We don’t need yours.

Constructive criticism, on the other hand, is something we need more of. The tough part about constructive criticism is that in order to offer it you need real knowledge about the topic at hand.

• You can’t tell me how to improve my site if you don’t know much about websites. You can only tell me it sucks.
• You can’t help me improve my writing if you’re a weak writer. You can only tell me you hate what I wrote.
• You can’t help me build a business if you’ve never built one yourself. You can only tell me how stupid you think my concept is.

But it’s fun to pontificate, to reference imaginary conversations with clients, and hurl judgmental comments at writers we find online. There’s a delicious taste of power in seeing people

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How to maximize retweets:

Step 1: Say, do, or share something remarkable.

Step 2: People will then remark upon what you said, did, or shared.

Step 3: Count all the remarks and gloat over how many you have.

You can observe how remarks relate to remarkability in the professional flow chart below:
That’s all there is to it! Note that combining kittens (always remarkable–did you know there are THREE kittens just in this post?) with a flowchart (multiplies expert points by 300%) creates a highly remarkable presentation.

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In the words of a 1st century new media evangelist,

“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

After much thought and perusal of the interwebs to observe how trusted friends use the site, I cancelled my Facebook account for 3 reasons:

1. Too many phone lines, not enough calls.

If it’s your birthday, I want to remember because I once cared enough to ask you, took note of the date, then acted in a real way to help you celebrate your life. I don’t want to be one of the drones that starts each morning with a wall-plastering exercise of birthday cheer to random strangers. When I look back through the Facebook page of a friend who passed at his own beckoning, I see signals–like the bobbing flag of a diver–that alluded to his impending dive. But his remarks were just a few drops in the stream and I missed them. I missed him.

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One of the things I like best about social media is the way it helps me discover talented writers. They remind me a lot of distance athletes with their deep conversations about seemingly minor details and long periods of time spent practicing alone.

The web also has a downside. There seems to be a growing belief that having mobile access to information negates any need to regularly consume quality writing.

Some writers point to the popularity of the Twilight series and say it’s a sign the general population no longer cares about quality. In my reply

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Truth isn’t all about joy and beauty. It has an unsavory side that often conjures images of loneliness, perspiration, and pain. Here’s a bit of the latter:

How To Make Money By Writing A Blog

Write without pay until somebody offers to pay. ~Mark Twain

The web is flush with purse-snatchers and trust agents who exhort you to build a community then monetize it with calls to action and promises of overnight success. They tell you to follow your passions, to hustle, and to keep your eye on the prize.

Ignore them.

The web has changed the way we identify and toil for prizes.

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I stand across from the bespectacled man, breath bated, waiting for him to reach out and allow me to grasp the much-lauded future of electronic reading devices: the Nook. Beneath the august names bolted to the painted concrete storefront is a word that explains the birth of this Kindle killer. “Bookseller” says the sign in glowing green letters. That’s what this device, this gray bit of plastic that reminds me vaguely of a knobless Etch-a-sketch, is intended to do: sell books.

Smiling like a junior high school student who knows something I don’t know, this man whose breath somehow seems to steam in a warm room–his name is Gary–refuses to let me hold the Nook as he expounds upon its features. I hear, “2 Gigabytes of memory” and “share books with friends for free” as the tech-enthralled beast inside me grows ever more angry at this character for holding out on me. He continues his pitch with, “You can take notes and search for…” but I can wait no longer.

“Gary, could you hand me that Nook? I’d like that.” Gary reluctantly gives up this precious harbinger of literature’s future.

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The way you view failure can dramatically alter the path you take to success.

Milton Reeves built terrible cars. They were large, loud, smelly, and hard to drive.

He built the eight-wheeled monstrosity, “OctoAuto”, with the idea that eight wheels would make his car ride as nicely as the Pullman train cars it was modeled after. He took his pet beast to the inaugural Indianapolis 500 but failed to attract any serious buyers. Thinking the problem was the number of wheels, the tireless Mr. Reeves took an axle off the front of his car and called it the “Sext-Auto”. That model simply attracted more laughs. His cars were failures.

So why do we remember Milton Reeves as a success?

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