Inspired by Anger Burger’s post last week, I thought it might be fun to talk bout the jobs I’ve held — the brilliant, the miserable, and the utterly ridiculous.

And those are just the jobs I can talk about. What about you? What fields have you dabbled in? What odd jobs have you taken?

Back by popular demand, I’ve got another batch of words of wisdom to help you cultivate the right attitudes for change. Check out my first post on mantras to live by to get started on the subject.

1. What you do everyday is more important than what you do occasionally. (via Gretchen Rubin)
It’s so easy to burn out on change, whether it’s a lack of willpower or a commanding pace of life, so when all seems lost, remember that what you do every day is way more important than what you do every once in a while. The everyday actions are the things you’re really committed to, the things important enough to make it into your already crunched day. These are the things that stick with you. If you’re going to make a change, don’t focus on being able to deadlift 150kgs, focus on lifting every day. Change starts on a much smaller scale than we think, just as the small routines we complete have a much larger impact than we might have imagined.

2. Shoot for the stars, you may land on the moon. (via my dreamy nature)
I’ve always said this phrase to explain to people why I’m such a dreamer. I think big and you should too. Really big. Expect to get there. It will seem absurd to everyone else, but when you aim for the big fish, you inevitably end up somewhere cool, regardless of whether you catch the whopper in the pond or not. Don’t be afraid to overshoot or to aim high. How else do you wind up on top? Ask yourself what really makes you and the greats of the world different, and you’ll be surprised how often we scale ourselves back instead of letting ourselves be big picture thinkers.

3. Make no apologies. (via Ross Wells)
I’m not ashamed of who I am and what I do, and even someone as infallibly confident as myself often makes too many apologies. Ramit Sethi calls it the “Eeyore effect”, I call it “youtube syndrome,” but anyway you slice it, overapologising is no good. Creative people often fall into the trap of apologising when they miss a post or the sound is bad or the focus off. I do the same thing. I used to regularly kowtow a world of “sorry”s when I sent a newsletter out too close to the end of the month. Don’t. Just show up with what you got and make punctuality or presentation or production value or whatever your private area for improvement. Not only will most people never notice, but you end up putting your best foot forward. I did a documentary shot entirely in noisy, crowded, dark restaurants all over Los Angeles. Sure the picture was grainy, the noise floor was higher than heaven, and the subjects hard to understand, but what are you going to do when you know your shooting conditions suck? You go with your gut. You do your best. You make no apologies.

4. You can’t eat the meat until you kill the cow. (via Outlandish)
It sounds like something Dr. Phil would say, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. You do have to walk before you can run if you don’t want bruises on your face, but the old adage is so much more than that. Once you’re ready for a steak, it’s really easy to start thinking about how you’re going to get it. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, if you want the meat you have to kill the cow first. So before you grow livid wondering where the steak life promised you is, pop in Bread and Barrels of Water until you remember that you haven’t killed the cow yet.

5. As in the beginning, so in the middle, so in the end. (via Danielle LaPorte)
It’s a Buddhist proverb I’ve heard before to describe infinite nature, but Danielle LaPorte gave it a whole new meaning for me. In her regular appearance with Mark Kelley on CBC, she spoke about trusting your intuition and your first impressions when it comes to business. While I do believe humans can change, I agree that most of us are unwilling to. If someone comes off as rude at first, they generally continue to be rude and are still rude when you decide to stop taking their rudeness. As it was at the start, in those first few seconds you thinsliced the situation, so it usually ends up being. Stop fighting the things that are unchangeable and changing what you can: in LaPorte’s case whether you work with them, in Buddha’s case how you look at the world, and in your case too.

Let me tell you about my views on the smartphone five years ago. Five years ago I was carrying around a rucksack everywhere I went that held my mobile, my palm pilot, my digital camera, my mp3 player, my TI-89 calculator, plus a paper agenda with my to-do lists, important documents, and maps, a 3.5″ hard drive and enclosure, a spindle of CDs for my car and a bundle of charging cables. Five years ago I toted around eight different objects on a daily basis with a combined weight of 8.5kg and still eschewed the idea of an all-in-one device.

Why? There were devices of that variety on the market, including the Blackberry and Palm Treo which dropped two years prior, many of which could have lightened my load, yet I was convinced none of them could do a series of combined tasks successfully. I required that the quality of my pictures, the features of my PDA, the speed of my data transfer, were maintained to the point that I ran the risk of back problems from a heavy bag in order to accommodate my digital needs.

It’s fairly insane to consider carrying around so many devices today, especially given my travel-heavy lifestyle, but at the time it was considered normal for tech-heads like me. It’s not because I was so gadget-lusty that I needed to try everything, and it’s not because I was so tight-fisted I wouldn’t go out and give the Treo a go, but it was that five years ago you couldn’t find a mobile device that did everything I needed it to. There was no device on the market that could give me cellular service, keep my calendar and contacts, take decent pictures, play most of my music, calculate differential equations, hold copies of my presentation, or store my data, let alone play videos, back itself up, or sync to my email account. Heck, there were hardly any internet-ready devices in the market at all five years ago.

Now there are numerous devices that perform multiple functions, and not only do them, but do them well. The camera on the Droid is better than my point and shoot camera was five years ago. 16GB of storage has never been so light or so sturdy as it is today. Cellular data coverage has become so popular you can use it as your primary source of the internet. These are equally insane times, but in a different way. People have finally jumped on the smartphone bandwagon, everyone keeps talking about digital convergence, and the projections that everything will move up to the cloud are in unanimous agreement.

Today, while rumours about the Apple tablet closing the gap into a single, everything device, I think people are too optimistic. It could be done, but the reality is that what I want in a device and what you want are going to be different, and both of us aren’t going to want a whole bunch of extras taking up system resources, adding bulk to the thing, and cluttering the interface. I still agree with my opinion five years ago: the all-in-one quality device will never exist. Just as you’ll never be able to grill steaks in a soup pot, the iPhone will never take pictures or videos as well a DSLR or an EX1 without ceasing to be an iPhone. The Nexus’s 3G coverage will not be as high-performing as a cable modem anytime soon. You still can’t watch TV on your phone on the bus. The Kindle can’t adequately display vivid National Geographic images. So yeah, devices are still specialised, but it’s okay. As much as I’d like it to be, my smartphone is not my computer, but it can do almost everything I need my computer for yet fits in my pocket and has a longer battery life. I can take pictures, edit them, and upload them to flickr. I can ad-hoc a live video broadcast that is automatically geotagged. I can ask this piece of metal for directions to “Roy’s Donut World” and it’ll get me there. I can play football with my mates or answer my work email from Amsterdam or write my own app for something that can fit in my pocket. That’s really incredible, and what’s more incredible is that none of it existed in a pretty, little, usable package five years ago.

