Monday Mar 19th, 2007: Issue #782
I was talking to a friend over the weekend and he asked me how and when I got interested in writing.
My first thought was that I’ve always been interested and loved writing from my school days. But that’s not really true.
Like many people I left school, went into business and could only associate writing with exams - and that was enough to put me off in a big way! As soon as I started working for a living, writing was consigned to the ‘childhood’ compartment of my mind. It was no longer cool (or whatever term we used back then).
It might well have stayed there if it hadn’t been for a combination of a kind of word blindness and my natural curiosity.
My ‘business’ was in advertising agencies - places where every little action you take has to be documented into reports that are as thick as telephone directories that clients expect as a demonstration that they are getting their money’s worth. Reports that were never meant to be read, only to impress.
At first I was far too green to be allowed to write reports. That was a skill I had yet to learn. But I did have to read a lot of them.
Or, I should say, tried to read.
You see, my brain couldn’t understand the peculiarly formal business English that professional reports were invariably written in. I could read every single word of a report and absorb absolutely nothing. The harder I concentrated, the less I could take in. They might as well have been written in Russian for all I could understand them.
Reports that my colleagues could pick up, scan, and then stand up and do a presentation on, would take me five or six readings before I’d even start to get a glimmer of what the author was trying to convey.
I actually got quite a complex about it and went to extraordinary lengths to avoid having to read reports and documents. I worried that I might be dyslexic. (Although I avidly read anything and everything else).
Eventually, the dreaded day came when I had to write a report of my own. My boss gave me a great tip: “It doesn’t matter if it’s all b*ll*cks, just make sure it’s thick. The client will never read it anyway.”
But just as I had enormous difficulty in reading ‘business English’ I found that writing it was completely alien to me. I knew WHAT I had to write, but every instinct I possessed forced me to ditch the clawing formality and to write more like I would talk.
Needless to say, that didn’t go down very well with ‘the management’.
Over the years I had to learn to write in the acceptable style, but in my heart, I always questioned why language was being deliberately used to hide the facts rather than clearly communicate them.
So it was out of an immense frustration that I started writing for my own pleasure - and a curiosity about why it seems to be that the more supposedly intelligent people are, the more they like their reading to be challenging.
Perhaps I’m just not intelligent enough, or perhaps I just don’t like to waste my time writing b*ll*cks! 
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I really should start a webpage for Kickstart’s most frequently asked questions. The top entry would be ‘Who do you use for hosting and can you recommend them?’
Web hosting is one of those issues that everyone who is in the Internet marketing business is desperately interested in. Good hosting is essentially invisible to you. You don’t want to have to think about it, or become a technical geek to use it. You just need your host to provide a great service, at a good price with an interface that you can understand.
I have hosting accounts all over the place. Here is a short list:
GoDaddy. Yes, I have some domains hosted with Godaddy. At $3.95 per month per domain, they are not the cheapest option, but they are generally reliable and easy to use. Recommended for people who only have one or two domains to host.
Host4Profit and Thirdsphere. These hosting companies cost quite a lot more - around $25 per month - but offer a lot of extras that make that figure worth it for people who are looking for a one-stop solution. They are really only intended for single domains (although both offer the ability to add extra domains to your account for a small extra fee).
When you start to develop a bigger stable of domains and websites, you need to explore the world of reseller hosting. A reseller account is a special type of hosting plan that allows you to put as many domains as you like (subject to the space you have available) into one account. They were originally devised so that anyone could ‘resell’ hosting to their friends and clients and effectively become web hosts themselves.
But these days, most reseller accounts are used by one person to house all of their domains.
For a long time I have used a company called ResellerEdge, and have about 40 domains hosted in one account that costs me about $35 per month. So it works out to under a dollar a domain. Not bad at all!
Lately though, I’ve found that ResellerEdge’s servers have been running very slowly - that doesn’t affect people who visit my sites, but it does make administering them very time consuming.
So I looked around for another company that offered a reseller account for a reasonable monthly fee and, importantly for me, had a control panel that I find intuitive and is well featured.
I ended up with HostGator.
HostGator give me more memory space and bandwidth for a lot less money - under $25 per month. They even gave me a discounted rate for the first month!
