Improving Skills to Overcome Impostor Syndrome – The Story of Rockstar Excel
How I was thrust into a situation where the only way to succeed was to greatly improve my skills.
And how I can share those skills with you at my new site, Rockstar Excel.
Blog Business
No Post This Week
No regular Friday post this week because I’m traveling. There will be a new post on Friday, September 18.
No Weight Loss Wednesday This Week
No Weight Loss Wednesday this week because I’m traveling. There will be a new WLW on September 16.
Happy Birthday to Self Helping Yourself
Today is the one year of Self Helping Yourself’s first real post, Ten Minutes a Day to Changing My Life.
The site’s gone through a lot of changes since then.
It was originally “Self-Improvement for Realists.” Then it changed to “A Skeptical Guide to Self-Help.” And finally, “Self-Improvement Made Easy.”
I’ve also redesigned the site quite a bit as I learned more about web design and SEO.
(And a huge thank you to April Marquet for her assistance with the design and functionality. Please consider her for your freelance front-end web development and design needs.)
The most interesting thing to me when I look back at that first article is that it explains the key theme of the site by the third paragraph:
For self-improvement to work, it has to be easy.
Even though I didn’t yet know that’s what the theme of the site was going to be.… Read more
How to Make Twitter Pleasant in 10 Minutes or Less
Announcement: I have a new eBook for sale:
How to Make Twitter Pleasant in Ten Minutes or Less
A guide to removing arguments, politics, and hate from your Twitter feed
Would you like to make Twitter pleasant?
Enjoy all the benefits of Twitter without any of the downsides?
That may seem like a pipe dream, but it’s actually easy to do.
This guide gives a simple 4 step process to taking control of your own Twitter experience.
Including:
- How to avoid politics, hate, and anger.
- How to handle accounts that post a mix of enjoyable and unpleasant content.
- How to avoid annoying retweets while still seeing the retweets you do want to read.
And all this can be done with less than ten minutes of effort on your part. The guide gives step-by-step instructions with screenshots on exactly what to do.
Guaranteed to dramatically improve your Twitter experience within two weeks, or your money back.… Read more
Five Boosts, and 24 Ways to Improve Your Life
Announcing the launch of the Five Boosts mailing list, featuring five weekly links to articles on easy ways to make your life better.
Sign up to receive a free copy of 24 Ways to Improve Your Life, with summaries of 24 of the top Self-Help books.
Announcing A New Site Focus
I’m excited to announce that I’ve changed the tagline of the site to “Self Improvement Made Easy.”
I’ve also added a new top-level essay called “Don’t Challenge Yourself!” I recommend reading it to explain the new focus of the site.
Clarifying Focus
Why did I make this change?
Self Helping Yourself previously had the tagline “Self Improvement For Skeptics.”
Whenever I told people about the site, I always had to clarify what this meant. I had a link from the top of the site to an 1,800 word essay explaining it.
The short definition is that my skeptical approach tries to find self-improvement methods that work by avoiding the mystical and the excessively difficult, and embracing the positive.
But that isn’t evident from the tagline. Maybe you could guess that I avoid the mystical. But nothing about “for skeptics” suggests that I favor a positive approach to self-improvement, or that I oppose suggestions that are unfeasibly difficult.… Read more
Tooting My Own Horn – And Why You Should Too
In general I try to avoid tooting my own horn. When I was younger, I was quite arrogant, and in many ways that made me an unlikable person. Eventually I grew out of that, and learned to not rank myself or other people.
But as someone who advocates positive-oriented self-improvement, I believe it’s important to celebrate successes.
Celebrating Our Achievements
It’s worth remembering for all of us that huge wins and achievements are special. Nobody likes a braggart who constantly goes on about how great he is. But big accomplishments don’t come along every day. That’s what makes them big accomplishments, and they are big deals.
You should be excited about them. If you don’t share that excitement with others, they either won’t think it’s important, or won’t know it happened at all. Then the excitement and joy you ought to be feeling over this epic win will be diminished and hollow.… Read more
Introducing Affiliate Links
At some point in my life, I’d like to make a living with my writing. That’s the dream.
I just took a first step toward trying to make some money from my blog, instead of it just being something I sink money into for hosting, software, services, etc. (Not to mention all the time I put into it.) I’ve posted Amazon Affiliate links on the List of Self Help Books page.
If you enjoy my articles, please consider clicking through those links as a way to support the site at no cost to you. Note that you don’t have to specifically buy any of the books I’ve linked to. If you click any of the links shortly before doing your regular Amazon shopping, I’ll still get paid.
I’m not expecting to make a living off this, but it would be nice to have a little bit of money coming in. And hey, I’ve already made a whopping 44 cent commission from myself, after I tested one of the links and later that day bought some ice cube trays.… Read more
Taking Feedback
Recently a friend of mine commented on Facebook that he thought my blog had too many pictures and wacky captions, and that it was becoming a distraction from the main articles. I asked other friends what they about this, and the general consensus seemed to be that most agreed with him. So I decided to cut back on the number of photos per post.
This was actually a relief to me, since I had been spending more time searching through stock photos and coming up with captions than actually writing the posts. I was glad to be able to reduce that time and focus on the core mission of the blog.
Shortly after, I saw this friend in person, and he was apologetic. This surprised me, until I realized that from his perspective, he had insulted his friend’s passion project. But from my perspective, he had done me a big favor by helping me improve something that was important to me.… Read more