The technology might have existed, but what’s really changed is the overlap between devices. Phones used to have atrocious calendar functions that didn’t sync to your desktop, but have you tried to get a PDA that doesn’t come with a network carrier contract? The old-school palm pilot of yesteryear has long since been swallowed up by more advanced smartphones. It’s not just smartphones that have evolved either. Canon’s new line of cameras can shoot full-size 1080p HD video and still function like the kind of quality still SLR camera you’d expect from the company. You can control your Sonos music system from your iPod touch and stream Netflix to your and your friend in a different city’s XBoxes.

It’s not just the devices that have evolved, but the way we use them. The ability to link up your social networks, to have the websites you read pushed to one location, to automate everything from file storage to television viewing is widely accessible. You can take a device that has great capability and customise it to meet your exact needs, without having to pull a linux and hand-code everything yourself. The idea isn’t to make one device to rule them all, because a gamer will never want the same things in a device that a business executive will. The idea is to increase the overlap and make everything play nice, so that instead of carrying around eight devices, you only need to carry one or two light, energy efficient, globally connected objects. If I’ve gone from a back-breaking rucksack to a single pocket’s worth of space and weight in five years, just think of where we’ll be in 2015.

My greatest fear in life is that I won’t be able to do the things I want to do. Maybe it sounds familiar to you, maybe it sounds kind of superficial, but the truth of the matter is I’m one of those few people that puts my long-term goals before much else. So, good as I am at accomplishing life goals (I’ve managed to finish 22 in the last 18 months and accrue over a dozen new ones), I still feel I’m selling myself short. I hate the idea of uni-tasking, especially when my list of life goals are so tantalising and exciting, yet every time I try to overdo it, no matter how detailed my plan of attack, I always burn out. We are just not used to implementing large-scale, long-term change or remembering more than 7 things at once; it just isn’t in our hardware. So, if you’re going to tackle a long list of areas you’d like to improve, you have to understand your limitations. Almost every self-help, personal development, and lifestyle design guru will tell you to narrow your range and pull your focus to one thing at a time, an approach I’ve spent my whole life fighting only to find it’s actually the best way to get things done. They tell you in great detail how to organise your list or how far away to put your deadlines, but no one ever explained to me why you can only chase after one habit right now. I never found a compelling enough reason to deviate from my do it all at once approach. Well, now that I’ve experienced some success at the unitasking method, I thought I’d let you know a few good reasons why you can really only do one thing at a time.

You know what happens when all the emails in your inbox are marked high priority? Not only do they all become equally unimportant, but you lose faith in the whole priority system. On top of that, it makes it so much easier to close your mail if you have 26 things you consider urgent instead of one nagging thing you needed to get done. The same thing happens when you try to tackle too many areas at once. The things you really want — to start a garden, to visit Paris, to run a marathon, whatever your goals — become lost in a mass of too many things, and it becomes overwhelming and far too easy to just turn your back on the stuff that matters to you most.

Moreover, life is hard enough. You’ve got to pay the bills and wash your garments, feed yourself and show up on time, and still find enough hours to sleep well and unwind so you don’t breakdown the next day. That’s nearly too many things to worry about already, never mind the limits on your money, your time, and more importantly your energy. You’ve only got so much energy, attention, and willpower to give, so you need to be ultra-discerning where you spend it. As much as I’d like to wallow every second of the day in my dreams, the truth is I have to go to work and I have to do my dishes and I have to sort through the mail. If I tried to learn more Japanese characters AND try new recipes to improve my cooking AND do 50 crunches every day, I wouldn’t have time or energy to go to work, do the dishes, or sort through mail, and I’d be in pretty hot water come the 31st. So instead I pick one of those things to work on, and make sure I can still function as a human being when I’m not quizzing myself on Kanji.

This is key. I’m not saying you should put stuff you don’t care about, like laundry or hoovering your carpet, before your dreams. I’m saying you need to take care of yourself first. You need to know your rent will be paid and your stomach full before you can worry about owning an Aston Martin. This is because you need to bring your A-game to make a change. You can’t be recovering from a stressful week at work and a bad head cold and expect to still hit the gym every day to start that new routine. It’s going to take an intense amount of energy to turn your dreams into reality, and you’re going to need a stable foundation to grow from, so recover first and hunker down second.

And it will take a surprising amount of energy. There will be lots of inertia to overcome, lots of emotional baggage and circumstantial barriers to surmount. It might be stressful at times, but these are dreams you really want, right? The effort should be worth it. Bottom line, you can’t put the same amount of effort into everything. You’re going to have to be a nazi about time drains, constantly asking yourself “is this really what I want to be doing right now?” You’re going to have to take the guesswork out of it when you reach that vital fork in the road: french fries or fruit? This is a lesson I learned from polyphasic sleep. I’ve always had trouble getting up in the morning, and though my goal was to adapt to a polyphasic schedule, when my alarm went off four hours after I fell asleep I seemed to conveniently forget that goal. I learned not to trust my 6am self and instead rely on my 6pm self to take away all my 6am self’s decision making authority. It wasn’t that I lacked discipline or motivation, it was that getting out of bed when you’re in desperate need of REM took more energy than my groggy, sleep-deprived, un-showered self could muster at sunrise. I did it though, because polyphasic sleeping was something I wanted, and it was worth every rough early morning. You have to know what you want, and concentrate your energies on getting it.

The really fiddly bit is that there will always be more things you want or need to put your effort into. Your trough will never be empty, your to-do list, never complete, so in the constant stream of desires and duties accomplishing anything feels rather anticlimactic. To combat the sense of futility that lets us give up on our dreams of having the Rock’s six pack or Linda Hamilton’s ass in T2, you have to find a way to make accomplishment satisfying. If you celebrate adopting an exercise regimen the same way you revel in returning a library book on time, you’re throwing a kink in what could be a huge motivator. Fulfilling your personal goal is not the same as finishing a household errand, so make that distinction as clear as possible and be clear about what really is a victory. If you aim for too many victories, they won’t be worth throwing a party for.

