Link Soup :: The Internet Money Fountain

Link Soup is your weekly rundown of my little corner of the blogsphere. I scour the internet and give you the skinny so all you genius types can spend more time finding the secret to world peace, having a peanut-butter-and-jelly, or whatever you do wherever it is you are.

The Goal/Moment Conundrum

Nneka over at Balanced Life Center brings to light a fascinating dilemma in her article, Goal Achievement and the Collapse of Time. This one is especially relevant for all you goal driven creative types.

This well-written article hit home for me because I can be borderline obsessive when it comes to goal planning. There are days when I spend more time in my primitive-but-effective day planner than I do working. I’ll spend all day on a spreadsheet optimizing my driving patterns for the next six months and then lock my keys in the running car.

My girlfriend (who’s a very relaxed, enthusiastic, and aware individual) always gives me a hard time. You spend so much time in the future, you forget about the now! she tells me.

She wants me to work on living in the moment. I say that sounds great, but what about all of these goals we want to accomplish? Turns out we’re a perfect match: I spend all day planning the future and forget the moment, she spends all day in the moment and forgets to plan!

Nneka talks about a guy named Eckhart Tolle who writes about two different types of time: clock time and psychological time. I love this kind of stuff because it fits right in with my thoughts on duality, this time existing in time itself.

Turns out, we need to master both kinds of time to achieve a goal. We first need to be able to put ourselves in the future to create it. Then, when the moment of action presents itself, we need to be present to make the decision to follow through.

Social Network Overload

Ryan Mapes thinks that there is something fishy about social networks. He points out that they have millions upon millions of members, a handful of employees in someone’s apartment, but no money to show for it.

What’s up with that? Are they not optimizing their traffic to the max, or are social networks just a bad business model?

Speaking of which, I have social networks coming out my ears! I can’t keep up with them all, let alone remember their passwords. If my trusty OSX didn’t remember them all for me I guess I would be stranded.

Oh yeah… let me take this opportunity to shamelessly promote my networks on MyBlogLog, LinkedIn, Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, and Stumble Upon.

The Internet Money Fountain

And yet another blogger finds himself making a ridiculous amount of money overnight by typing on his keyboard. I know it’s hip in the blogosphere not to do it for the money, but I’m not gonna lie, I would just about kill for that kind of cash on this blog. I’ve read lots of articles about bloggers who sing Kumbaya in lieu of checking their adsense figures, but I’m not afraid to say that I’ve checked mine three times since starting this post.

John Chow joins Steve Pavlina and Darren Rowse in an elite I make insane cash on my computer club. These guys are like financial planets. The more money they make, the easier it is for them to make more. Everyone (including me) wants to know how they did it, gets sucked in to the gravity of their blog (like I am), and throws links at them (like I just did).

Man, I’ll tell ya, the day I make enough money on Genius Types to qualify as full time income, you guys will be the first to know. I’ll take my right of passage and write an article like those guys about how much money I just made. It’ll become my top article and earn even more money. Then I’ll sit back and write articles about how I don’t even think about the money, I just do it for the love of the blog.

Miserable… but Creative!

Douglas Eby wrote a great article today called Pain and Suffering and the Artist. He poses the question do we need to suffer to be creative?.

Suffering does seem to go hand in hand with big creative talent. Just think about all the rock star suicides. Watch VH1′s Behind the Music and after awhile you can just about predict the storyline. Rock star has everything but is tortured inside, addicted, and miserable.

Is that the tradeoff? I’ve had my share of strife trying to be creative in this world, but I sure hope that it’s all leading to a good place. I think that suffering helps people to feel something in their lives that they might decide to express, but you can also feel strongly about joy.

Douglas will sort it all out for you in his article, but for now I’m getting glossy eyed surfing the net. Maybe I should take some advice from Donald Latumahina and take some time off the internet.