No I’m not talking about the band “Spinner,” and if you’re at all interested in internet marketing then you’ve heard of the hottest article spinner out there at the moment, The Best Spinner.

Writing quality articles is a vital part of any online activity, be it for your article marketing campaign or simply to have quality content up on your sites or blogs. Not everyone can give the time for producing such content, and with multiple sites things get can quickly out of hand. That’s where article spinners come in, to save you massive truck loads of time!

But wait you say, aren’t all article spinners inherently flawed? They just replace synonyms and make a mess out of any readable article, or they take too much time in writing for proper spinnable syntax. Not so for the best spinner.

You see, the way this is different than most article spinners is that is has a nifty little one click feature that will replace your article with a community of synonyms submitted by users like you and me, thereby creating a 90% unique article in seconds flat. Of course it can do the traditional spinning stuff too, but I find this one-click spin feature to be invaluable.

Head over to thebestspinner.com and take a look at all the features for yourself. I can guarantee that you haven’t seen its like before. And on top of that it currently selling at a whopping 45% discount. Grab it while it lasts and you can rest satisfied at the thought of the best $47 spent this year for online marketing.

Click here to find out more about The Best Spinner.

Related posts:

1. 3 Less Common Ways of Using the Internet to Save Money When Shopping

These are the steps that I took to follow my dream, although I didn’t so much “take” the first few steps as get a sudden push!

1. Realization
   One fine day I realized it’s possible to follow my dreams.
   This was a shock to me, since I’d become jaded over time, and had started to think that I would be going down a “traditional” life – trying the corporate world, possibly not being that successful since I wasn’t about to work 15hour days in Corporateland, and having a “typical” life.
   Then one day I understood that I don’t have to do it if I don’t want to. I live a very frugal life, so I don’t have to earn very much. Even a part-time role would pay enough to cover my bills, and I could spend the rest of my time chasing whatever dream I had. Whatever dream I had.
2. Acceptance
   The next stage for me was accepting that I wasn’t really on track to the most fantastic life ever. Seeing a future in Corporateland didn’t excite me. Suddenly it was clear to me that my life wasn’t the awe-inspiring journey that it could be, and I should possibly think about changing its course.
3. Understanding
   Once I realized that I wanted to do something different, I had to understand what I wanted to do. Why did I want out of the suburban dream? What did my dream life look like? It wasn’t just the things I would ideally have, or how much money I would make, but what kind of things did I love to do?
4. Dreaming big
   When I was younger I had wanted to be a novelist. I also wanted to be an entrepreneur.I started dreaming wild dreams about what my ideal daily work would be like. From this, I started to narrow things down. What business did I want to be in? Did I still want to be a novelist or did I just want to write? What kind of things did I want to write? Did I have any other dreams? For instance, I’m very interested in business and marketing – did I maybe want to be a consultant, or write about business? I like design, so did I want some kind of design career, may as an interior designer? Or did I want to write about interior design? As you can see, there were so many possible combinations! At this stage I felt overwhelmed! I hadn’t done this kind of exercise since I was a child, and I suddenly realized that there was a whole world out there that I could possibly explore!
   Around about this point I decided to take a step back and be a bit more realisitic. Following your dreams is a bit like trying to have a relationship – you may like some potential career, but it may not like you. It may like people with a skill set completely different to yours.
   So I started trying to find “the one”. Again, like dating, there is no Mr Perfect – because there’s no-one out there who’s perfect. But there is a Mr Right, because there are people out there who are right for you. For possible careers that really appealed to me, I drew up lists of pros and cons.
   Just because a career is a dream for you, doesn’t mean that it’s without it’s drawbacks. Once more, I can’t leave the analogy of a partner – just because you love someone it doesn’t mean they don’t have their flaws. At this stage, I was taking a long hard look at the cons, and trying to decide which ones I could live with. Essentially, I was doing a cost-benefit analysis of different career options, and trying to weigh how much I would get out of a career and how much I would have to put in, and what different things meant to me. For instance, I chose blogging about personal development, money and happiness because although the hours are quite a lot and the pay is much lower than what I could make in other careers, the potential satisfaction of a job well done is much higher.
5. Be determined
   I’m putting this in as an extra step, because I needed to take a deep breath and decide that I would take the plunge. In fact, I’ve needed to take a couple of such deep breaths every few days, whenever I come across a little voice that says I’m doing something crazy and I’ll fail miserably and become an icon of stupidity. You need to have the determination to face down that little potent voice.
6. Put in the effort
   This where most people fail.
   It’s simply not practical to chase a dream when your life is already full with a career, a relationship, friends, family and maybe some other hobbies. Changing or starting a new career takes a whole lot of effort. How can you carve out time for that effort? Would you be able to maybe reduce your work hours and withstand a temporary cut in pay, would your partner/family support your dream? This stage actually takes a lot of preparation, trying to figure out how to put in that effort, and making a realistic assessment of how much you need to put in. It’s all right to say that you just don’t have the time for this: if you realize it upfront, you’ll have saved yourself a lot of wasted effort, and can maybe look into some other way to integrate your dream into your life.If you’ve got your plans set up already (e.g. become an interior designer by enrolling in a part-time course and helping out a designer for free on the weekends), are you really going to be able to put in the required effort?
   If the answer to all those questions is yes, the only thing to do now is go ahead and stick it out.
7. Monetize
   This is the very last step, and it only comes about if you’ve taken all the other steps. It may be a long and winding road to get there, but it ultimately happens. Of course, even after monetizing, you may not be able to make too much money. For instance, with this blog, I don’t have grandiose money-generating schemes, but if I make enough to cover my bills, the satisfaction of creating a good blog will be enough.

