Book: Killing Floor – Lee Child

Wow – this is the first fiction book I’ve read since Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, which I read a week after it was published! I hurt my ankle playing football (soccer) on Thursday and that meant this weekend was not going to be spent on the golf course or on my bike. Sophie has been mad for all the Lee Child/Jack Reacher books and so I asked her to recommend me one to read on Friday evening. By Sunday afternoon I’d finished it!

Lee Child - Killing Floor

If you enjoy simple to read, fast paced, action books – this is one for you! I’m not going to try and do a proper review as I’m not much of a literary critic, but I enjoyed it so much I’ve got another one in the series next to my bed to get ready to start.

It was also really nice reading some fiction before bed instead of a business book. I think I actually slept better this weekend than I had done for a long time. Need to switch off sometimes.

Mixergy Top 10 Interviews

I’ve been watching Mixergy for as long as I can remember. Andrew Warner is a machine in putting out quality interviews nearly every working day. I sometimes think I might miss an important interview because I miss a few of them now and again.

I wrote some code that would find out how many times a url has been mentioned on Twitter or Shared/Liked on Facebook. I realized I could use this to put together a Top 10 Mixergy interviews based on social sharing.

So here are the top 10 in terms of Tweets and Facebook Likes:

1, The Master Of Power, Seduction And War – with Robert Green

2, Would WordPress Sue The Maker Of Thesis, A Leading WordPress Theme? – with Chris Pearson and Matt Mullenweg

3, 37signals Is Selling Sortfolio. What Happened? – with Jason Fried

4, How Khan Academy Is Changing Education With Videos Made In A Closet – with Salman Khan

5, Blasphemy & Revelation – with David Heinemeier Hansson

6, $80,000 A Month In App Sales By Outsourcing EVERYTHING – with Mike Moon and Quoc Bui

7, Sun Microsystems’ Pioneering Co-Founder Gives A Rare Interview – with Scott McNealy

8, Zaarly: How To Get 100,000 Subscribers In 3.5 Months – with Bo Fishback

9, The Story Of Groupon: From Failure To An Industry-Changing, Profit Machine – with Andrew Mason

10, How To Build A Profitable Education Business – with Laura Roeder

If people are interested I can upload a bigger leaderboard.

Just to note, this is far from a perfect way of ranking the interviews – but it is *a* way. Some issues:
– earlier interviews probably didn’t have as many viewers so won’t have had as many tweets/likes
– newer interviews won’t have had as much time to get the clicks. This should hopefully be worked out if I did this again in 6 months time.
– bigger names to interview probably attract more tweets/likes. There are still many great interviews by lesser known people you should watch.
– I’d like to include some other signals – such as number of comments for each interview.

If you’d like me to run this against your site to figure out which of your pages are getting the most Likes/Tweets send me an email at nick.swan@gmail.com. It can even be run against a competitors site!!! This is useful for two reasons:

1, See which of your content attracts sharing
2, Compare your site against your competitors, and see what content of theirs promotes sharing!

Should you always try to turn your passion into a business?

I was out riding my bike the other day. The roads were wet and the wind was cold but I was loving it. As I made my way down a country road I started to think about how I could turn this re-found passion into a money making venture!

…I could start a blog about cycling…
…I could start a site where you could list all your different cycling routes in your area…
…I could start a daily deals site just for people who love biking…!

Whoa there a second fella! Just because you enjoy doing something does not mean you have to try and turn it into a money making venture. I’ve done this before – with golf. I tried starting a blog, a positive re-enforcement type site (www.3goodshots.com) and although they started gaining a tiny bit of traction, nether took off as much as I hoped. And as the sites didn’t do too well, I started to dislike golf too! When I did go out and play I was thinking about blog posts I could write, how to get more visitors etc etc. I blame Gary Vaynerchuk and his book Crush It to some degree! (you should still read it though, it is a good book 🙂 )

Since I’ve stopped trying to make web sites around golf I’ve started to enjoy it again.

Of course you do need to have a passion for what you do – my passion is around building things with code. I’m just going to be careful not to mix other passions up with coding quite so much in future. Make sure you pick your projects carefully.

Book review : Uncertainty by Jonathan Fields

Just before Christmas I finished reading Uncertainty by Jonathon Fields. It’s a really good book which I gave 5 stars on Amazon. It has also helped me work through a few issues such as ‘dealing with burnout’ and ‘being public about projects’.

Uncertainty by Jonathan Fields

The overall premise of the book is that people are scared of exposing and being judged on their work. And yet this is exactly what is needed by people who are working on new projects that aim to move things forward.

Constantly exposing yourself to judgement from others can be tiring, exhausting and even scary. People can even back away from this process and become really introverted about the work they are doing. The book also covers a number of things that can help with this such as creating routines and anchors to ensure you get your creative work done.

It also goes into some detail about looking after your body and mind, as without these being in a great state you will never be able to create good work. This is something I realized just before reading this book so it was nice to have it confirmed by someone else. It is common sense of course – but often when you are head down trying to get things done common sense goes out the window and you forget to do the most basic things such as eating healthy and exercising.

It’s also easy when you are head down, working hard, to head off in a direction you never wanted to go. As the book refers to it:

It’s easy, as a creator, to fall into the habit of showing up and simply doing the work every day without ever stopping to examine whether your current direction is truly serving your muse, your greater life, and your community.

Sometimes you need to step back from the process and evaluate if the work you are doing will get you to where you want to go. The hard thing for me at the moment though is figuring out where I want to go as it seems to change each time I think about it 🙂