The admin is via CPanel (the easiest admin panel to use, in my opinion) and is extremely fast.
I’m slowly transferring many of my domains to HostGator and am putting all new websites that I build with them. I wish I’d done so a long time ago!
http://www.urlnex.us/hostgator/
Check them out for yourself - they are now my #1 recommendation.
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A quick movie report.
Her royal wifeness and I took ourselves to see the new movie ‘Premonition’ with Sandra Bullock and the plastic-looking chap out of Nip and Tuck.
I wish I’d had a premonition and stayed at home.
Normally, I like Sandra Bullock but this movie did nothing for me except cause cramp in my buttocks. It isn’t a long film - it just felt like it.
If you happen to enjoy really slow movies that have little in the way of suspense, marginal (at best) characterization, predictable and miserable endings and that can only be described as a waste of the ticket money, then rush along. It will be right up your street.
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We started the long job of redecorating the downstairs of our house this weekend. It is hard to believe that we have lived here for over four years now and that all the hard work we put into decorating back then has now got to be re-done.
There is a saying here in the UK that it is like painting the Forth Road Bridge. What that means is that the bridge is so big, and painting it takes so long that by the time you get to the end, the beginning needs doing again.
Oh well, I suppose we’ve got another couple of months with paint ingrained under our fingernails to look forward to.
You may ask why I don’t outsource it. After all, we have several great decorators that we can call upon, and none of them are particularly expensive.
That would be the logical answer, but the truth is that I quite enjoy decorating and get a real sense of satisfaction out of looking at a finished room and being able to think ‘I did that!’
Mind you, if the aches and pains that I’m suffering today don’t ease up soon, I might well still take the easy way out!
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Some ’statistics’ that are touted as facts are just plain silly.
I was reading a book of useless information (looking for an interesting trivia item for today’s Kickstart) when I came across this:
‘The odds against you hitting two holes-in-one in a single game of golf are 8-million to one.’
Hmmm.
The odds of me even hitting a golf ball is probably higher than that! The only time I ever tried the game I managed to get round in 66 strokes. After 3 holes they asked me to walk the rest.
So the statistic is meaningless.
Perhaps it could be rephrased as ‘The odds against anyone capable of hitting one hole-in-one in a game of golf managing to hit a second in the same game are 8-million to one.’
But that somehow lacks the same news-bite impact.
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An Inspirational Thought
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Anyway (By Kent M. Keith).
People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self- centered; Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives; Be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies; Succeed anyway.
If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you; Be honest and frank anyway.
What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight; Build anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous; Be happy anyway.
The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow; Do good anyway.
Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough. Give the world the best you’ve got anyway.
You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and your God; It was never between you and them anyway.
Update: Since sending out today’s Kickstart, I’ve been contacted by several readers with details of the original author of ‘Anyway’. I’m now very happy to give all due credit to Kent M. Keith. You can read more about him here: http://www.bookpage.com/0205bp/kent_keith.html
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Don’t keep it to yourself - send them to
http://www.kickstartdaily.com today!
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The Quote of the Day
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Edward L. Curtis said,
“Optimism, unaccompanied by personal effort, is merely a state of mind and not fruitful.”
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Today’s Power Thought
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A very quick action point today, but given that it is Monday, a good one to start your week off with.
When you make your to-do list for this week (please say that you ARE going to make one!) add an extra column on the side.
This column is the one for other people to do.
One of the hardest success secrets to learn is that nobody gets there all on their own. The people at the top of the tree got there because they learned that some things are best done by them, and some things aren’t.
You ‘they-do’ column is where you put all the jobs that can and should be delegated. Don’t beat yourself up about it. If it can be efficiently passed on, do it without guilt.
By writing it down in your ‘they-do’ column you achieve two things: you make the act of delegation official in your mind, and you provide yourself with a reminder of who is now responsible, and when by. You are now not responsible for the doing, but you ARE responsible for checking that it is done, and done well.
A good delegator is not an abdicator. You are not simply moving things off of your desk for the sake of it. Your role should be to facilitate that the work gets done by the most efficient means.
Your ‘they-do’ list is a very powerful tool. Use it.
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Fascinating Facts
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Every continent in the world is wider in the north than in the south.