The Earth completes its trek through space around the sun, we reset our calendar and then proclaim that we will undo all the wrongs of the previous year.

I would wager a guess that somewhere in the 95% range of new years resolutions fail.

It is kind of cool to have a scheduled date to reflect and reconsider ourselves, yes.

I argue that we should schedule that reflection everyday, not once annually.

For the sake of ritual, my new years resolution is to pick up the guitar more than 5 times in 2010.

After a couple years of procrastinating joining a jiu-jitsu school, I finally did a few months ago.

I’ve been going a couple times a week in between random injuries, the most painful of which was a bruised rib.

I wrestled for a decade and feel comfortable on a mat.

But, Brazilian jiu-jitsu is not wrestling.  That reality took me a few months to realize.

My parents snagged an item off my Amazon wishlist, “Jiu-Jitsu University” by Saulo Ribeiro.  It has about 2000+ photos and is organized in an interesting way that I am going to take to heart.

Essentially, Saulo’s idea is that a white belt’s goal is to learn to survive in all positions.  That is a concept that I really needed to hear.  I feel comfortable when we are drilling, but as soon as I get put in an unfamiliar position, I’m a fish out of water.

I dug into Saulo’s book and one rolling session later, I already know it has made me so much more aware in those out of position moments I frequently find myself in.

When rolling, I’m going to be the most frustrating, surviving bjj player I can be.  That’s the plan anyways.

The book has been eye opening to me.  There is a decade of learning material in one $25 book.

Thanks mom and dad.

Chalk another win up to the use of Amazon Wishlists.

When I first started this content creation marathon I talked about nagging friends and family that smoke until they quit.

I want to make it clear that I know quitting is ridiculously difficult.  I also know it’s impossible for someone to quit smoking for anyone other than their own desire to stop smoking and live a healthy life.

A couple weeks ago I watched Dr. G Medical Examiner – 5 Ways Not to Die, or something like that.  #1 was smoking related deaths, 440,000 annually.  It was like 1am in the morning and I felt compelled to call all my friends who smoke.

One of those people told me last night that they are going to quit.

I know saying it and doing it are two entirely different plateaus in the quitting process, but this particular smoker was one who has rejected the idea entirely.

I know I’ve been a bad influence on a lot of people at different points in my life.

Now I’m on a crusade to counter those negatives.

Thursday morning, I spoke with my brother, who had already made it home for christmas.  He said the day had started out hectic at our parents house:

• the roof was leaking from the 24+ hours of rain
• my dad had just spilled coffee
• our mom had just called.  she was upset and having issues with her car a few miles outside of town and needed someone to come help her.

I can only imagine the chaos, as I was headed to work 70 miles from their home.  I would be making the trek there later that evening.

30 minutes before I left work for the holidays, I get a message from a close friend.

Are you OK?

Please tell me I heard wrong?

Did your mom pass away?

My first reaction was, Ha, no way.  But, then my mind started creating the possibilities.

I responded with, “I hope not”.

I immediately pick up my phone and look for a signal.

I call my brother.

Ring… Ring… Ring… “The Verizon customer you are trying to reach has not setup a voicemail box”.

I’m holding my breath at this point.  Fighting off the urge to 100% panic.

My mind is racing through all the scenarios.  The last I knew was she was having car problems, parked on the side of the highway and upset, waiting on my dad to come help her.

Are my family members avoiding my calls until I’m physically present?

What did I last say to my mother?

Will I ever want to celebrate christmas again?

How could I possibly deal with this?

I call my sister.

Ring… ring… ring… “Hello”.

I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I was attempting to gauge her voice for any hint of sadness.  There was none.

I’m calmer, but have convinced myself maybe she doesn’t know yet, either.

I call my mom’s cell phone.

It rings and rings and… “Hi Tim”.

My imagination had nearly caused a stroke.  I’ve never been happier in my life from hearing a hello.

It took the rest of the day to recover from the anxiety that 10 minutes of confusion had created.

After informing my friend she was fine, I asked him:

Are you going to be in town for the holidays?

To which he responded:

Are you going to stab me?

I did get new kitchen shears for christmas.  Just saying.

I bought this domain a few years back with the idea of dissecting some basic groups of motivations and categorizing small blurbs of my thoughts into each of them.

It seemed to make for a very interesting, artistic reflection of my daily life after I had collected a few hundred posts.  But, I learned most motives aren’t so simple. They are all interconnected.

If I’m motivated by financial gain, is it really that extra buying power that is driving me to work harder to reach that goal?

Does that filter down to some greedy desire to be rich?

Or am I actually interested in something more genuine.

Each thought needs a lengthy, non-interesting back-story or they become open for interpretation and I’m too insecure to defend them all.

Christmas has always been a fun time for me.

