What did I challenge myself to do?

I followed this post written by Glen Allsop in his blog on pure self-discipline and challenged myself the following three things:

1. One blog post everyday in this blog for seven days

2. No twitter

3. Sleep for not more than 6 hours (11PM-5AM)

The Results:

1. One blog post everyday for seven days

This one didn’t come out like I wished. I was supposed to write 7 posts (one everyday). But I ended up writing only 4 posts. But hey, 4 posts in 7 days is better than 1 post a week. It was quite hard to write one post a day since I’m not quite used to it.

This challenge helped me a lot and I’m sure my posting frequency will only get better. Also I’ll be concentrating on quality of blog posts.

2. No twitter

This one was a success. I didn’t post a single tweet for a full week. In fact I hadn’t posted for 2 days when I started the challenge. That makes 9 days of no tweeting. There were 3-4 tweets which were automated from Friendfeed. I disabled the automatic ‘friendfeed to twitter’ posting one day before the challenge ended.

This increased my productivity. I had time to accomplish a lot of things.

3. Sleep for not more than 6 hours (11PM-5AM)

This went on well on all days except Saturday. On Saturday, I slept at 12PM and got up at only 8AM. That’s 8 hours. The rest of the days were pretty good. I didn’t sleep exactly at 11PM or get up exactly at 5AM but somewhat in that range.

This also helped me in becoming more productive. I had time to play football (or soccer if that’s how you call it) every morning with my friends and yet get my work done.

This challenge is surely a success. Now I can stay away from twitter whenever I wish and still be happy. I can get up early in the morning and be productive throughout the day.

Did you take up the challenge? Or will you be taking up the challenge? Please let me know your views in the comments. I’ll be glad to hear what you have got to share.

Image Source: My design for Twitter’s “over capacity” screen by Mykl Roventine

It is so common for people to face negatives. By negatives, I mean those things that you don’t want to happen. Let us focus on the blogging part of our life alone now.

Image: Optimist, PlanTrees by Heart of Oak

Scenario 1 – Broken Blog Theme

You start a blog and in just few days your blog theme doesn’t function properly due to some change you did in the code while editing your blog sidebar. Would you sit down and get angry over your blog? I know people who quit blogging because things don’t go their way.

What should you do?

Instead of getting angry at yourself for editing the sidebar, sit straight for a moment. Clear the fear in your mind. Login to a social networking site (me in twitter) or instant messenger and ask for your friends for help. Do what your (trusted) friend says.

The hidden positive

You know how to solve the issue that you faced. So now you don’t need to be afraid again when editing your blog’s code. Also you will understand how helpful your friends are.

Image: Optimism by baejaar

Scenario 2 – Comment Spam

This happens for almost every blog. It is funny how the spammers get to know about your blog before the search engines even index it. If your blog doesn’t receive comment spam, you can consider yourself lucky or your blog is not worth being in the internet. Okay maybe that is too much. Anyway, don’t get angry with the spam comments.

What you should do?

Install Akismet plugin for WordPress. If you still get many spam comments, especially from a particular IP address, block that IP address.

The hidden positive

See the spam comments this way. The more spam comments you get, more popular your blog is. In mathematical terms:

Comment spam is directly proportional to your blogs popularity.

The next time you receive spam comments, be happy that your blog got one step more popular.

Image: Money by jenn_jenn

Scenario 3 – A Big $0 Income from Your Blog

Blogs will not earn you money (a living) unless you get huge traffic. It won’t earn you even a penny when you are starting unless you are really good at it. I never earned a penny on the first day. Sometimes you won’t earn money after 1, 2 or even 6 months.

What you should do?

This is the tough period in blogging. Once you cross this, you will start earning money (I cannot guarantee a living). Keep your focus on blogging and do it as a hobby. This way it will never bore you when you are waiting for the numbers to appear in your paypal or adsense account.

The hidden positive

You will learn how not to quit when you are facing hard challenges in your life. It will help you keep going even when the target you want to achieve is so far from you.

Almost every negative has a positive. You should only be happy when you are facing a negative.

A negative can teach you a lot more than what a positive can teach you.

So keep going in your life looking for the positives in every negative.

Please share your views in the comments.

What is the challenge?

Simple. You have to list your daily activities that you want to stop doing and those things that you want to do for 7 days in a row. This might sound a bit vague to you. I’ll explain everything in this post and I’ll tell you what I’m going to for this 7 day challenge.

Before you read everything, let me make it clear that you don’t have to pay for anything. This is just a simple and fun challenge.

First you have to sit down and write down your daily activities that are affecting your productivity. This can be something like “Don’t watch TV”. After you come up with those, write down a list of things that you want to do everyday. You can write things like workout for one hour a day.

Don’t set yourself with a big list. Limit the list to 5. As Leo Babauta says in his blog posts, “Start with one at a time”. You can start with 3-5 small things for this challenge. Not more than that.

