At the end of the year there are overviews and top-this-and-thats all over. The short version: a lot has happened to us as a global community. It has been an interesting year as well, and hopefully it has also been a year that gave you something to aim for towards the future.
We aren’t in the new year yet though: these are the days in limbo while we’re all counting down…. It’s almost there and in that the end of the year is the perfect time to sit back and reflect on all that has gone down (besides goofing off, family time, running errands, video games, movies, books, doing nothing and everything). That’s why today’s article are 5 lessons that I learned in 2020.
Things can turn around, just like that
This may be the closest reference to the pandemic. Initially. This one comes around on and off every few years, usually when tragedy strikes with the tragic passing of close friends or family members. Or when other things end at the flip of a switch. This year it was that mass event that hit everyone hard.
On the other end of that notion is one of my reasons for moving abroad for a few years, back in 2012: the extreme over-regulation of life up in The West. Don’t get me wrong though, I prefer to live in an organized society where you will have this notion of life as being so-and-so. It just has to do with the extent where The Spark has been regulated out of everything.
During the years prior to my move in 2012, I had this feeling that my life for the next 25 years would just be a continuation of the status quo that I was in back then. Looking back, my life wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t how I wanted it to be either. But all that was more of a rationalization of a feeling, because the feeling that I walked around with all those years was a sort of home-sick-ness for the ascend (if that makes any sense).
My point being: the pandemic is something that happened to us, but when you seize an opportunity it’s a small step that you willingly take and it will pay for itself in more ways than you can imagine.
A little pressure, but not too much
I was reminded by this principle in a video that I saw recently, and I discussed this in the first ever Friday Fold-up. In so many words it comes down to this: when you’re out of a job, you might think that it would give you the ultimate incentive, motivation and direction to learn a new skillset that will lead to employment.
This is the notion that is explored in that video, and the guy talking has come to this conclusion after teaching some course. He had expected that people who were in big need of a new job would outperform those who did it mostly to pick up a new skill, but who weren’t dependent on doing so to make a living. It turned out that the opposite was true.
And if you think about it: this absolutely makes sense. Being without employment or income is highly stressful, which means that you won’t be as effective in performing intellectual tasks (learning new skills). The key take-away here is to figure out the basics first; go after a small job that pays the bills, and figure out your next move while you have established that base-line.
Starting something online is really, really hard
I think we all have this day-dream on and off about acquiring a passive source of income. At the surface it may seem an easy enough task, but in reality it’s really hard. I’m still in the process myself, and part of my attempt with this site is to document the effort in such a way that it may be helpful to others. My first few attempts at writing the kind of fiction that people will enjoy with well defined themes, strong characters and a silver lining didn’t exactly take off (see The Entity, The Island and The Bird Man).
I still feel that I’m on to something here, and that’s why I’m not ready to just give up. Even if it was just for that little notion that’s stuck in the back of my mind: highly successful individuals didn’t just become successful over night.
What turned things around this year was a deeper understanding about the basics of SEO. If you’re new to this, I definitely recommend that you watch this video series. It explains in simple steps what SEO is all about, and you can utilize that to create content and ultimately a product that people actually want.
When I started figuring out how to write fiction, and how to do it well, I started with myself in mind: most new books are poorly written and uninspired, and same goes for most new movies on streaming platforms. I thought that other people would feel the same way, and that if I just wrote those amazing stories, then they’d sell like hot-cakes.
That obviously didn’t happen, so I needed to figure out a next strategy. That’s why I started writing articles based on SEO, together with additional articles that are linked to this. That’s more or less the story in a nutshell, and I try to build this out into a larger frame-work.
What caused one article to take-off (and why it didn’t soar)
I learned the finer details of SEO in June, right around the time with all the demonstrations and unrest in the US and around the world. It obviously was a hot issue, people were looking for an understanding and there wasn’t that much related content available yet.
I managed to write one article that got picked up without too much effort. For a few days the traffic to my site spiked, but then it dropped again because I didn’t have that much of a framework available to get people hooked. The traffic was also more because of posts on Facebook and Reddit, because I had posted that article on a new blog that hadn’t been picked up yet by the google algorithm. But it did take off for a while, because it was the kind of story that people were actually interested in at the time.
To be hopeful is a powerful thing
This last one is linked to the pandemic, albeit side-ways. Moving forward in life we don’t always know what will be waiting for us, and to be fearful and hesitant is an initial response of many. But it’s not the kind of response that will get you towards creating a better future for yourself and those that you love.
Come to think of it, maybe this one is closer connected to a New Year-message than anything else: we owe it to ourselves, we owe it to those around us, we owe it to those that we love the most to be hopeful towards the future.
Think about it, whenever you start something new, whenever you decide to take that first step, you don’t know if any of it will work out. What you do know is that you believe that it will work. You may call it moxie, confidence, being a little full of yourself, but today I will stick with hopefulness.
Have a wonderful last few days of 2020.
(and if you read this some time after: good luck on your next enterprise).
Continue reading
Apple Sucks: why people stick with bad relations
On the decline of Apple-products linked to the 2016 democratic party, 2007/2008 recession and decay of democracy.
Axis pandemic-recession: how to solve social inequalities
On the real problems that the recession has unveiled, and how we as a society might turn all of that around.
Living autobiographically: how to use narrative identity
On writing the story of our lives in such a way that we can live with ourselves.
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