Success: Doing the things that you don’t enjoy, which have to be done

People don’t get what they want, because they are not willing to do the hard work, do the things that are painful and frustrating. Also, because of fear of that pain, that frustration, most people don’t even start. “I can’t do it anyway”, they say as an excuse, even that real reason is that they would have do stuff they don’t enjoy.

There’s a lot of wisdom here if you’re willing to listen, so I suggest you read the whole story at: http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/3657/why-people-struggle-to-get-what-they-want/

…

Amplify’d from www.entrepreneurs-journey.com

The challenge when running a business is not completing the 80% of tasks you do enjoy, it’s waking up and getting the job done for the 20% of things that you don’t enjoy, which have to be done, which separates the successful from the not.

Taking action when you just don’t feel like it is hard. Finding a way to transform the task from something you hate to something you enjoy because it helps you experience a result you want (thus the emotional gratification that comes with it), is the trick. You need to restructure your conditioned response to the task, to anchor it to a desirable emotion that helps motivate you to get it done. Read more at www.entrepreneurs-journey.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/enyd

via Amplify.com

DreamHost Gives Go Daddy the Finger – mod_pagespeed ENABLED

As you know, I’m deep into optimizing websites, I’ve written numerous posts on the subject, randing from htaccess tuning to harnessing the enormous power of W3 Total Cache…

Anyway, this was VERY exciting for me…

Yesterday, I read and tweeted the news when Google announced mod_pagespeed, an Apache module to speed up websites. Amazing news.

In the article, Google said that “they’re working with Go Daddy to get mod_pagespeed running for many of its 8.5 million customers…”

Well, while Go Daddy is “working on it” – DreamHost has done it already! And they’re not afraid to rub in on their competitors face(s).

*THIS* is why I run my blogs at DreamHost!

I’ll be testing this right now on my blog at http://zemalf.com

p.s. Check my resources-page for a very special DreamHost Coupon, if you’re looking for the best hosting service there is: http://zemalf.com/resources/

Amplify’d from blog.dreamhost.com

Yesterday Google announced a new Apache module, mod_pagespeed, whose only purpose is to get websites hosted on Apache web servers to load faster.

On average, Google found that sites that had mod_pagespeed enabled served websites up to 50% faster than their un-endowed brethren.

In short, mod_pagespeed has the potential to make your websites load twice as fast as they did before. And this is just the beginning. The whole project is open-source, so who knows what future enhancements and speed-uppers may be included in the future!

And while Google is still “working with GoDaddy” to roll this out across their entire customer base, today we’re announcing that DreamHost has enabled mod_pagespeed support for all DreamHost customers.

See more at blog.dreamhost.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/emxd

via Amplify.com

To seize everything you ever wanted

Look, if you had one shot, or one opportunity
To seize everything you ever wanted – One moment
Would you capture it or just let it slip? – Eminem

(can’t see the video above? watch it on YouTube: Eminem – Lose Yourself)

“One moment”

I believe in second chances, but if you always take action when have the (one) chance, always when you have the (one) opportunity, you don’t need the second chance.

By taking the (one) opportunity every time you can, you are in control.

You do it, one inch at a time.

You don’t need to worry about “letting it slip”…

“One shot, One opportunity”

Imagine living a life, never saying “I wish I’d…”

Imagine that you don’t need to look back thinking “If I’d only… then.”

What if I told you that you can have that life very easily?

“Would you capture it or just let it slip?”

There is no excuse, but yourself.

p.s. Thanks for the inspiration to Christopher S. Penn’s post “This opportunity comes only once in a lifetime” (and to Chris Brogan for sharing it)

One inch at a time

via youtube.com

The “six inches in front of your face”, that’s where we Live.

It’s the choices you make in that place that ultimately defines you, and, over time, the course of your life, until the end.

So many of us have grand plans for “Out There” or “The Future”, but never really focus on what’s right in front of us, right now.

Now… What are you gonna do?