How do you pick which victories to aim for, then? I’m convinced most abandoned new years resolutions are due not to a lack of realism, but a lack of priorities. What really matters to you? Don’t answer right away. I’m not asking what you want off your plate right now, I’m asking what really matters to you. Make two lists. On the first list write down what you spend your time doing, starting with the piece that eats up the largest chunk of your time. On the second list write down what the most important things are to you. Compare. Is family your top priority yet you spend the most amount of time at work and playing golf with your buddies? Is travel your number one on the second list but keeping house the number one on the first? You don’t have to drastically redesign your life and hack the soul out of your time, the idea is to make you think about the relationship between where you want your priorities to lie and where you show the world they do. Perhaps the two need reconciling?

Okay, that little exercise was slightly unfair. Sometimes it is hard to even accurately judge such lists because certain tasks carry a heavy psychological weight we’re pretty good at pretending doesn’t exist. There’s that one thing you’re procrastinating that might even be a tiny, trivial task, like mailing a form or stopping by the DMV, but the longer you put it off, the greater the burden it becomes. Yet, in your brain you rationalise it, thinking it’s such a little thing that surely putting it off another week couldn’t do too much harm? WRONG. ABSOLUTELY WRONG. Just as having time isn’t nearly as important as using time wisely, the best judge of tasks and priorities is actually their emotional impact. Once you figure out the weight of each goal, then you simply tackle the one that’ll have the greatest emotional impact. It’s easier said then done, I know, and not just because quantifying your emotions comparatively is tricky, but because then you have to actually followthrough and take on that task, no matter how painful it may be. It might be painful, and it’s going to be hard, so if you try too many difficult things at once, you won’t have the emotional capacity to followthrough.

That’s of course the trickiest part, the followthrough. I could write a whole book on how we spend so much time planning and making lists and dreaming but rarely do we ever do. It’s not easy and there are many real barriers (like being unemployed) and many fake barriers (such as lacking discipline), but the reality is that pursuing your dreams is hard. That’s why you have to tackle them one at a time. If 16 burly footballers come at you, the goalie, simultaneously each armed with a soccer ball, you’d be the next Edwin Van Der Sarr if you could stop them all. Why? Because your dreams require all sorts of different things from you. Being well-rested requires you sleep in yet making breakfast every morning requires you to get up early, and while not all of your goals will be in direct conflict, they will all require you to, well, dive in different directions to get them. Unless you’re Van Der Sarr himself, trying to pursue all those various dreams at once will overwhelm you and probably cost you the game. So focus on one footballer and block that one ball. Focus on one dream so you can actually followthrough.

There’s a bonus in all of this though, because by concentrating your effort onto one individual task you A) find a focal point, a central aim about which you can obsess, let passion overrun, and inject excitement back into your life, and B) forget all about whether or not you fail and instead do. Even if the process of pursuing your dream to get free of debt means you won’t be seeing as many movies in the theatre as you’d like, the relief you’ll feel at being in the clear is far greater than any disappointment you could muster at missing Sherlock Holmes.

So do yourself a favour. Recover before you tackle anything, clear your plate and define your real priorities, make the right thing the only thing, remove the biggest emotional burden first or give yourself the biggest break first, but most of all, only do one thing at a time. That’s more than enough. Life is tough enough already.

New Years is a time for resolutions and reflections. Usually people spend the month of January trying to adhere strictly to the new idea of who it is they want to be. New gym memberships and exercise routines, new diet plans and a huge purge of possessions, and new enrollments in language classes and stricter bedtimes are all well and good, but generally I find a new perspective does more than any resolution list could. So, instead of writing about all the to-dos and endless goals I have, something that I don’t review in December but rather revisit regularly throughout the year, I’m writing about the kind of attitudes necessary for true change. It’s not enough just to read these mantras and say, “oh yeah, that makes sense” and expect some real change to come about, you have to really adhere to these adages, you have to shift your perspective and make these mantras more important than whatever excuses your feeble ego could muster, because on some level you know that the mantras you really understand are the ones you really need to hear. So good luck with your 2010 endeavours, happy new year, and may these mantras help you on your way to whatever dreams you’re currently pursuing.

1. It’s never a good time. (via tiny coop)
If you’re waiting to do something, to buy something, to be something, to start something, essentially if you’re putting anything on hold until the stars magically align and the path before you is clear, you’ll be waiting forever. I’m a firm believer in living now and not slaving away, longing for some idea of the promised land 14 years, 40 years, your entire life later. The truth is, it’s never a good time to buy a car, to have a baby, to finish that project. It’s never the right moment to say that, or to let go of this, so don’t lie in wait. Recognise there is no perfect moment, and waiting for it is just another way to procrastinate actually doing what you need to do. Life is never fully-baked, so why are you waiting for the kitchen timer to buzz? It’s never cooked through, so just take it out when it looks right and worry about eating it later.

2. Do what feels right. (via my university mates)
It seems simple, but “do what feels right” is one of the most complicated mantras to not just believe, but to truly live. There are at least one million reasons to do what feels important, or what feels comfortable, or what feels logical. But what feels right is often just the thing we need. It feels right for a reason, so stop denying who you are and just go with it. Do what feels right, and the rest — the joy, the success, the freedom, the fulfillment — will follow.

3. Put the paint on the barn. (via family friends)
Two guys go to paint a barn one guy spends a lot of time carefully picking out paint, searching around the garage for the right-sized rollers, and trying to find the ladder. The other guy grabs the first can of paint and the first paintbrush he can find and goes to start painting the barn. When the day is over, one guy has painted half the barn, and the other guy has barely started. Whenever you’re faced with a task, before you spend hours agonising over it, ask yourself whether it’s more important to pick out the paint or to put the paint on the barn. More often than not, you’d do better to just put any paint on the barn. It doesn’t matter if you’ve found the perfect shade of mauve, or if you can’t reach the roof yet, the simple truth is that your barn will remain in disrepair until you put the paint on it.

4. Fail better. (via Adam Gottesfeld)
The little diddy goes something like “if you aren’t failing, there’s no way you can be succeeding.” There’s some truth to that; people who are wildly successful have failed quite a bit more in their lives than the average Joe who hasn’t pursued enough to fail more than once or twice. I’m not advocating you just throw statistics at the problem and try more so you can fail more, what I’m suggesting is that you stop counting failures and instead start qualifying them. Don’t worry about failing, worry about failing better. Did you learn from the experience? Were you in the know when all was tanking? How will your next attempt be better? So you failed, who cares. What matters is that you failed better — better than the last time, better than the other guy, better than you expected, whatever better matters in your field — failed in a higher quality way each time around. Everyone fails, so make your failures count.

