Alpha. She came to us after being abandoned by her previous owners who moved out and literally left her in the house, telling no one. Her human grandma found her. And John found Minnie through a friend-of-a-friend’s Facebook. He saw per big blue eyes and her Siamese mix face and he fell in love.

We didn’t even ask if she got along with other cats before we made the appointment to meet her. That’s when I knew that as soon as we saw her, she’d be ours.

Old Man, may he rest in peace, passed away in April. We still haven’t opened his box of ashes that are sitting on my shelf, three feet from this computer.

Losing a pet opens a wound that never closes.

Old Man left behind a brother, Vito, named after the Godfather but has the personality closer to a teddy bear, likes to cuddle. He’s not an Alpha, though after bringing Minnie into the house, I keep hoping that he will be. As I said, he’s a teddy bear. Non-territorial, likes to show you his belly, and has the largest big green eyes of innocence that I’ve ever seen.

And then there’s Minnie, who was five-and-a-half pounds of fury when we adopted her in June and I’m so Goddamned proud that she’s up to eight-and-a-half pounds today. Cats come to our house to get fattened up.

And Minnie is eating again while Vito watches her from a chair. Which means she has her appetite back. Which means we’ve made progress if she doesn’t get sick overnight.

Tomorrow the vet will call me with results from her blood work. If anything comes back positive, that means that something is really wrong. If it comes back negative than that means that we don’t know why she is sick, but just was.

As soon as Minnie decides she’s finished with her bland, wet food, Vito jumps in to lick her bowl clean, like every good brother should.

Why do we always need to search for the ‘why’?