Quite a few things become apparant to me when I look back over this exercise.

Firstly, this exercise in following your dreams is only worth doing if you’re not satisfied with how your life’s going at the moment. If you’re already living the dream, congratulations!

If you think your life could do with a bit of a shakeup, it’s worth noting that most people have quite a few things that they love doing. For instance, you may love yoga, knitting and reading. So right there, you have a couple of potential career avenues. Some people say that they don’t know what their passion is, but I think very few people have one single passion. Some people have become so busy and immersed with their current life that they can’t remember anything that they really love doing.
There are a number of steps that you can take to uncover things that you love (hopefully I’ll have a blog post coming out on this shortly). But usually, it’s a number of different things. In fact, your dream may seem completely boring to someone else – for instance, I love marketing and business strategy and was seriously considering becoming a small-business consultant.

Another question that pops up is, what does it mean to follow your dream? It may be more suitable for some people to have a corporate job and a hobby. Just because you love doing something doesn’t mean that you should try to make it your career. I love yoga, but I could never make it my career – I would rather practice it than teach it, and I don’t see myself putting in eight hours a day of effort into it.

If you choose to try to make money from something you love, there are a number of ways you could go about it. You could teach it, you could practice it, you could sell products about it. Another example to clarify this: I love interior design. So I could try to set a blog with home design tips, or I could set up a magazine about interior design, showcasing recent works. I could try to be a designer myself. Or I could set up a shop selling home design items.
Maybe you love golf. You could try to be a pro golfer, you could try being a golf coach at a country club, you write an educational newsletter or book about golf, you could sell golf supplies, or you could cover golf tournaments and blog about golf gossip.

As I mentioned in my previous post, you may find out that you can’t really create a career around one particular thing you love. It may just not be practical enough: the cons would outweigh any benefits. For instance, you may like airplanes, but it may not be practical for you to want to be a pilot because firstly, flying lessons are expensive, and secondly, being a pilot means a lot of travel and you don’t want to spend lots of time away from your young family.

A lot of people don’t initially make their dream their full-time career. It’s most likely to take a while to make money from a career move: there may be some time required for education, looking for work, or setting up a business. This is where the concept of a “day job” comes in. Basically, a day job is a stress-free job that pays the bills, that you can fit your other “dream” career around. Often, this is a bit of a dead end job. This is the route I’ve taken. Having worked in call centres for a bit, I’ve seen quite a few hopeful actors, models and musicians choose this path as well. After all, it’s nice to not have to worry about bills, but a “proper” job is often too draining to do anything else afterwards. Another option to make your dream a reality is to work hard at a stressful job, save up, and “retire” early to pursue your ideal career.

Whichever option you choose, and however you choose to go about it, I believe that it is possible to work at something you love. At least, I hope I don’t fall flat on my face and prove myself wrong.

Related posts:

1. Self Improvement – Why Bother?
2. How to Follow Your Passion

After reading on this a bit, I started wondering about how I could put this rule to good use in my own life. It turns out there are quite a few uses.
Since reading about this rule, I’ve started paying more attention to how my experiences are arranged as a whole, not just what I did. I’ve found that if I end something on a strong note, I feel more satisfied about how it went.

When I read about the peak end rule, I instantly thought about how a nice meal is usually arranged. We have a small appetizer, a nice main course, and round it off with a lovely dessert and maybe even coffee. The whole thing has a lovely glow of completeness about it, and a nice, smooth finish that leaves everyone happy. From my perspective as a sweet lover, this arrangement often borders on “leaving the best for last”, which is true for other good experiences.
Viewing the meal in terms of a “peak end” experience has also made me realize that a dessert is good not just because it’s sweet and tasty, but also because it rounds off the meal nicely, and creates a perfect, happy ending. Understanding this has made me more open to having a healthy dessert at the end of the meal, or maybe green tea or coffee. It’s the whole experience and the lovely ending that’s most important, not (for daily meals) the quality of the dessert.
At the other end of the spectrum, this rule helps me understand why I don’t like jumping up at the end of a meal to do the dishes, and would rather savor the meal.

