This, especially, made me nod my head.
How did I create my mediocre “personal brand”? I didn’t. I was just me.
How did I create my “blogging strategy”? I didn’t. I started blogging and over time learned to duck, weave and punch at the right times.

Cheers for the excellent post, as always.

Being a hot dog, doing your best, being better than the rest – pushing hard and not stopping alone won’t get you anywhere without friends. Recognition comes from friends who care enough to know you, follow you, trust you, help you when you need it, and vouch for you when the time comes.

I’d like to thank you for all our pleasant quick back and forths so far on Twitter, and give everyone a real rule they can follow: Stop trying so hard to get noticed, and start trying to develop relationships. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance makes it clear – it’s the journey that’s important, not the destination. Becoming a black belt isn’t about earning belts, it’s a process like taking a walk in the rain – eventually you get wet.

Personally, I love to see people publish rules, because then I know masses of competitors and their clients will follow them blindly. That translates into predictability, and even on my worst days I can compete with predictable sheep.

For example, grammar and language are important. If you look at the shorthand for mobile phone texts, using an agrammatical syntax could be exactly the thing that brings you closer to your audience, the rulebook might say otherwise, but convention hints that this will be a success.

On creating rule for tech, onr possible explanation of the why: Technology/IT and the whole Internet thing has had a profound effect on how quickly people expect a) to see action done and b) how quickly that action then turns into results. It’s everywhere. Goto Google and type in “Top 10 Tools”…that’s 381 million results. “Ultimate guide” 51 million. People want stuff now, and they only want the best of the information. That’s part of how we’ve evolved as a society, and we’re still in transition.

It’s a great time to be around, but it’s becoming even more important to step back look at things beyond technology’s functionality, to understand it at a more sociological level. When you see research where people were found to assign different human like attributes to a person based solely on the avatar’s format you start to realise that the 300page software manual, for all it’s words is gonna get you about 10% of the way to your overall success.

What I do think is also interesting to note, is that the more you learn, the more you appreciate that in fact it’s all very simple. Technology, as some innevitable and unstoppable force continues to create anxiety for people, it’s a burden that forces individuals to keep learning, and obligates everyone to keep up with it.

“have you been on your Widows 7 upgrade course bob”, said james.
Bob bit down on his lip nervously.

That’s another piece of the puzzle, Technology has still not advanced to a level where it is not annoying and it’s unlikely too either, because we are all so different it’s just not commercially viable to issue Windows on a 1-2-1 basis.

But that’s the transition period in full effect.

For me it’s important to combine other peoples “rules” with my own . . . as a result, I find that I spend a lot less time making the same mistakes that others have made, which allows me more time to spend figuring out original methods to accomplish things.

There’s just no need to rewrite the entire book when it comes to most innovations. You need to take the best pages, maybe tweak them a little, and then build on them. It’s standard evolution.