5. Any number is better than zero. (via Gary Vaynerchuk)
Unlike failure, where not all failures are equal, progress is progress no matter what progress it is. Any progress is better than no progress. One dollar is better than no dollars. A handful of followers are better than no followers. Hell, even negative numbers are better than zero; they at least tell you something, usually that you’re doing something wrong, while zero means that you’re stagnate. No movement, no improvement, no progress. The number itself doesn’t matter so much as the fact that it isn’t zero. And if you’re back at zero, keep moving, anywhere, somewhere, because any number is better than zero.

Generally, I hate rewards programmes. I believe in complete services instead because I’m driven mad when companies pretend to offer you something but instead just waste your time or fill your inbox with junk mail. When was the last time your supermarket rewards system saved you more than .02% of your total? When was the last time your bookseller membership’s 20% off actually paid for itself? I was an Arclight member for years and dozens of $14 movie tickets never once got me so much as a free popcorn. There’s nothing fair about frequent flier miles you can’t actually redeem and magazine subscriptions that haunt you for years after you’ve stopped subscribing and I’d be lying if I said I was comfortable with so many unused perks accounts opened in my name. Yet, the perk has a purpose. At their hearts, rewards programmes aren’t evil things. It doesn’t have to be a one-way street, and even someone as skeptical as I can fall prey to a few well executed perks. As the holidays roll around there are quite a few point systems sending me weekly email reminders to redeem before 2010 arrives, and though most of these newsletters are auto-filtered into my bin, every once in a while a company gets it right. Hateful though I may be, there are a few perks programmes that I actually adore.

1. Godiva Chocolate Rewards
Make no bones about it, gourmet chocolate is a luxury good. I enjoy a nice truffle now and again, and I think fancy consumables make for a classy gift, which is how I ended up at the Godiva store purchasing a host gift. I’m all about free rewards, but when I enrolled in Godiva’s rewards programme, I did not expect to actually use it, let alone enjoy it as well. It’s pretty simple, for signing up you get free shipping on one online order, one box of two candies, and one free piece of chocolate a month. That’s right, you get a free $2 truffle, any truffle in the store, every month. You can walk into the store and get a free candy, just like that. Of course, that’s the genius of it all. Godiva says, “Hey, we get that gourmet chocolate is a little too pricey to splurge on all the time. But now you have an excuse to come in and get excited about chocolate without having to buy anything,” and you do. I find myself in the store once a month to keep that free truffle from going to waste, and, I’m sure to Godiva’s joy, I buy my token gifts exclusively from Godiva, occasionally treat myself to a half-dozen truffles, and have become a snobbish elitist who eschews the competition. It wouldn’t work if chocolate wasn’t already a trivial purchase, but because the freebie gets me in the door, I’ve gone from a rarely consumer to a regular customer. Plus, I get free high-quality chocolate every month.

2. Half Price Burger Night
My local pub round the corner is just that, a pub round the corner, and as such my expectations are pretty low. I go because it’s a good place to meet up with mates and catch a pint, to grab a seasonal Sam Adams on tap, and to watch the Man U games they occasionally air on Sundays. It does its job well, but their breakfast sucks, the service is mediocre, and I’d ordinarily never frequent the place for anything more than a nightcap or a football game. Except every Wednesday is half-price burger night, so, presuming I come early enough for happy hour, I can get a beer, a burger, and a side of luscious mac’n'cheese for something in the single digits. Glorious, and brilliant, because now I’m a customer who instead of never buying a meal, goes once a week. We both win, and if that isn’t perky, nothing is.

3. Amazon Coupons
Paying for Amazon Prime was the best decision I ever made (I had to talk myself out of buying paper towels via Amazon yesterday and go to the grocer’s like a normal person), but I expect that decision to pay off. It’s a service I paid for. What I didn’t expect is all the coupons that come from buying things. I much prefer Amazon’s MP3 service to buying a hard album — much less waste all around, plus you get it instantly and it saves me a step to getting the album on my iPod — but Amazon Prime won’t save you much on digital downloads. Amazon, to encourage me to buy more music, keeps giving me $1 off my next album purchased through the MP3 store. They keep giving me 10% off my next MP3 store purchase. They keep giving me special prices on the new releases by artists I’ve already bought from them. Except, unlike an endless stream of Bed Bath & Beyond coupons I keep receiving as junk mail, I actually use these coupons. $7 is insanely cheap for a full-length album, and the break suddenly makes me not only buy more music from that store, but makes me insanely loyal. Between routinely getting music freebies and constantly getting my 2-day shipping packages a day early, Amazon has made me into a die-hard customer for life. That’s intelligent marketing.

What about you? Any perks that work?

If I wanted to sound like a douche-bag, I’d assert that I am indeed a “content creator” looking to enter the “VOD-sphere” and possibly “hypersyndicate.” Or I could just tell you that I make videos, and yeah, you can watch them online if you want. After attending a three-day conference on the subject of streaming video and listening to some of the questions asked, I can’t help but feel there’s a lot of misinformation going on around the ideas of online video that I’d like to set straight. Now, I’m in no way an expert, but just because I don’t bill myself as a social media consultant doesn’t mean I’m completely clueless about the subject. Let’s just say there are 10 really obvious myths about streaming video that with just a little research are fairly easy to disprove, if not easy to dispel.

1. Your video can only survive if it’s interactive.
Flat out wrong. Social media is great, I’m a huge fan of it, but in the excitement over its development, a few of us seem to have lost touch. First of all, avid social networkers are a small piece of the pie. Not everyone’s on facebook, and not everyone on facebook is an active participant. If this wasn’t proof enough, let’s take something like TV. Just about every home has a television nowadays, including your grandma’s, but I would love to shake the hand of the grandma that’s on twitter (no offence to grandmas) and catches up on her soap operas via the internet. The point is, youtube may have caught on, and “vote for your favourite!” is the standard now, but to put all your eggs in the social media/interactive basket is to only appeal to a small percentage of your possible audience. Second of all, your product can’t be all that great of a product if it can’t stand on its own without the social aspect. I’m a member of the Gowalla community and not a member of the Foursquare or Brightkite community. Why? Because none of my real-life friends are into that sort of thing. Foursquare sucks without a network of people you actually know, and Brightkite has no purpose if all your “friends” are strangers you’d never meet up with. Gowalla on the other hand is still fun even if it’s just a location tracking app. Social is cool, but your product/service/purpose still has to be at least a little fun without the social aspect.