Similarly, when I end my day at work I feel happier if I’ve had a good experience when leaving. I can’t really control how my work-day goes, but I can control how I leave. Since I’m in training, we tidy up the room, the trainer makes a lame joke, and we all leave in a good mood. I try to walk to the train station with one of the people I really like, or I call my partner just to say hi and let him know I’m out. On the ride home I try to meditate a bit, and read a few pages of a Pratchett novel. I can’t control the ups and downs of my 9-5, but ending it smoothly allows me to get home in a good, energetic mood, all ready to write up another blog post.

I’ve also been trying to apply this rule to my workouts. I don’t really like working out that much, and the experience mostly consists of me being out of breath. I now try to incorporate some serious yoga stretches at the end, which are challenging and leave me feeling relaxed and happy that I went through all that exercise.

Most of us have “peak end” routines that we apply daily without being conscious of it. We do a nightly tidy-up maybe, parents tuck their children into bed, a perfect first date ends (maybe) with a good night kiss.

In my opinion, the peak end experience has a lot to do with transitioning. I like the idea of having a definite transition from one area of the day to another, a nice close to the current task. Whether it’s a meal, or a project, it’s nice to know that something has definitely ended, and even nicer to end it on a pleasant note.

Related posts:

1. How to Integrate Your Dreams and Your Life

“Work is love made visible.” – Kahlil Gibrail

When you do something you love, you wake up excited, work intensely and happily, and go to bed looking forward to another day of work. It’s not work you force yourself to do for the money, it’s work you love to do, and would do for free or very little pay.

Most of my life, I thought this was an impractical dream. When I was much younger, my writing was much better and my dream was to be a fiction writer. I threw that dream aside because I thought, novelists starve and are poor, I’d rather be a rich banker.

Now that I’m older, I’ve realized that I don’t want to waste my life in a meaningless job, I’d rather earn relatively less, live frugally, and spend my time happily applying myself to something that I love.

Why should you bother to try to find work that you love and find fulfilling?

1. It makes your days so much brighter, it’s like living in the shade and then suddenly moving into the sunlight. I didn’t really believe how big a difference doing something you love could make, until I started this blog and my other business. Now I think about the blog almost all the time, and what to write and do and so forth and I love it! Doing something you’re passionate about makes your life amazing.
2. You make the world a better place. You might trivialize your skills or what you love doing, but even if your great love is banking and you become a good banker, you’ll have maybe created new banking products that will really help customers. On the other hand, if you love scrapbooking, and choose to teach others this hobby, you’ll have made their lives more enjoyable. What you love to do doesn’t have to appear to be a great task, like building houses for the homeless, it just has to be something you enjoy. Regardless of what it is, it’ll help other people.

So now maybe you’re convinced that you do want to follow you passions and work on something you love, but how exactly do you go about it?

