Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Convert Passion to Income

I'll post an excerpt from this guy's site and let you read the rest from his site if you like. I thought it was a good read. I would expect to read this on the Grits blog.

The 3 Sacred Steps to Converting Passion to Income

1. Separate passion from reality.
We must start with brainstorming your passion projects in a way that encourages success. Unfortunately most people do the opposite.
As humans, our immediate reaction to someone’s new idea (or our own) often is to figure out why it won’t work. I know, sad but true. The problem is that when you get critical of something the moment the idea comes up, it gets stomped out immediately. It might not even make it more than a sentence or two before someone else yells out the reasons it ‘obviously’ won’t work. Then you feel stupid and move on.
But if that idea were given say five or ten minutes of brainstorming whiteboard action, along with a solid dose of open, creative and non-critical discussion, it’s very possible that the idea would turn out to have some merit.
Imagine how many brilliant ideas get killed too soon due to premature criticism.
This happens with passion every day—even if we’re just doing it in our own head (which is the most likely and most dangerous case). A lot of times when we task ourselves to think of our passions we only allow ourselves to play in part of the sandbox. Since the end goal is to find something we can make a living from, we subconsciously discard the ideas that are totally off the wall. We stifle our creativity without even knowing it.
In order to have a fighting chance at developing world-changing business ideas or personal passion pursuits, you absolutely must separate the creative and the critical stages.
Brainstorm your most far-out dreams of passion careers you can think of. Then wait for at least a few days if not a week or more before you start to get practical and critical. Mark my words, for every wild idea you come up with, I’m sure there’s already someone out there making a great living off it (and that’s a good thing). More on finding them below.

2. Be the expert you already are.
One of the most common barriers keeping people from making money from their passion is the belief that you don’t know something well enough to get paid to teach it to someone else.
That’s just flat wrong – You know more than you think. Being an expert is purely relative and based largely on perception.
The crazy thing is once you find something you’re passionate about, you’ll likely realize it’s something you’ve been learning and improving upon for years and maybe even decades. You have more experience with your passion than likely 99% of those around you, simply because you love doing it.
If you’ve been on this earth for at least a couple decades, I guarantee you’re an expert at something. Give yourself some credit. Find what it is and find the people who desperately need your help. Combine the two and living off your passion starts to become a reality.

From: Zenhabit

Friday, November 25, 2011

I'm thankful for you.

I wanted to take a minute and make a quick list of the things I am thankful for. I'm often very busy and easily loose sight of what I am thankful for so I figured this would be a good place for this list.
I am grateful for:

1. My healthy beautiful daughter Joaney.
2. My beautiful and crazy smart g/f Carly.
3. My family, they are capable of more than they can even imagine. (can't thank my mom enough)
4. My brother from another mother Joel. He is a great producer and always inspires me.
5. My truck. Seriously, I have pounded on that thing for years and it has not let me down once. 01 Silverado
6. MY Health! I recently had a bout with some type of lung infection. Doctor gave me great meds and I can             return to the gym again full throttle.
7. My career, I work for an IT consulting firm as help desk and I love it!
8. My fingers (i know this falls under health), I've broken a couple of them over the years trying to learn automotive mechanics. I've been fortunate enough to keep all my fingers and my fingers have always healed up to where I could continue to play guitar. I don't really work on cars anymore.

9. You. If you are reading this, then you are my friend. If I have not hung out with you then hopefully one day we will.
Leave a comment below and let me know what you are thankful for. I want to hear from you.

Inspiring freaks

I love the internet! When I first started playing guitar. My uncle loaned me his treasured case of cassettes. It was a collection of the weirdest, fastest and most amazing guitarists he had come across in his years of playing. I was inspired although I spent most of my time learning classic stuff from Slash, Dimebag, and J Yuenger. With the internet budding guitarist have all the freak guitarist at their fingertips. Guys like Chris Impelliterri blew me away as a kid cause the guy is so fast you cannot see his fingers move, crazy stuff.
I'm not as moved by speed as I was. I love melody and stuff I haven't heard or seen. I stumbled across this guy the other day and was pretty impressed.
Check out his site He made this 27 string guitar!

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Wierd ebay

I've been leaving strange comments on ebay lately. Stuff like claiming the seller saved me from a burning building or that the seller shipped me something better than I bought but I'm just not sure what it is yet. It makes this xkcd comic even funnier to me.

From Jul 7, 2011


Friday, November 18, 2011

WORKOUT!

This is my first week back in the gym. My diet has been excellent this week. It's the weekends that my diet has to work about. Spent my day off of work getting student loans in order and I'm about to hit the gym. I've been so busy this week prepping food and hitting the gym, I haven't had to track any guitar work. I'm currently 264 lbs and 6'7". Definitely the biggest I've ever been. Got my studio area cleaned up to make it easier to start tracking guitars.



Lovin' the Eleven Rack! Lovin' the iphone 4s! Off to work out before I go pick up my munchkin.

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Loads

Lots to catch up on here. Carly (my g/f) took Joaney and I to the Aquarium of the Americas in downtown New Orleans last weekend (See pics below). Kinda freaky when I think about it cause if I fall into the water when swinging onto one of these drilling rigs then that's what I'll be swimming with (Gar, sharks, sting rays and fish larger than sharks.) I'm working for a tech support company that supports many offshore rigs.
Finally got my iphone 4s. Love this thing! I haven't been a big fan of Macs in the past but their mobile platform is outstanding. I've figured out how to do things on this phone faster than any of my past phones (Symbian, blackberry). I've had it for almost a week and I haven't sexually harassed Siri yet! My coworker could resist asking her what she was wearing though. She promptly responded "You have the wrong assistant."

I picked up and Eleven Rack guitar preamp the other day on ebay for dirt. This thing really sounds like some of the amps it is modelling! I say some because I've never heard a Soldano, Splawn, or a Titan head but they sound amazing modeled. I can't wait to start tracking guitar for the stuff I've been recording lately. If you need help updating the firmware on one give me a buzz. I fought it for a week and I can quickly walk you through the confusing process!

My brother is starting to build guitars. Like anything he tries, he has dove head first into modifying, painting and assembling guitars. I've been really surprised at some of the stuff he has done so far. I'll try and post some pics soon of his latest works.

 She wasn't crazy about the birds.




 Joaney, Mady and Kate
Joaney and Mady