2. You can make money off of online video.
This is a huge misconception that’s hurting the industry rather than helping it. Now, if you’re online video is associated with a broadcast or studio content available elsewhere, then you can still be making money off of the endeavour (I’m talking to you, Netflix and CNN Money), but if you’re relying on online video itself to foot your bills, then you’re chasing a wave that will never come. The costs are still too high, there’s no good advertising model that actually delivers, and while users will pay for services, they’ll almost never pay for content. Should you be able to make money off of online video? Yes, but it’s damn near impossible unless you’ve already got a billion-dollar budget at present or unless you’re using it as a promotional tool to sell something else.

3. HD is the standard now (and everything is going mobile).
This is a big whopper of a lie. HD still has almost no demand; it’s all culture. If you offer HD you look legit, but pretty much no one is watching in high definition. The percentage of people who subscribe to HD cable and own a HD television is still a fraction of the market, and the number of online video viewers who can even stream video at speeds fast enough to accommodate HD still hasn’t reached 10%. It’s the trend to move towards HD certainly, but right now it’s still in infancy. There’s no HD standards, little HD-capable device proliferation, and a minority of carriers even providing it. Going for HD might be reaching for the stars, and our media rocket hasn’t broken the atmosphere quite yet. Same goes for mobile devices. Sure more and more of us have single-use, multi-use, and “smart” mobile devices, like cell phones, in-flight DVD players, and automobile flat screens, but being able to watch youtube on your droid doesn’t necessarily mean mobile streaming is here. There are hundreds of problems with streaming that much data to users, even fewer players in the CDN market able to deliver consistently, and almost no telcos ready, able, and willing to step up the game. Like HD, video-enabled devices are certainly the direction we’re going, but the train’s only just left the platform and it’s a long journey ahead.

4. Subscription is dead.
Not true. Subscription is hardly dead, and the model might be the saving grace of the industry if we can ever get it together enough to offer more software as a service and make the subscriptions worth paying for. As I mentioned before, pursuing ad-supported online video isn’t really working well. Either you don’t get the bills paid, or you inundate your customers with cheap advertising and they have a terrible user experience. Neither sounds like a great option. But give ad-free, unlimited access so long as you pay your subscription fee, and it isn’t such a bad idea. In fact it works with video on demand precisely because it doesn’t work with services like Napster. Streaming video on demand isn’t something you own, like a CD is, it’s something you do. You don’t suddenly lose all the music you thought you owned if you don’t pay the bill, because you can’t lose the experience of having watched a movie. The problem isn’t finding an alternative to subscriptions, it’s making the subscriptions feature-rich and easily available enough to be satisfying and the price point still low enough to reach the masses.

5. Digital distribution has totally taken off.
Don’t let iTunes statistics fool you; there are still some major problems with digital media distribution models. It’s great for the distributors, but there’s absolutely zero incentive for the customer to invest in digital assets. A blockbuster on iTunes (if you download to own) is at least double the price of going out and buying the DVD. You could buy a Blu-Ray disc of a new release at Best Buy for less than you could download an ’80s classic on iTunes. It’s even worse for other digital distributors. So how did we buy into this model? Because the music industry wanted you to. Downloading an mp3 of the latest Vampire Weekend album on Amazon’s MP3 store is actually less expensive than it is to have the physical CD shipped to you. Buying that album is better than pirating it because it’s faster, better quality, and you know what you’re getting. They tricked us into thinking record stores were a thing of the past. But downloading a movie is slower, worse quality, and harder to find than just buying or renting or netflixing it. No incentive, no selection, and no storage space means digital distribution of video is still taxi-ing before takeoff.

6. Viral is good.
Viral is not good. It’s hardly an advertising model, and it drives me bonkers when I’m asked to begin a viral campaign for anything. You can’t force viral. You can push through word-of-mouth — package it as clever and interesting and it gets re-tweeted, re-embedded, and re-purposed, giving it exposure to many more eyeballs than before — and that’s a good idea. Even if I could make a video reach viral status on command, “going viral” is a terrible idea, because by definition viral content is short-term. It’s quick, explosive, and then gets so oversaturated that everyone goes from loving to hating your product faster than the guy that lists side effects of drugs after commercials. Want examples? “Headon. Apply directly to the forehead.” See what I mean? You want your product to be treated seriously, thoughtfully, and well-recieved if and when it’s circulated around the cyber-rodeo, not as a constant source of wisecracks for decades to come (”Where’s the beef?” anyone?) or as the posterchild for THAT thing (remember the poor lightsaber kid!). So get over viral and go back to marketing basics.

As you might have surmised, I am a blogger. I’m not just a blogger. I’m a vlogger, and a photographer, and a traveller, and a filmmaker, and many other -ers besides. This can be a wonderful thing, but it can also be worrisome. Through my blogging and general out-there-ness, I’ve ended up making portions of my life transparent. If you’re someone like Kevin Rose or Barack Obama, making part of what you do transparent can be a real success strategy, but if you’re someone a little less deliberate, you might find yourself in hot water pretty quickly. As with anything on the internet, there is common sense, and there are risks that supersede common sense. Giving out your home address is not the wisest course of action in life or online, but sometimes you don’t give it out, someone else does, and while there’s a lot of legal precedent for identity theft and privacy invasion in the real world, the rules governing online privacy have a much shorter history.

Before I delve headfirst into my take on online privacy, first I’d like to make a distinction between safety and privacy. These are two different concerns, though they often overlap. Privacy, to me at least, is about the balance between your right to express freely and your right to keep information out of the public eye. While safety is often a violation put upon us by others, the extent of your privacy is often a choice you make. So how do those of us exercising our free speech (transparently in places like the US and often anonymously in places like Iran) practise transparency while still maintaining our privacy, and the privacy required to retain our safety?

PROBLEM 1: In vs. Beyond Our Control

It’s worrisome because I find myself making decisions about what to write, do, or film based on these sorts of questions. A healthy dose of internet paranoia is probably wise, but it’s a shame that there are whole chunks of photographs I’ve taken, for instance, that I’ll never publish on the internet because they either give away too much personal information or could possibly divulge someone else’s. Some things I’d like to keep private, but sometimes the far reaches of google get the better of you. If you create a myspace page and then remove it, does it still exist? If you delete a file on your hard drive, can you get it back? If you send a private email, can you erase that information? Joi Ito, the CEO of Creative Commons and internet entrepreneur with some pretty strong privacy opinions, in an interview with the Japan Times spoke about a series of lists and references, essentially information about you collected and held onto by others that you have no control over. It happens offline too, but it’s so much easier to unearth online, that the thought of blogging personal or professional information, as Ito does, can seem terrifying for some. Ito combats the problem by controlling the information put out there, and he claims that by publishing the information first on his own platform, it’s much harder for it to be misunderstood because it’s framed in the proper context. He controls the information and thus maintains a level of privacy.

