BryanPovlinski.com

Yesterday I stumbled upon a blog by Matt Morris who is a motivational speaker and author of a “Think and Grow Rich” style book called The Unemployed Millionaire.  I haven’t read his book, and this was actually the first I had ever heard of him.  I don’t necessarily endorse his work (the reviews of his book on Amazon were a little bit sketchy), but I did like one of the things he mentioned in one of the videos on his blog.

Success = Level of skill MULTIPLIED by level of effort

So essentially skill and effort are equally important when determining how successful you are.  I think it’s widely believed that your level of skill is what you need to improve if you’re going to be successful.  “Only the smartest people can do x.”  In reality, your effort contributes just as much to success as your skill.  Think about the saying “Practice beats talent when talent doesn’t practice.”  I heard that more than enough times on the basketball court growing up, and I might not have thought much about it then, but I realize now how true that statement is.  Even if you’re not the most skilled, you can accomplish what you want if you’re willing to put in the work to get there.  Of course, you have to develop your skills to some degree because you’ll end up beating your head against a wall if you don’t take the time to learn and improve your skills.

Think about how that can help you achieve your goals.  What do you need to work on more? Skill or effort?

Last night I watched the classic Christmas movie “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and it really made me think about my priorities.

I read an article once (and I can’t find it for the life of me) that had a couple exercises for finding your true passion or what you truly wanted out of life.  One of these exercises was to write down all the things you think you might be passionate about, or some of the things you really want to do in life.  Then read through the list, and your true passion is the one that makes you cry.  You cry because you want it so badly and it would mean so much to you to accomplish it.

Now I’m not someone that gets all sentimental and starts crying in any feel-good movie.  But I’ve watched “It’s a Wonderful Life” twice now, and I haven’t been able to keep my eyes dry yet.

Throughout the movie you start to think of George Bailey as an underachiever.  He has grand plans to travel the world, and build things like cities or buildings.  He has the chance to get involved in a very lucrative business opportunity.  He even denies an offer from Mr. Potter to drastically increase his salary.  It seems like he’s stuck in a rut, and he’s not able to advance in his career or achieve some of his lofty goals.

Yet you realize that George is actually living the richest life of anyone in town.  He has a loving family that adores him, and he’s single-handedly helped most of the hardworking folk in town to own a house over their head through his Building and Loan Association.  Because of George, Bedford Falls was a better place and almost everyone who knew George had a better life.  When George was in trouble, everyone came rushing to his aide because they knew George had made a big difference in their life.

I’m moved to try to model my life after George Bailey.  The way he was able to help so many people on an individual basis is exactly what I want to spend my time doing.  Owning a Building and Loan Association is not in my plans, but the two areas that I think I can make a difference in the lives of my friends and neighbors are:

1. Technology and using new web applications

2. Fitness

It’s my New Year’s Resolution to focus on creating a new strategy around these two areas, and devoting a lot more of my time to this than I have been.  Be on the lookout  for some new stuff coming soon!

I’m the kind of person who wants to know how to do everything. Lately, I’ve been extremely interested in the blend between business and technology. I’ve bought quite a few books on topics like new media marketing, entrepreneurship, etc.

Currently, I’m reading Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernhoff and I’ve recently read Free by Chris Anderson.  Both of them have taught me a lot about where the business world is heading, and how technology will play a major role.

I’ve also been interested in learning how to build websites and how I can start some of my own projects.  I’ve started by dabbling in blogs.  First, I started on WordPress.com with The Idea Exchange.  It was fun for a little while, and I started getting a few comments here and there.  I learned how to submit my new posts to Digg, Reddit, and Stumbleupon and it was pretty exciting when I got a wave of traffic from those sites.  I just kept getting frustrated with the fact that I couldn’t really customize my blog the way I wanted to on WordPress.com.

I graduated onto Typepad.com with my Career Kickstarter blog about a year ago.  My goal with the new blog was to provide a resource for college students and recent graduates on everything I was learning as I started my career.  I planned to document some of the things that went poorly and some of my own success stories.  I learned how to add my own HTML to pages, bring in 3rd part widgets, and put Adsense ads on my site.  I learned quite a bit about how things worked together, but I was still frustrated by the fact that I couldn’t really customize things any way I wanted.  I would see some cool new functionality on another blog that I wanted on mine, and then I couldn’t figure out how to make it work or it just wasn’t possible with Typepad.  Plus I couldn’t have my own domain…it had to be careerkickstarter.typepad.com which I never really liked.