My List (Starting on 03 June)

1. One blog post everyday in this blog for seven days

2. No twitter

3. Sleep for not more than 6 hours (11PM-5AM)

Why do I want to do these?

1. One blog a day for seven days

I have always felt that I don’t write a lot in this blog. I want to write good posts here and help bloggers learn more about blogging by sharing my experiences. I won’t be stopping it with seven days. I have planned to make it my habit. Let’s see how this one goes.

2. No twitter

I thought this should be the toughest of the three tasks I have set for myself. But seeing that I haven’t tweeted for the past 2 days, I’m sure I can do this. By not tweeting for a week, I will learn how to limit the time I spend on twitter. I normally spend 2-3 hours a day in twitter. But this challenge will help me limit the twitter usage after seven days.

I won’t stop tweeting completely after 7 days. I will tweet for 15-20 minutes a day after the challenge is over.

3. Sleep for not more than 6 hours

I normally get up at 6.00AM just in time to get ready for college. From today, I will sleep at 11PM itself and get up at 5AM so that I will have one hour extra in the morning for creating a ‘to do’ list for everyday.

Why 6 hours?

I always feel that one should sleep for 6 hours everyday to get full energy for the next day. Though many have proved to me that quality of sleep is much more important and even 5 hours of sleep would be enough. But I’m going to stick to 6 hours. I’ll sleep at 11PM and get up at 5AM. I will be doing this even after the challenge is over.

So those are my challenges. If you want to get involved in the challenge, get away from your computer right now and write down what you want to do for the challenge in a notebook. If you wish you can share it with me by writing a comment or writing it in a blog post or let me know by email.

Thanks to Glen for this idea. I recommend you to read his blog. You would also love his story.

For those who are asking me who John Reese is, he is a top class internet marketer who owns products like traffic secrets. You can call him the “traffic guy” because he knows a lot of stuff about getting traffic to a blog/website. Also he is popular for his “million dollar day”. He earned one million dollars in one day and that day is August 17, 2004. One of his recent projects is blog rush, which was closed down recently. Though it didn’t work as expected, it did have a lot of plus points in it.

I hear you say “That’s enough. Get me to the lessons which he is teaching.” He is neither teaching any lesson directly here nor did I attend any of his one-on-one coaching. I’m just an admirer of this guy. This post is about the lessons John Reese indirectly taught me with his blog rush project.

Image Source: JasonRogers

1. Be Creative
In the internet marketing world, you have to be creative. You have to come up with something unique to become a famous person. You have to represent yourself and you should not change or act like other person. Be creative and be unique in whatever you do. You have to think. Thinking has a lot of power. When you sit in a calm place and think for a while, you can come up with great ideas. So the first lesson is ‘be creative’.

2. Hard Work
You cannot expect to become successful without doing any hard work. A lot of hard work has been put to make blog rush work. Though it was shut down recently, it doesn’t mean the idea didn’t work. All the hard work reaped good results. It was brought down because some people tried to game the system. Over all, the system was perfect and all credits to the hard work of John Reese and co. Believe in the saying “The harder I work, the luckier I get”.

Image Source: JakoJellema (7j.nl)

3. Failure
John Reese pulled down blog rush and it didn’t work as expected due to the reason I have stated above. So the project is, to some extent, a failure. This brings you to the third lesson John is teaching us. Failure is something even the successful people experience. Every single arrow that is hit in the bull’s eye is a result of hundred misses. You should dare to try. As Robin Sharma, an internationally acclaimed leadership guru, says “The only failure in life is failing to try”. So never worry about failure.

4. Fame
John is already a famous person in the internet marketing world. He multiplied his fame by launching blog rush. Hundreds of blogs wrote about him. Almost the whole blogosphere was talking about him. This increased his fame by many times. It didn’t stop there. Even when blog rush was brought down, all the top blogs wrote about it and added much more fame to his name. Right now, many bloggers know John. The lesson is, whether you are doing it right or wrong, you will be noticed. You will get popular everyday if you are acting on your ideas. Let me warn you that doing something wrong or facing a failure is not same as committing a mistake repeatedly.

5. Learn
John would have had a good experience with blog rush even though it didn’t work quite well and he, now, knows what will work and what will not. You can learn only through experience. It can be either through your own experience or by watching others. When you want to know whether something would work or not, try it. Even if it doesn’t work, you will not have the guilt of not trying.

Even though John didn’t have expected level of success with blog rush, he at least had the confidence to try it. Though he didn’t earn any money from blog rush, he has earned enough fame.

What do you feel about the blog rush project? Do you think John would have had the happiness for at least trying it? Please share it in the comments.

P.S: Never get bored in twitter. Follow me and I’ll keep you engaged (at least when I’m awake). I’m Ramkarthik in twitter.