Ito’s tactic is an interesting one, and while my own writing can seem very personal, I honestly believe I don’t post anything I wouldn’t tell a stranger at a bus stop. There’s an alarming amount of information about me floating around the ethers already, and any determined hacker or con artist or wrongdoer could find out shedloads of personal information about not just me, but about you too with just a few internet searches and a phone call or two. So it has always been, and just because you don’t have a digital alarm system that tells you when someone is breaking and entering doesn’t mean having one would help. The thing is, there is information I wouldn’t divulge to a stranger at a bus stop, and that information certainly doesn’t get published here.

PROBLEM 2: Ownership vs. Privacy

So what’s the difference between the photos I put up on flickr and the photos of me on facebook? If I publish my photos to flickr, I’m controlling the content. I have no control over who’s putting photos of me on facebook. But with facebook comes the illusion of granular control. Because there are privacy settings, people feel okay putting up pictures, regardless of whether they use those settings. I’m guilty of it, sometimes I post pictures of passerby that may not want to have their photos available for download. It’s a risk I take, because I use flickr as a platform for my work and as a way to share my life with friends and family, and generally, more good than ill comes of it. Just because I have ownership of that photo though, does not mean that I have no moral qualms about publishing pictures of my friends and family. The internet is great for sharing my travel pictures with those I know, and showcasing my photography to those I hope to know, but I’m uncomfortable knowing that there are photos of me floating around facebook that I don’t even know were taken. It’s not a supposition, it’s fact by now.

It all comes down to your boundaries. A fellow vlogger in Osaka that I follow, Scott from Unrested, brings up a good point about other people’s privacy. There are certain no-nos that we all seem to agree on, whether we’re in Japan or in America. You can’t just walk around filming anyone or anything. You can’t film (and often blog about) your workplace, for example, if you intend on keeping your job. While there are laws (as any photojournalist knows by heart) protecting your right to take pictures in public places and laws sanctioning your freedom of speech, singling out others and exposing parts of their lives is considered an invasion of privacy, culturally at least. Unrested is married, but he asserts that he will never show his wife or his children in his videos, and in my opinion, rightfully so. “This isn’t their hobby, this isn’t their craft,” he says, and as such it would be unfair to put their faces unwillingly in front of all to see via the interwebs. He takes the risk but doesn’t throw it upon others. Merlin Mann, on the other hand, has no problem discussing, filming, and posting pictures of his baby girl, Ellie. So for him, the line falls in a different place.

Where’s that line between personal and public? It appears to be wherever you can get away with drawing it, because who you are changes everything. If you’re Scott, who has a large number of subscribers and whose videos garner substantial view counts, your line has to be pretty clear. If you’re 14-year-old Jane from Salt Lake, you can probably post videos of your family reunion and nothing will come of it. If you’re Paris Hilton, you’ve got to be okay with that sex tape leaking out before you even film it. It might be unfair, especially as your standards change, but it’s a fact of life.

PROBLEM 3: Good vs. Bad Judgement

The other half of the problem with digital privacy is social. Anything you post can be used against you at any time, any place. Treat digital like it’s never truly gone, because that facebook photo could turn off a potential employer, and that twitter comment could get you fired. On the other half of the coin, anything you post will be used to support you at any time, any place. That potential employer might see your blog posts illustrate how knowledgeable you are about finance, and that video of you dancing might fund your next vacation. The problem is, socially we keep condemning people for having opinions and activities outside of their professional image, but then we keep asking them to. We’re expected to be social networkers but put ourselves out there and still carry the same cleaned up image politicians and their PR teams create. I’m not talking about reputation blemishes, I’m talking about having a public opinion, a public face. Be forward thinking and with the times, but only in an outdated, conservative way. As long as this dichotomy exists, we won’t be able to build clear legal and moral boundaries around online privacy.

I won’t lie, it terrifies me to think that years from now I might be regretting writing these very words as my interviewer asks me, “We see you’ve written on your website about Korea…” They can’t hold your support of gay marriage against you, but enjoying South Korean cinema could still be a liability, never mind that my two years of blog posts thus far illustrate I am reading and thinking about contemporary issues like healthcare and international relations, spending my time and money experiencing other cultures instead of, say, doing drugs in my mum’s basement and watching trash television. It’s a double standard in its own way; it’s great that you write but it’s still a strike against. I’m sure something somewhere will come back to bite me but I make no apologies, because I am presenting a true and honest version of myself. That’s my solution: to be the same person on my weblog that I am in real life. I’m not hiding my name or masking my whereabouts. I’m putting myself out there because I believe I have something to say, and hopefully my consistency and character will be enough to see it through.

CONCLUSION

Here’s where the real discussion begins, because in spite of all the dangers and all the problems that come with putting yourself so out there, people still do it. Personally, the benefits of blogging currently outweigh the risks. As someone is passionate about new media and would like to continue working in the field, not participating would deny me a great experience. Putting my work on display has allowed me to become a part of projects that would ordinarily never have come my way. The community of bloggers and vloggers has been a huge source of inspiration and both personal and professional development for me, and I enjoy giving back to the same society that supported me when I decided to become a serious traveller. If the costs start outweighing the benefits, then I’ll probably reconsider my participation, but for now I’m willing to put my word on the line for the better parts of the experience. There are of course still a great many risks, but I do my best to mitigate them.

I’m a person, not a robot, not a secret team writing under one alias, not a committee designed to test you. As such, I have feelings, I am under time constraints, and I always run the risk of upsetting someone. So let me lay this on the line: this website is my personal vantage on the world, comprised of thoughts, opinions, first hand accounts and experiences, and a good deal of speculation. At risk of sounding like a copyright disclaimer, please know the views expressed here are mine and mine alone, and the writing published here was penned by and belongs to me. I want to believe that I’m making a difference with the words I say, and I’d hate for anything to be a) taken out of context and misconstrued, b) passed off as something it isn’t, or c) held accountable as anything but my own thoughts, opinions, and experiences. While this website is my personal blog, this website is not professional writing. I am not a published writer at present or a professional journalist, in fact, I’m not even a civilian journalist, and I assure you there’s no team of editors proofreading, fact checking, and ghostwriting anything you see on the site. That said, I know I can get it wrong sometimes. If you find anything erroneous in my posts, just let me know. Email me, direct message me on twitter, leave a note in the comments, message me on youtube, however you let me know I would be grateful for the assistance and more than happy to do a little more research, correct the misinformation, or even take down something wildly off-base. If you disagree with what I write, I’m open to a dialogue. That’s the beauty of a blog: contact me, write or film a response, comment my posts, or even reference my site. While I refuse to entertain hatemail for hate’s sake, I am more than willing to consider and give credence to decent arguments and other valid viewpoints. I’m in it for the exploration and the discussion and the expression, not to shout down to the world from my soapbox.