Now I’m here on my own hosted WordPress platform.  I haven’t done everything I wanted yet (far from it).  But I feel confident that I can make changes when I find a new idea that I want to implement.  I still have a lot to learn, and I plan to take some tutorials on PHP so I can really get into customizing the WordPress templates.  You’ll probably be seeing a lot of changes to this blog while I tinker and experiment with everything I’m learning.

That brings me back to the original point of this post.  I would have never gotten to where I am now if I just took classes about blogging or read a book about it.  I probably would have been able to talk about blogging , and been able to understand what most things mean but I wouldn’t have been able to actually do anything on my own.

I’ve gotten a lot of value in experimenting and learning how things work on my own.  However, sometimes it gets to the point where I really want to make something work, but I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing.  That’s where I think it’s valuable to talk to an expert or someone who has more experience than you.  I changed my blog over to a new domain because I originally installed it at www.bryanpovlinski.com/blog.  I didn’t have anything that I wanted to put at www.bryanpovlinski.com so I set out to move everything over.  It ended up being a lot more complicated than I thought.  I ended up having to go into the .htaccess file to make changes.  Now I had read about the .htaccess file before and I knew what it was, but I had no idea that I needed to go in and edit it.  The installation of wordpress has hundreds of individual files, and I never would have known which one to go in and change.  Luckily, my friend and co-worker Brandon Corbin is just across the office and he knew what I needed to do.  Now I know it’s not always possible to have an expert of whatever you’re trying to learn sitting right next to you at work.  If you do, perfect, ask them for as much help as you can.  Here are a couple more resources that I’ve used to get expert advice.

LinkeIn Answers

I had heard about this, but I didn’t realize how active people are on this site.  There are experts out there that subscribe to keywords that they are experts in so that they can respond as soon as someone asks a question about their expertise.  I asked a question about ecommerce and had 7 answers in the first day from people who are experts in that field.  If you have any business or technology related question LinkedIn is an outstanding resource.

Twitter

Twitter is another great resource because mostly everyone on Twitter is extremely open to responding to questions and helping each other out when they can.  Again there are people on Twitter that use search and RSS to subscribe to keywords that they know a lot about.  These people are eager to answer questions and help others out when they can.  Twitter is also a great way to reach out to others in your local area that you might be able to meet up with to talk about your project.  Services like Twellow are great because you can search for Twitter users by city and by topic to find people in your area that might be able to help you.

Online Forums

When I first got my hosting account with Bluehost I had an issue with uploading images and video so I posted in the help forums.  I had a response by the next morning that helped me solve my problem.  Another forum that I’ve used a few times that is popular with the web marketing community is the Digital Point Forums.  There’s a forum for any single topic that you can think of so it might be a useful place to go when you’re really stuck on a problem.

What other places do you know where you can get specific expert advice quickly?

This is a question I ask myself quite often. On an everyday basis, how am I being useful and valuable to others? I’m pretty sure that the value you create for others is proportionate to what you get back yourself. Think about Bill Gates. The reason he is so rich is that Microsoft and it’s Windows operating system and Office productivity suite made things better for so many people. Businesses could use software programs on the Windows operating system to operate rather than keeping written records. Everyday people could use computers to store information, play games, and communicate better with each other. Those are all incredibly valuable and Bill Gates obviously made out pretty well himself.

Every day I think about what kind of value I’m creating. I hope this blog becomes valuable a couple (hopefully more) people. What are you doing to create value?

So this is the first post on Bryanpovlinski.com.  I’m excited about this new arena because I’m not limited to a certain topic.  I’m realizing that I have a lot of interests, and I’d like to be able to voice my opinion on any of them whenever I want.  With Career Kickstarter I tried to narrow the focus to career related advice.  I’m definitely interested in my career and giving advice for others to find their path, but I’m by no means an expert and it becomes a chore to post career thoughts several times per week.  Here on Bryanpovlinski.com I’m going to be talking about a few different things.  One theme that I hope to talk about often is using online tools to make improvements in your life.  I think that new technology tools are seriously underused by the general public, and there is some value in simply making people aware of some of the awesome new tools available online.  I’m also passionate about entrepreneurship and doing side projects for fun and profit.  I’m also extremely interested in the world of online marketing, and I’m learning quite a bit about that area in my job with Sigma Micro in Indianapolis.  Finally, I hope to write a lot shorter posts here instead of trying to work really hard on long, informative posts.  I know you don’t want to read long posts so I might as well keep things short for your sake and mine.  I’ll also be integrating my Twitter profile and comments on other blog posts/articles through my Posterous and Delicious.  Hope you like the new blog!