1. Believe that it’s possible
   This is the first thing you have to do, and something that no-one else seems to talk about. Most people are skeptical about their ability to turn dreams into reality, or to make money doing something they love. You need to believe it’s possible. It’s possible that you can do whatever you want, no matter how crazy it sounds to others. If you try work hard enough, it’s possible to do anything. And if you do something you love, it’ll seem like fun and you’ll work harder than you ever have, without even breaking a sweat.
   Believe that you can do anything you want to do, and you will.
2. Find your passion
   You have to look for it, it doesn’t look for you. Try different things, and see what you like. Think about what you already love doing – reading, cooking, tinkering with cars. Some of these may translate into work directly, some may not be things you’d like to do every day.
3. Convert that passion into work
   There are many ways to turn a passion into work. For instance, maybe you love dogs, but you don’t see yourself shampooing them all day in a dog saloon, or looking after them in a kennel. But you might like the idea of becoming a certified dog trainer, and becoming a trainer. On the other hand, you might like writing as well as dogs – hello new dog blog!
   Think about how you’ll turn what you love into a job. You could start a business around it, maybe providing supplies, or start a blog, or go to work for someone else in that line of business.
4. Dip a toe in the water
   If you think you’ve found your passion, don’t quit your job to chase your dream. Chances are, it may not be what you ultimately wind up doing, and even if it is, it may be a while till you make money from it.
   A good way to dip your toe is to take classes on the side, start a small business on the side, or volunteer to work for someone after work or on the weekends.
5. Don’t despair if it’s not smooth sailing
   It may take a couple of attempts. Maybe the first go, you have too many existing work commitments and can’t study enough. Reduce your work load over time and study up.
   Maybe you like design, and decide to be an interior designer. You offer to help out an established designer for free after work and on weekends, so you sit with him while he designs, and go with him shopping and to clients’ houses. You find that, while you like shopping and designing, you don’t really like interacting with high-end customers, over-charging them and acting snooty
   So take a step back and identify what went wrong. In this case, it would be the client interaction. So is there any way you can still do design work but not overcharge and deal with high-end customers? Maybe you can start a design magazine – there are many designers who’d love you to showcase their work, and you enjoy talking with them. You can reach a mass market who can then apply those design concepts to their own homes without spending a fortune.
   When you identify what you don’t like, you don’t have to incorporate that into your daily life. You may find it tolerable, and worth the opportunity to focus on what you love. Or you may try to redesign your work away from those elements, and switch back to Step 3, converting your passion to work.
   Alternatively, you may find that you’re not really that passionate about it and can’t conceive of doing it every day. So you switch back to Step 2, and look for what else you love.
6. Don’t stress about money
   If you do something you love, the money will follow. However, it may be a bit late in following.
   Don’t stress about it. This is the advantage of following your passion. You’re not really in it for the money, you may even be just doing it on the side for a while. Sure, it would be nice to get paid to do it, but you’re happy to do it for very little in the beginning, because one or two or three years down the line, you’ll get paid lots for it. Because you love doing it, you’ll work much harder and smarter than other people doing the same thing, who don’t really love it. So the work, projects, clients and responsibility will flow to you, and you’ll be happy to deal with them. Leading to a pay rise or more business.
   The key here is persistence. Don’t give up when the going is tough, and pretty soon it’ll be a much smoother journey.
7. Enjoy

Related posts:

1. How to Integrate Your Dreams and Your Life

1. Drink Less Coffee
This is a tip coming from a coffee addict. I’ve found that coffee is a vicious cycle of a crutch. I have coffee, I love it, I’m happy, it’s gone, I need more. Unless I consciously limit the amount of coffee I have a day, I can easily go through ten cups. And I just feel worse overall.
Coffee in moderation isn’t bad. But before it becomes a crutch that you can’t function without, pace yourself. Try substituting with tea or soda water sometimes.

2. Have more passion
When you go through the day not really caring about what you’re doing, you’ll definitely feel drained. However, when you do things you care about, your energy levels go way up.
Have you ever felt way too tired to study or do the dishes, but excited about hanging out with your partner or playing a video game? That’s passion at work. So do things you love to do; if you’re stuck in a job you’re not thrilled about, pretend to care.

3. Interact with someone you like
I’ve worked in a few jobs that I didn’t really like, and I’m an introvert, but talking with a friend has always made me feel a lot better. A bit of joking and horsing around usually makes you feel more positive and active.

4. Got vitamins?
A multivitamin is better than a caffeine hit. I’m not a doctor, so I can’t explain how this happens, but basically your body functions better if it’s given proper fuel. Develop good food habits, and have an occasional vitamin tablet or drink.

5. Exercise
Increased energy is one of the major reasons I bother to exercise. Although it’s counter-intuitive, exercise really helps to reduce fatigue.

6. Decide to be more energetic
Strange as it sounds, this is something that’s been working for me recently. I’m going through training at work, which is incredibly boring, but I take a conscious decision to be alert and attentive. Usually, I don’t focus fully on class, and jot down notes for future articles and to-do lists, but at I’m certainly energetic about it!
My very unscientific theory is, once we decide to be more energetic, we actually focus some of our attention on how we’re feeling, and we do the right things (eat right, have tea instead of coffee) and we somehow force our brain to be more alert. I know, it doesn’t make sense, but it works for me and it might work for you.

7. Be more positive
Negative people are energy vampires, but positive people radiate energy. It’s hard to be lethargic when you’re thankful for your situation and your life. Appreciating what you’ve got makes it easier to put more into life.

8. Meditate
I’m still really bad at meditating, but it’s made a huge difference to how I feel – my work is more focused, and I’m much more productive.

9. Get out in the morning
Make yourself presentable, and get out of the house. Maybe you commute to work and read/meditate/listen to music on the way, or maybe you work from home and go for a morning jog. Either way, I’ve found that the act of getting out of the house in the morning makes me feel that much more energized.

Those are the things that worked for me. Of course, the major factor in how I feel is the fact that I’m doing things I care about, so I think I’ll soon post about working at something you love.

No related posts.