Please also know that, like other bloggers, I often reference and link to other people’s material (though I will never republish it or claim it as my own). This is meant purely to spread the joy and share some of the neat stuff I love with the readers of this website. I think the world deserves to discover some of the amazing work people are doing and am often excited to further the word-of-mouth. If you happen to be making any of this content and are uncomfortable with my allusions, think I have violated your rights or privacy, or feel I have taken it too far, let me know. The last thing I want to do is prevent the artists and designers, figureheads and companies I admire from doing well, so I’d be happy to remove content or come to an accord that we can both agree on.

Sources from this post include merlin mann’s personal accounts, Joi Ito and his interview with the Japan Times, Scott from Unrested’s great videos, Barack Obama’s whitehouse.gov and Kevin Rose. If you look closely, you’ll find I’m not the only one being upfront about who I am and what I do. Chris Gen, John Eckman, The Budak, Cabel Sasser, Gary Arndt, Dustin Curtis, and too many others to count are doing the same thing.

I don’t have all the answers. But I do have an awful lot of ideas and a few experiences in my short life that have proven happiness really is what you make it. The challenge for me is to follow my enthusiasm, because doing what you love is a whole new level of happiness that permeates everything, like a dusting of snow in winter, or like the smell of baking pie. There are the big happiness generators, of course, that usually involve not selling your soul and standing up for what you believe in, giving back to those you love, the simple pleasures in life, all that sort of stuff. There are also a few small-time hidden happiness generators that lurk in a closet, waiting to spew golden bubbles and skittles when you finally get around to turning them on. For me, there are few little tweaks here and there that may not seem like a big deal at first, but have ended up being some of the biggest happiness generators for me. Here are five of them that keep me smiling.

1. Clean as you go.
Some people leave the cleaning for later, or tackle that pile of dirty anything with one epic blitzkrieg, but I’ve always been more of a clean-as-you-go gal. In the kitchen I like to trick myself into emptying the dishwasher while I’m waiting for the next batch of scones to get golden brown, or I race to see how fast I can get the dishes done while I’m waiting for the pasta water to boil. Then, after my piping hot meal is safely resting in my stomach, I don’t have to fight too hard against the food coma since I’ve only got a few easy dishes left to do. I’ll vacuum my apartment one night in between TV shows and I’ll wipe down the bathroom before my dinner plans another night. Not only is cleaning as you go a good way to keep all the nagging chores from piling up, but it’s a good way to turn a day’s worth of work into ten minutes over the course of a week. I like to clean everything as I go too, including my mental riffraff, my cyber space, and the insane number of lists and piles I keep at work. I do it all so I never feel bogged down by the size of my inbox or the mess of my files, and when I don’t have to give up a Saturday for errands I hate to do, I get to take a picnic instead, or meet friends for coffee, or just sleep in.

2. Do it anyway.
There are at least one million reasons why you should eat less wheat, go to the gym more, and call your mother regularly. There are even more reasons why you shouldn’t have another chocolate chip cookie, spend another hour on facebook, or buy that nifty new camera. If you’re anything like me your brain has very little trouble producing a mile-long list of why you don’t feel like going for a run, and I’m certainly good at coming up with thousands of pros for sleeping another hour, but if I’ve learned anything about happiness, it’s that what you want right now and what will make you happy are often two different things. The bit that makes me most unhappy isn’t that I spent too much money on that plane ticket, or that I still can’t run less than a 13 minute mile, it’s the part of me that feels wrong for the aeroplane reservation and feels incompetent for not running fast enough. The key to making yourself happy in the face of a mountain-sized pile of suckage is to do it anyway. You don’t want to exercise today. Okay, great, but do it anyway. You really shouldn’t have that piece of candy. Probably not, but do it anyway and then move on. You might not really need that camera, but get it anyway. Meditation’s hard and your inflexible muscles hurt. Do it anyway. I’m not saying you should be irresponsible or forget your priorities in life, but rather that you should stop agonising over simple dilemmas. Either do or do not, and stop worrying about it either way. You’ll stop making everything an ordeal and get on with your life, because our time here is far too short to spend it mired in regret and it’s far too important that we pay attention instead of wallow in procrastination. So, no matter your fears, regardless of your excuses, do it anyway and make that, that.

3. Drink a cup of tea.
There is very little in this world that cannot be righted by a strong cup of hot tea. Tea has a calming effect and, since it cannot be swigged and instead must be sipped, a unique ability to slow us down. Feel terrible? Drink a cup of tea. The heat is soothing to rough throats, helps kill off a lot of microbial wrongdoers (by sending them to their stomach-acid deaths), is comforting in times of need, and if nothing else, will keep you hydrated, and it’s best to stay hydrated even on your worst of days. Want to show your gratitude to a loved one? Drink a cup of tea with them. Giving your time and attention over a communal pot of tea is one of the nicest things you can do for anyone. Need a break from life? Drink a cup of tea. To make tea, first the water must boil, then the tea must steep, then the beverage must cool, and then you can finally begin to drink it. If you need a break, the patience required to make tea provides a nice, long one. I think tea is good for the soul, so when in doubt, drink a cup of tea. It’s bound to do you good.

4. Ask for directions.
Feeling lost, alone, and as if you’ll never arrive where you’re heading is one of the worst feelings to endure. Facing a fork in the road, or an empty field with no idea of where to turn is more than daunting. I’m all for figuring things out for yourself and I’m a huge supporter of heading out for the endless horizon, but that doesn’t mean you have to be above asking for directions. I regularly feel asking for help is often harder than bumbling around in the dark by myself, but there are also many times when a point in the right direction could have saved me hours of frustration. Getting lost isn’t always a bad thing, since it can lead you to places you’d ordinarily overlook or help you get better at navigating, but always thinking you know better, refusing to reach out to others, and fighting your own private pride war is foolhardy at best and life-threatening at worst. Asking for directions helps you connect with others, helps make you more aware of where you are, and helps get you where you’re going in a much more pleasant way. I used to shy away from asking for any kind of help, now I relish asking for directions as a way to start conversations and meet people.

