9rules and Me

I recently mentioned my slight freak out. I also blamed it on 9rules. I was kidding. I figured this would be obvious in its absurdity. I take full responsibility for my emotions and the actions they engender. The freak out was sparked by the looming specter of the 9rules Round 5 submissions. In four days from the date of this post the 5th round of submissions will begin. I’ll be submitting this weblog.

It was this approaching deadline that set me off, at least in regards to the look of the site. My content is what it is. I do my best with each and every post. I will fall on my sword with it. No problems there, at least none for me.

No, the theme was what was killing me. Basically my brain kept insistently barking at me, if I didn’t have the “right” theme or the “right” look then my chances at 9rules nirvana would be severely hampered. Keep in mind no one was telling me this. My irrational brain was. So I freaked a bit, lost focus.

I came back to earth once I realized the whole neurotic escapade was silly. I’m no designer. I can do my best to present my writing in a logical and user friendly way and that’s all I can do. Indeed, given the nature of this blog it doesn’t really matter what theme I wrap around the content . Can you read my words and easily get to the next ones? Once I remembered it was about the words and not the varnish I coated them with I relaxed, chuckled at myself and returned to normal. Normal being a relative thing.

I suppose not everyone is familiar with 9rules. It’s easy to get caught in your own internet vortex and assume everyone knows the things you know. So what follows will be a quick description of 9rules, my personal history with them and some of the blogging lessons I’ve learned during this time.

What is 9rules?

For those who may not be familiar with 9rules I’d suggest you skip on over and give it a look. I’m afraid my stumbling attempt at defining the network wouldn’t do it justice but we need a little context here so for the purpose of this post let’s just call 9rules a weblog community of the best and the brightest. I think that gets to the heart of its ideal.

One has to be invited into the 9rules network and the historical system for inclusion has been a 24 hour period of self-submission. 9rules looks over the submitted sites during this time and invites those they feel meet their standards, tastes, criteria, etc. Simple enough.

Why Apply in the First Place?

Everyone will have their own reasons I suppose. I’ll stick with mine. First, let’s dispense with the obvious and partially painful reason. Ego. I want in because my ego demands it. If 9rules claims to contain the best weblogs, and my experience with them bears this out, then it wouldn’t be complete without FunWad. So says Mr. Ego.

While we’re never the best judges of our own creations I believe my content stacks up favorably to other examples from the network. I won’t say better than, the words “better” and “right” are two of the more dangerous words in the English language. I will say I think my content is of a similar quality, especially since my Spring re-visioning. I would imagine everyone who has ever applied feels the same way. Their content is as good and their blog deserves to be included. They should feel this way or why apply in the first place?

Ego frequently gets a bad rap because it’s often equated with arrogance or inflated self-worth but Ego isn’t bad. It isn’t good either. Your ego’s a tool and the question is, is it going to use me or am I going to use it? We frequently see rampant Ego using and abusing our sport and movie stars. This is a meta-example but I’m sure we’ve all experienced times when our conflated Ego gets the best of us.

Using your ego would be akin to self-confidence, not arrogance, just quiet confidence. When it comes to my content I’m confident. When it comes to the themes I use I am not. Ego’s a contextual chameleon in this sense.

So there’s the Ego angle. If that was the lone reason for trying to join a blog network then that might be lame. There’s also the opportunity to become closely aligned with a community of talented writers, to learn from them, to explore new possibilities, to be a member of something larger than my atomized weblog, to be a small part of a communities continued success, to make new friends, to share some jokes, to create new opportunities, to reach a wider audience, these are all other reasons to join.

And finally, I’ll submit my site to 9rules because I’m a stubborn bitch. Like the ego motivation it’s a lame one if it’s the lone reason but it is a part of my desire, a part of the story. See I’ve tried before, twice. I tried and failed to join 9rules on two other occasions. This October 25th will be my third attempt. What of the first two tries? What happened then? Suppose you’d have to ask the people that decided my fate but from my perspective it looked a little like this:

My 9rules Submission History

1st time: I submitted two sites. This one, or an old variation of it called The Rabbit Trail, the focus and content have shifted since then, and another one I created called “The Idiots Guide to Web 2.0.” Did I deserve to be invited into the network? Looking back, No, probably not. If I was choosing I wouldn’t have chosen me. The old variation of this site was vanilla. It didn’t really stand out. There were shining moments to be sure but I believe The Rabbit Trail didn’t exude vibrance on a consistent level.

As for the Idiots Guide, did it deserve to be included? Again, no, with a caveat. It was a young blog at the time of the submission round. I always felt it was a clever idea born out of Who I Am and an interest. The interest being Web 2.0 and Who I Am being decidedly untechnical. I looked around and didn’t see a blog about Web 2.0 written by someone who didn’t get it, from a technical perspective, but liked it. It was a sort of Joe Six pack take on the emerging social web.

The initial content was good. It had promise but was still to green when the submission round took place. If the round had been four months later and I had stuck with it then I might have felt it should have been included. As it was, it didn’t make it and it probably shouldn’t have. That blog died a slow death a few months later because my interest waned. My passion dwindled and it’s my opinion that a great blog needs more than passion to sustain it. I’ll explain more below when I get into the lessons learned.

2nd time: I submitted this site again. The round coincided with my re-visioning of this site, around April or May of 2006. Things were in flux on this blog. I was getting my sea legs under me. Changing focus and goals. The content didn’t exactly represent the new vision or only a small faction of it did. Did I deserve to be included the second time?

