Steve Mills - Life, the Universe and the Digital World

REBEL ZEN - DIY ENLIGHTENMENT

Just wanted to let you know that I am also writing over on a blog called Rebel Zen with my good friend Seamus Anthony Ennis

The blog is about meditation, zen, tao, tarot, personal development and much more, and promises to be an interesting and thought provoking read.

We already have a number of great articles up, with much more coming in the following days and weeks.

Do yourself a favor and check it out. www.rebelzen.com

Tags: blog, Inspiration, meditation, Personal Development, tao, tarot, zen

Quick Update From Holidays

Hi All,

Thanks heaps to all of the recent commenters, I really enjoy the thoughtful additions that you have all made to the discussions here.

I am currently enjoying some  R&R, but will be back with my usual frequent posting schedule in a week or so. Please subscribe if you are interested in what I have talked about over the last few weeks, there will be  plenty more articles and discussion like that comming up.

Now you have to excuse me, its time to go for a surf, then spend the afternoon lazing in my hammock.

Steve

My Lifestyle Design Plan : A Review

I just thought I would spend today giving everyone a bit of an update to my current situation. I am currently working towards my ideal lifestyle. It is amazing when you look around how many people are not. People think they are, but what they are doing is chasing the next promotion, in order to get more money, in order to buy more things.

I am after more then that. I want an independence of the 9-5, sit in an office workday. I want to be truly rich. Not monetarily rich, but time and experience rich.

Slowly my plan is starting to become real, as I am directing my life and making choices on work habits and situations based on my “lifestyle design.”

Just to get everyone up to speed, my lifestyle design plan is

• To have a variety of interesting work.
• To set up autonomous systems in order to make passive income.
• To have the freedom to work hours of my choosing, in the location of my choice.
• To be able to travel for at least 3 months of the year with my family.

The steps that I have taken so far in the last year have been to :

• Establish a network of consulting clients while still holding down a 6 - 4 (10 hour days plus 2 hour commute) job. This was the hardest part, and one that I will write about in more detail soon. I was working 18 hour days for 3 months there getting things off the ground. Not an ideal lifestyle at all. But people have to consider a small amount of hard yards, a couple of hard months if they want to seriously work at breaking the 9 -5 rut. I’m not talking about the years of corporate grind / deferred lifestyle plan of the usual wage slave, but the ability to make small scale sacrifices for massive long term gain isn’t a bad trait to have.
• Quit the job with a steady net of clients. This gave me 4 day steady work a week, 2 of which working in the city, 2 of which working quite close to home. The other day deliberately left free in order to source more contracts and work on passive income earners.
• Develop 2 sites with passive income earning potential. One is a video sharing site that should attract some advertising revenue, due to it being in a specific untapped niche.
• Develop partnership agreement with one consulting client, resulting in equity share if project goes well. Large passive income earning potential
• A growing network of web development, graphic design and internet marketing clients that I consult with purely over the phone and internet.
• Starting to develop efficiency and knowledge management tools to compress the work day down to a smaller time investment.

So I am starting to get things off the ground, and although I have deviated from my plan a few times and fallen back into unhealthy work habits, I have had the piece of mind to look back at my plan and remind myself that life is for the enjoyment and experience, not the dollars.

HERE THERE BE MONSTERS

Remember those olds sailors maps from antiquity, the kind you would see in a history book or encyclopedia. People of centuries ago had some pretty detailed maps of the areas that they frequently traveled , especially when you take into consideration the tools and mathematics that they used to draw them.

What really stood out for me though is the areas that weren’t quite as well mapped, or completely unexplored. In these areas, they had pictures of huge grotesque creatures, and dire warnings of what would happen to people if they crossed those waters. “Here there be monsters” “Death for those who enter” etc. etc.

The unknown always has an element of fear, and doing something new, or something that means a lot to you is an intense experience. We are so used to the everyday monotony of work routine, of being on a schedule and told what to do that we don’t quite know how to deal with these different, new experiences.
When we start something new, the voices of doubt and dismay are never far away. There is something inside that says “This is new, scary and different. I am going to come up with 50 reasons why you should stop”

Well you know what… that voice can go and get stuffed.

The manager at one of the places that I am consulting at has a good statement on the wall of his workstation. It reads something like ” As soon as a new way of doing things starts, the pull of the old ways of doing things begin. In the beginning, enthusiasm is enough to override this force, but in the longer term, a more sustainable source of motivation must be found”

We think that all great adventures are fun, are glamorous and exciting and should “feel good” the whole time. But while I agree that adventures should be REWARDING, I also see that the greatest adventures have their scary times, the boring times, the patience trying frustrating times. They have times where you don’t know what you are going to step in when you take that next step towards your goal.

It is my mission for the next few months to break this pattern of thought. To stop looking for the monsters in the uncharted waters, and just keep my ship sailing on course, until I reach new land.
Once I get there, the realise that a) There really weren’t any monsters and b) The journey was well worth it.

I have made some personal inroads with certain projects this year. I have gone into full time consulting, co-founded a businesses that is starting to do things (slowly) and worked on some interesting IT and marketing projects. General entrepreneur stuff, which has been a long time personal goal and has given me a sense of satisfaction.

But, alas, these have all been business goals, and left me with precious little time for working on other things. I want to create and promote music that people will enjoy, that will make them think, that will make them groove. Psychedelic trance/rock/electro/mystical/world music. Music that takes people on a journey.

Till next time…

Lets All Talk About The Same Thing

I am having a little bit of a change of direction for this site going forward, with more of a concentrated effort to showcase my work as a writer of fiction, non fiction and free thought. As I have said here over the past few weeks, there are enough blogs out there about people making money online, internet marketing and blogging in general. All are fine topics, and there are some pearls of wisdom to be found in the other 100000000 sites out there that talk about there subjects.
BUT, 95% of internet marketing is marketing in the pure sense. What they are marketing to you is products that allow you to market the concept of marketing to others. If that sentence doesn’t make a lot sense, the reason lies purely in the reality of the situation, and not my grammar. It is a pure caste made of air, a house of cards, the emperors’ new clothes. People telling others how to basically sell nothing. MLM pyramid schemes, get rich quick sales pages, too good too be true offers. Not for me thanks…

With latest Google page rank fiasco, I don’t really see the point of building a business who can have its profits halved, quartered or decimated completely by a giant corporation. That is not building an asset or a legacy. It’s a ticking time bomb, being fuelled by the time you put into it.

Sure if you love it, then do it. But do what you love, express the ideas that are in your head, the ideas that are yours alone because you thought of them. Create, don’t chorus with every other opinion or business plan or genre that you feel everyone wants to hear.

What I will share with you are ideas of how people can make money from their creative works, from their songs, novels, short stories, designs, graphics, games and un-categorisable projects. I will also detail my journey from unknown writer to hopefully known writer. I know that inside every blogger out there flogging some useless affiliate program (Hey that’s a new word… flogger : someone who writes purely for the commercial aspect online to sell ads) is a novel, or a screenplay, or a killer new bit of software just bursting to get out.

That is the revolYOUtion, letting that creative bit of you out, and making the systems of the internet and the commercial world work for you, not mindlessly selling your talented self after 10 cents of adsense dollars every day trying to make it rich, writing content that every other person is hashing out pursuing the same goals.

I think that I have made my point.