Posted via web from Zem Post(erous)

Dwarf Fortress – A free game makes (a lot of) money from donations

There’s a chance you have not heard about this game called Dwarf Fortress before. (if you have, you probably know what an amazing game it is). I’m not going on details about the game itself, but in short, the game is about building a fortress for dwarfs, designing it, building it, controlling the resources, managing the dwarves, training them, etc. One could say it’s an combination of Sim City and Nethack.

A game unlike any other

This game is everything that the games created mass game industry are not.

• The game is “ugly”. If you have played Nethack, a RPG-game with “graphics” made of ASCII-characters, you’ll know how Dwarf Fortress looks like too (although DF does have cool framework that does support “real” graphics too).
• DF is very hard (it takes a LOT to learn to play the game).
• The game is free
• The game is not ready (as I’m writing this, the version is 0.31.x)
• The game is not available for iPhone, iPad, Nintendo DS, XBox, PS3, or Facebook.

But still, this game is the favorite game of thousands of gamers. Why?

Dwarf Fortress has been designed to be the ultimate game (for those who like this kind of micro-managing kind of strategy games). Thousands of gamers have played it over the years. And many who have, LOVE the game.

Amazing free game + Donations = Business

Here’s a game that major game publishers would never-ever provide funding for. Yet, this free game provides its developers a decent income stream with numerous voluntary donations from raving fans who love the game so much they want to support the developers to keep going.

For me this is inspirational:

• Create something of value (preferably out of passion),
• give it away for free,
• keep updating it and
• people who like it enough pay to keep the updates coming.

This is what the Bay 12 Games have done with the Dwarf Fortress. They took their passion (for games), turned it into a project for creating their ultimate game, gave it away for free and now after several years, they are still going (stronger than ever), without actually selling a single copy.

The Bay 12 Games and the Dwarf Fortress has received nearly $29000 donations in 4 months (January-April 2010). (via the Bay 12 Games Report, May 1st, 2010)

With this, Bay 12 Games and the DF has shown that it is possible to make money by “just”:

• creating a free game (AMAZINGLY good game),
• updating it regularly (making it better) and
• asking for donations.

I see the same principles applying for a non-game industry as well:

• Give it away for free.
• Ask for donations.

What do you think?

p.s. If you’re interested about the Dwarf Fortress, join Dwarf Fortress Fan Page on Facebook and check the Dwarf Fortress official page for more info.

Posted via web from Zemalf’s microblog

Change one, small thing

You can’t change everything.
You can only change one, small thing.
And that’s all it takes.

via mnmlist: the only thing you can change.

Posted via web from Zemalf’s Microblog

Confessions of a DMOZ editor

Here are some guidelines for submitting to DMOZ.org (the largest human edited online directory)… and 99.9% of people fail to follow them.

Bad webmaster, no twinkie!

Being a DMOZ editor let’s you see the true slag of the Internet. The amount of awful sites that think they are worth a read is amazing.

Thus, before you even consider telling anyone about your website, ask yourself this: If I would visit this site what would I think?

If you can’t recognize what makes site totally repulsive, consider doing something else than building websites, OK?

It seems that following guidelines is hard

But sadly, even the good sites fail to follow simple guidelines. Here are few of them…

“Do not submit sites “under construction.”

Started your site yesterday? Don’t bother submitting.

“Don’t submit sites consisting largely of affiliate links.”

DMOZ is the worst way to build a link to a site that sucks and is all advertising: you won’t get the link.

Submit non-English sites to the appropriate category under World.

Nice site, but I don’t have a clue what it is about. The language specific categories are there for a reason, you know…

“Keep the description of your site brief – no longer than 25-30 words.”

It’s amazing how hard it is for people to follow the simplest guideline when submitting to DMOZ.

“Avoid using promotional language”

People like to buy, but they don’t like to be sold to. This is true here as well.

If only people knew how to read

Since all the guidelines are clearly written in the submission form, I give you one tip that will make getting a site into DMOZ a whole lot easier:

Learn to read.

Posted via web from Zemalf’s Microblog