Blog of Ben Foden

Here are the top five posts from my blog in 2009 based on traffic.

1. Does Your Product Have a High Threadcount? Two Examples





2. Top Ways to Weather Dips in Entrepreneurial Enthusiasm





3. Why You Should Market First and Build Later





4. RSSCloud and PubSubHubBub -What’s Up?





5. iPhone and I

Let me know what you think!

Imagine for a second that you, as a person, are analagous to a world.


Source

The Self World:

1. Your world has an economy, is it prosperous? What is it’s long term outlook? Is it paying off its debts on time?




2. Your world has a culture, is it vibrant? What new areas are being explored? What things make it different, and interesting?




3. Your world has an environment, is it growing, stagnating, or worse? How well is it being sustained? How long can it survive on this course?




4. Your world has different countries (interests), are they at odds with each other? Is there a struggling country? Which country is the best at what it does?




5. Your world has room to improve. What do you need to do to make it prosperous in all areas? Evolve — some things in each area must die and others need to grow, but with enough trial and effort, your world can achieve a net gain.

There is a flip side to all of this.

The World Self:

If the world were a person, how healthy and prosperous would it be in all of the above areas?

This is a scary thought at first, but I choose to remain optimistic =]

I freestyle my future every day. If I were to believe in fate, external things would choose my destiny.

Have the great people in the history of the world left it up to god to carry them?

Even the most devout religious people can not have felt this way.

I refuse to believe that they would be pushed and pulled so easily. It is the strength of ones vision that pushes them — the people they need help from to accomplish it are caught in the current they create.

Believing in fate is easy… if it is outside of your hands you dont need to try. You never have to pivot or try a new approach when circumstances dont line up perfectly, you just accept that you weren’t mean to have what you originally wanted.

That’s horseshit. You owe your nieces and nephews, if not your children in the future, more.

Is your legacy going to be stolen by external circumstances, or are you going to freestyle your own future?

This short post is for my family who have helped me get where I am today and inspire me to always improve and never settle.

In other news: go for a run. Excercise helps me unlock great ideas sometimes and maybe it will help you too.

It seems fairly straightforward, but if you need to send an email that is longer than a paragraph, or if it is for a client, don’t send it from your phone.

• The signature will look unprofessional
• You will make typos
• You will trade brevity for clarity

There is something about this format that influences me at least to write things in a less effective manner. Maybe its the fact that I wrote it with my thumbs, whereas every serious piece of writing I have done since I learned handwriting in grade school was done on a full size keyboard.

The medium influences the art, so be careful which medium you use when.

Excellent talk given by a man named Dan Buettner about the simple things that, if done consistently, can let you live to be 100+.