Perfect Life Project

275 authors band together for Age of Conversation 2

Following the success of our recent assault on the Amazon sales charts, the Age of Conversation team is now busy working towards a second book. The new one is tentatively titled, Age of Conversation, Why don't people get it? and this time it combines the talent and advice of 275 of the worlds best marketers, thinkers and advertising writers.

The only relevance to the book has to this blog is that I am once again honored to be one of the authors in this innovative publishing exercise.

Meet the rest of the authors here:

10 ways history's finest kept their focus at work

I just came across this post at a blog called LifeDev. It was actually written by Albert van Zyl from the blog HeadSpace. Anyway, its really great advice.

The lives of great people give us interesting clues about how to organise our days.

All of them attached great value to their daily routines. This is because they saw it as being part of ‘becoming who they are’, as Nietzsche puts it.

For the same reason they were also highly individual in their routines. They had the courage to go against popular opinion and work out often strange daily plans that suited them.

This is perhaps the first lesson that we can learn – that it takes courage and resolve to design and stick to a routine that suits you. But as Emerson reassures us: ‘The world makes way for the man who knows where he is going’.

There are at least 10 other lessons that the daily routines of the great can teach us:

Published and listed on Amazon

In 2007, more than 100 authors - from 10 countries and four continents - joined forces to write The Age of Conversation, a book about emerging media and marketing.  I was one of those co-authors.

Social Computing Magazine called it an “e-blockbuster.” Business Week said “Little did we know that social media would soon begin to tie us together digitally in ways that we are only just now beginning to understand. That’s why a new book called The Age of Conversation may be important to comprehending what’s going on in our society, economy and even polity today.”

If you don’t own a copy of the original, please consider ordering one from March 29 from this Amazon link. Dozens of bloggers around the net are promoting that purchase date in order to push the book up the Amazon charts. As a reminder, all book proceeds go to Variety, the children’s charity.

Being published was one of the goals I wrote about on my life-list last year. This effort was to contribute one chapter to the book and I will be doing so again soon in the 2008 version of Age of Conversation. But I still intend to have my own book published and am steadily making plans to do do so.

Meanwhile the team-effort continues with my fellow AoC authors.

Flow

Almost everyone alive has experienced those sweet moment in life when you are so "in the zone", so in the moment, so engrossed in an activity, that time just seems to pas unnoticed. It might be sport, an amazing conversation, writing, painting, exercising. I am sure you know what I am referring to. Remember how satisfying the experience was?

Well it turns out that this phenomenon has been studied in detail by a psychology professor at the University of Chicago called Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who has been studying human enjoyment since 1963. He calls it "flow". The question he posed himself was simple: What is fun? What makes some experiences enjoyable, and other experiences not? His conclusions reach deeply to the very question of happiness.

Taking Responsibility for Happiness

Today I want to share one of the most important attributes of successful and happy people: Responsibility. Its a lesson I have taken years to learn but is most likely the greatest key to my current level of happiness and success. I believe the message can be summed up as thus: you must take responsibility for your actions and your life in order to enjoy true happiness.

Most of my life I have been what you would consider a confident person. I have rarely had any reluctance to take on new challenges or back myself to succeed. As a consequence of my self-belief and willingness I have been able to enjoy some remarkable experiences and varied success. This has included world travel at a young age, reasonable success in several sports and reasonable success in business. All satisfactory results but nothing world-beating or extraordinary.

Doing business in Borneo

Greetings from Sabah in Malaysian Borneo. My wife and I are currently staying in beautiful Kota Kinabalu, just above the equator in a gorgeous and lush tropical paradise. The hotel is 5-star luxury and no expense has been spared in entertaining us and the other guests on this trip. The meals are magnificent, the cocktail parties plentiful and the activities highly enjoyable. Best of all, its all basically free.

Hit the refresh button on your life

I am constantly amazed at the amount of information, technology and general "noise" we allow into our modern lives. Mobile phones, PDA's, internet, email, Twitter, SMS, IMS, general media and more. All this is competing for our attention with work collegues, clients, meetings and everything else we try to accomplish during the day.

How do we ever get anything actually done?

My response is to log off and tune out. My best work and best thinking is one far from the daily noise of working life. Fewer interruptions = more clarity in my thinking. And for most entrepreneurs, thinking is where it is at.  

Survive and Thrive in Tough Times

I have been fortunate to enjoy great success with my business since buying it back in 2005. A lot of that can be attributed to the team I have built, the planning I have done, the manner in which we conduct business in general. However, we have also been fortunate to have been trading in a very strong economy here in Australia. In short, times have been good.

The thing is that I am not foolish enough to believe these good times will last forever. The dark economic clouds forming over the American economy are a warning that tougher times may be on the way. It is also inevitable that my business will confront some challenges that will test our resolve. I heard someone say once that you are most vunerable when you are successful, and with that in mind I have begun to consider what to do in tough times, either economically, personally or when a business disaster strikes. Here is what I have come up with so far:

Today is The Perfect Time to Start

Following is an excellent old post I recently came across on the the well-written Genius Types blog. Its about just getting on with your dreams rather than making excuses or waiting for the perfect time to start. I believe its very true.

The Perfect Time to Start Never Comes

When is the perfect time to start a business, lose weight, start investing, become an artist, travel the world, or create the life you have always wanted?

Australians working harder, sleeping, relaxing less

A new study of Australian lifestyle habits has revealed that we are working longer, sleeping less and getting less exercise. This is something I have been aware of for some time and used to be guilty of. In the last few years I have made a determined effort to combat this trend with a more balanced and rewarding approach that I have termed my Perfect Life Project. Below is a report from the Sydney Morning Herald detailing the latest lifestyle figures. In italics I have included my PLP figures to demonstrate how life can be successfully lived by the average person without following this alarming trend.