I used to love getting presents and being surprised.  My parents have always gone way over the top to make their kids happy.

My dad has always said, “you can spend $10 on me, thats the limit”.

Mom would act thrilled to death if I drew her a stick figure on a napkin with a crayon.  She’d hurry off to find a frame, if I actually were to be so lame.

They’ve sacrificed a lot for us and sometimes I fail to show appreciation for it all.

Reciprocating the joy they’ve given me all of these years is my simple motive this Christmas and everyone after.

All families are crazy, show them love anyways.

Approximately 2 million views with 12,000+ comments.  Both of those figures are pretty amazing to me.

I’d suggest buying both of his albums. Ronald Jenkees (2007) and Disorganized Fun (2009).

Checkout his Youtube channel, too.

Beyonce is my dentist.

Don’t be jealous.

She’s undercover, but I know the truth.  She was singing, yesterday, while drilling into my teeth.

Right as she was stabbing my gums with a lidocaine injection, “Celebrate good times, come on…”, began playing on the radio.  I started to laugh and then the needle stole my attention.

The sound of a dental drill hurts my feelings.

Which comes to my first point.  Brush yo teeth.

For more advice on life, including wearing deodorant, buying property, etc., see the  “Read a book” music video (NSFW) from 2007.

Every word Seth Godin says is pure gold.

It’s ridiculous.

Here’s a few recent posts that amazed me for one reason or another.

First, organize 1,000

1,000 people willing to try a new restaurant you find for them gives you the ability to make an entrepreneur successful and change the landscape of your town.

What a great point.  Start here.  Plant a seed that grows in many directions.

He gives some grant examples of applying this concept, as well.

Fear of bad ideas

The problem is that you can’t have good ideas unless you’re willing to generate a lot of bad ones.

This is one of the most difficult concepts to impress on other people, especially in the web world.  Instead of making an attempt, gathering analytical data and revising, we’ve all been trapped in failed projects that were too inflexible from day one.

I truly believe failing quickly and re-evaluating is the best way to get something right.

Get a review copy of my new book

My US publisher is not sending free review copies to magazines (the few that are left), newspaper editors, TV shows, any of the usual media suspects. Instead, we’re allowing people like you to raise their hands and, if they like the book, asking them to tell the world about it in January.

They raised $100k in less than 24 hours asking for people to donate in exchange for reviewing his book.  That goes to show you the reach and influence this man has on the marketing world.  He preaches patience and building with value and he obviously follows his own guidelines.  55,000+ RSS feed subscribers on Google Reader.

Verdict.

Seth Godin is cooler than Oprah.

And he’s not a quitter either.

I don’t think I’ve applied for a position using Career Builder in the past 2 years, but occasionally I will get emails from them.

CareerBuilder.com Job Matches

Here’s the list:

• Lotus Notes Domino Developer
• Oracle DBA
• Oracle Applications DBA
• Systems Security Engineer
• Marketing Management Senior Manager
• Information Technology Services
• UI Designer & Web Developer
• Interactive Designer
• Sr. Oracle DBA

I guess any reference to database experience is going to trigger the flood of Oracle gigs.

If I ever called myself a “designer”, what I meant was, I’ll call my graphics designer and convert his work to html/css.  Sorry CB if I didn’t make that clear.

I’m just glad they didn’t waste a stamp sending me this list.

Their unsubscribe was easy enough.

I usually hate comments.  I purposely avoid them, especially on my local news’ networks website (KSDK).

Today, I read something that really compelled me to say something, but:

Commenting is off.

Let’s follow the hops.

I started out reading @CaseySoftware.

Which took me to Open Sourcing Google Page Rank Algorithm.

Where I clicked on  “…effect SEO practices actually have“.

In this article, the author reviewed the top ranking sites for 10 different keywords.  He noted that their HTML markup was awful and inconsistent with some SEO “rules”. Therefore, he concluded, that SEO does not determine a page’s rank, but rather serves as a tie-breaker between pages with the same rank.

Arg.

On-page factors account for a small percentage of a site’s search engine ranking.

I really wanted to post that in the comments, so that others who read his post wouldn’t buy this flawed experiment as the whole truth. But, he said “No commenting allowed”.

Comments can add a tremendous amount of value to your content.

For example, Brandon Savage posted about why there are no enterprise projects written in PHP.  He planned to fix that in 2010 by contributing a bug tracker, VC browser, etc.  In the comments, he was overwhelmed with people suggesting not to reinvent the wheel and to check out Arbitracker.

Without comments enabled, Brandon’s monologue is trivial to me. But, he started a conversation that introduced me to a potentially useful piece of software that I was unaware of until he boldly stated he was going save the world.

If you are sharing an observation, please leave the commenting enabled for others to chime in.

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