Again, probably not. If I was picking the sites I’d pick based on what is so, not what might be. I’d imagine it would pain me to do so at times but you have to judge based on what you’re presented with and I presented a site in flux. It might be great down the road but I’d simply be extrapolating and guessing based on what I thought it might evolve into. I’m often wrong. I will be again. I could be in this case. So you need to judge based on what is so, not potential, and what was so at the time was FunkWad was more potential than anything else.

So to recap my 9rules history, I submitted three sites in two rounds. In retrospect, I believe they were all left off the network for legit reasons, as I imagine theme. All the blogs showed flashes of wonderful content but none of them showed sustainability at the time of submission.

How about this site now? Not for me to say. What I can say is I’ve found a comfort zone. I’ve created my focus and mission. I have a body of work to back it up. I’m happy sharing my stories, writing my poems and saying what ever it is I want to say be it words about Apple, movies, or cheese steak. Will this translate into 9rules success? Don’t know but it’s translated to my success, as it is now.

Lessons Learned

And what have I learned from my 9rules “failures”? Quite a bit actually but three main lessons stand out.

Failure is an integral part of success.

Imagine if Michael Jordan never missed a shot. Imagine he shot 100% for his entire life, that every time the ball left his hand it was a good for two or three points. What’s more, imagine every shot was a perfect swish, nothing but net, all day every day. If you think about it for a moment you’ll see the Michael you just imagined is not nearly as great as the real one. After a year of watching the imagined Michael you’d get bored. No outcome in doubt, no shot a journey. It wouldn’t be fun. It wouldn’t be exciting. It wouldn’t be great.

Michael’s missed shots, his failures and stumbles, defined his success as much as his incredible achievements did. His failures were a part of his success story. They were an integral component of his story, not a blemish or a smear but a triumph in their own right. His success was not possible without his failure. One could not exist without the other.

Every good scientist knows failure is a part of success. It’s why they’ll celebrate set backs and missteps. Each failure points they way to their eventual success. It’s a part of the process. “Wow, that didn’t work,” can be an exciting and motivating discovery. It leads you down new avenues. It opens up new doors. It points the way to eventual achievement. So failure is simply one stop on the road to success. Since you define your success, you can define your failures as well.

It’s good to have a barometer from which to to judge your writing and creations.

Left in the vacuum of your own mind it’s easy to lose perspective and vision. You become caught in a vortex of your wreathing thoughts. All you hear is your own echo and that can kill growth and rational evaluation. The 9rules submission rounds have helped give me direction and provided a history from which I can look at my blogging growth or lack there of. This is a good thing, having a ruler to measure yourself by is a useful tool.

Passion alone won’t make a great blog.

You hear this a lot. Great blogs display passion. If you want to succeed have a passion for what you write about. I don’t disagree but I think advice like this leaves out a crucial point and is a tad misleading.

Passion is an emotion. It is a feeling. It ebbs and flows like all emotion and feeling. Unless you’re Jesus or the Buddha, and their message was you can be, you won’t feel passionate about something every possible moment of your life. What’s needed is passion actualized. You need to channel that passionate emotion and energy into action. In other words, you need commitment and dedication.

Feeling passionate is one thing, recreating that passion over and over is commitment. Those that continually declare their passion are practicing the highest form of the emotion. They’re saying this is me and this is good. Not once. Not twice. But their whole lives. Their lives are a passion play and the effect is often intoxicating. We’ve built entire religions around the people who have demonstrated this at the highest level.

Commitment and dedication can be a drag when you’re not feeling passionate but the truly great weblogs, or people , or ideas, or whatever are those that re-create the feeling. I’ve never had a problem feeling passionate about things. Every blog I’ve ever started was begun with passion and love. However, I have had problems being committed to my passions. When my passion has ebbed, as it always does, I’ve not always been able to re-create it.

Now one might think you weren’t passionate to begin with but I think this totally misses the nature and nuance of emotion. For most people passion isn’t linear. It’s a jagged arc. Taking the Michael Jordan example again, while he was passionate about competition there were times his passion would diminish. Part of his greatness was being able to re-create it. Sports writers marveled over Jordan’s ability to motivate himself, to re-create his passion. He was a genius at it.

I’m decidedly not a genius at it. I struggle with this aspect of passion. I’m akin to those people who love falling in love but can’t commit. 9rules and my attempt to get in have helped me to see this in myself, to notice a pattern, and you can’t change a thing if you’re not aware of it.

Postscript

I can’t help but voice my cynical thoughts about this whole post. It would go like this, if you’re apply to this 9rules thing and they’ll be reading your site aren’t you simply writing this post for them? You’re writing a job application cock head. Or that would be the hardened cynic talking. I’ll address this quickly.

First this post didn’t spring out of thin air. It organically evolved from a prior one but it’s true I can assume they may read these very words some day soon. At this point I could very easily become engulfed in a Charlie Kaufman-esque mind trap here. In order to avoid the anguish I’ll just say, no it wasn’t written with anything other than a motivation to share my thoughts with everyone and even if I did write it for the 9rules folks, if I simply sat down and did write a “job application,” so what?

Of course, if that was my motivation you’d hope I’d be smart enough to create a better post than one where I take about my “failures.” In fact if I wanted to somehow appeal to 9rules, to somehow influence the process, which I don’t think I can anyway, but if I wanted to try, I wouldn’t write a post on my blog. I’d send them flowers and candy and strip-o-grams and hire airplanes to write them glorious messages in the sky.

October 22 2006 09:46:37 AM EDT