5. Browse.
I think one of the best ways to milk life for joy is to enjoy browsing. If you can learn to love browsing for books, music, clothes, and other material goods as much if not more than you love buying those same things, then you’ve essentially quadrupled your fun. I personally love everything about travel, from picking dates and destinations, researching the best airfare, and haggling for the sweetest hotel deals to studying the subway maps and bus routes, writing about my impressions of the city before I go sightseeing, and organising my photos from my trip when I get home. Not to sound like a maxim from a bad kung fu movie, but it really is about the journey, not the destination. The more you can love the journey in its entirety — preparing for, embarking on, and having taken the journey, wherever that may be — the more opportunities there are for happiness. Start enjoying the browsing, the observing, the being there and you’ll find you’ve added a big spoonful of happiness to the mix.

I’ll be travelling 21 days in November. That’s 70% of the month. Yowzers. posted on 28 Oct 2009 by Leigh to twitter

That’s no exaggeration. I will be away on travels for 70% of November, 74% if I count a camping trip I cut from the calendar once I realised how insane it was to spend more time on planes and trains, open roads and busy hotels than falling asleep in your own bed. I feel like I’ve reached a new pinnacle in my status as traveller now that I’ll be essentially absent for the better part of a month. And I’m not just embarking on a 21-day trip, either. I’ll be taking four separate journeys (each of which has their own mini-stops), touching down on home soil for sometimes a week, sometimes just a few hours. It’s a good mix of travel as well: I’ll be visiting friends and family just as often as I’ll be going solo, I’ll be travelling for work and for play and for in-between alike, and I’ll be hitting up the east cost and the west coast and some of the turf in between. I foresee needing a small library of books, a case of granola bars, and my own pillow.

Do not for one microsecond think I’m complaining, because to be honest, I’m thrilled to be travelling this much. While I wouldn’t want to make a habit of tuckering myself out in such a short span of time, a little excitement is nothing to balk at. To the outsider it can seem like I’m rushing about from place to place, but let’s be realistic, travel is a much slower beast than the calendar lets on. There’s the waiting to do, see, or go, and then the sitting while you’re getting from point a to point b, and of course periods of intense activity when a deadline presents itself or an event occurs, followed by leisurely periods of downtime before you get up and do it all again. I love the single-taskedness of travelling; right now I’ve nothing to do but pass the time by working or reading a book, now I’m working on the task at hand, now all I can do is sit back and observe, now it’s time to interact with the world around you, right now it’s time to unwind, explore, create, etc. You never have to choose because travelling limits what you can do. So when I was in Amsterdam, what I was supposed to be doing became incredibly clear. During the day I was supposed to explore. When I was hungry I was supposed to eat. When I got home it was time to work. When others were available to meet up it was time to go out. There’s no balancing act required.

Things are certainly simplified when travelling, as described above, but travel also amplifies other things. As Alain de Botton describes so acutely in his book, “The Art of Travel,” you cannot help but take yourself with you when you depart. It’s impossible not to check your emotional baggage along with your suitcase and even when you thought you’d left it behind, there it is, circling the luggage carousel, waiting to be carried on your back into paradise. De Botton notes that, without the distractions of our familiar surroundings and with the added expectations of our unfamiliar ones, our problems grow louder, our fears grow bigger, our outlook, darker, until they are impossible to ignore and you could be in Barbados but it isn’t going to make a fight with your wife any easier, especially if your rented cabana has no doors to slam. To some extent, this is very true, but there’s another side of it pessimistic Botton likes to ignore. Your laughter is louder, your joys are bigger, your triumphs, brighter, until you find yourself with a curious sensation you’d thought died with childhood. From this experience, some people, like Botton, write books, while others, like Edward Hopper, paint on canvas. Stephen Shore takes pictures, Che Guevara fights revolutions, Edward Ruscha throws typewriters out of speeding cars. It affects us all differently. Today, with travel so accessible, there are even more fruits of the travel labours. Tom Kevill-Davies cycles, Lindsay Nash and Whit Altizer blog, Gary Arndt publishes podcasts, Mariana van Zeller makes movies, and both Davey and Matt dance.

“It must be nice…”

I travel a lot. And as anyone who travels a lot knows, I hear this phrase a lot. “It must be nice you can afford to travel so much. The rest of us have to live responsibly.” Yes, because liking to travel automatically implies I’m irresponsible. “It must be nice that you can just leave whenever you want. I have a job to hold down.” Of course, because all trips just happen without planning, and the only people who travel are unemployed. “It must be nice to be able to do what you want all the time, when I have a spouse and kids to think about.” Sure, because I don’t have anything else to worry about in my life just because I’m child-less. “It must be nice to be so young you can travel like that.” Absolutely, because Melena RTW and Jason Harris aren’t at least twice my age and travel more than I do. It must be nice, because I seem to like it, and I seem to do it, but I also seem to not be the only one. It bothers me that travel is still associated with something only the upper crust or collegiate get to do, when it’s become something so much more accessible than it was years ago. And it is nice to travel as much as I do if you like it as much as I do, but it isn’t nice because I’m independently wealthy (I’m not), because I’m so unencumbered (I’m not), or because I’m in some magical life stage that makes mine so much easier than yours (it’s not). I have an edge over some folks who have a mortgage or a dog or a bum leg, but that doesn’t mean travelling three-quarters of the month is out of the question for you either. You just have to want it.

Now, I’m not saying simply the will alone is enough to find the way, but rather travel is a question of priorities. You can have many interests — I’d like to (and am trying to) learn Japanese, along with 42 other things — but they aren’t priorities, because your decisions can only be motivated by a choice few things you care about, and your priorities are it. I have not found a magical beanstalk or genie, I have just made travel a priority because it is so fulfilling to me right now. I have other priorities, and sometimes my priority to make rent and feed myself takes precedence over visiting Buenos Aires, but just as often my priority to go somewhere pushes me to buy that ticket. Having travel as a priority doesn’t mean I drain my bank accounts just to get away, it means I spend my money on hotel reservations and train tickets instead of shoes and books. I spend my free time combing Travel Zoo and researching destinations instead of browsing facebook. I spend my energy planning the next excursion and I spend my brainpower daydreaming about what Croatia is really like and I spend my hard drive space on my travel photographs. There’s nothing wrong with spending it any other way, it’s just different, and it’s different for me because travel is a priority. So if you’re going to say “its’ nice that…” say it’s nice that travelling is one of my priorities.