Walk across America Kickstarter campaign

Watch the video to learn about a campaign I backed on Kickstarter that I encourage you to get involved with too.

Click here to watch the video if you can’t see it.

Click here to check out Holly’s Kickstarter campaign.

If you do back Holly’s campaign, shoot me an email at natedammemail @ gmail.com or forward me the email you get from Kickstarter after you do. I’ll put you on a list to get a free PDF version of the book I’m working on a week before anyone else, with a couple of extra stories/chapters that were cut out in the final edit.

Get involved if you can! Let’s get this thing funded.

I trust my people

So you want to learn more about something.

There are a couple ways you can go here.

First, you can jump around from resource to resource, learning the opinions of tons of different people.

This is important and I think it should be done, but only for a very short amount of time. If you keep hopping around from place to place, there’s little time for action.

I’ve learned that there is a lot of value in picking one, maybe two resources on a particular subject that you can trust and sticking with them. Try it out for a while, learn about the experiences other have had with it. Once you’ve done that, you’re done. Stick with it until things either change for the worse there or your needs change.

I’ve found that when you stop searching for the newest, greatest thing, it relieves a lot of pressure. You won’t be spreading your attention too thin over too many places. You trust in your people. You’ve put in the work to make sure they are good, so you’re really trusting in yourself too.

I understand this may be a bit vague, so here are a few examples from me.

For everything relating online business, my guys are Dan and Ian.

For travel stories/information it’s Jodi and Earl.

For fitness related stuff, Steve Kamb.

In those areas I don’t really stray far from those people. I trust them. I trust that if there’s something I should know, or something that will entertain me, I’ll learn about or see it there.

These are just a few random examples. I’ve picked one or two resources in various areas, and focus mainly on them. Occasionally I’ll scan through other websites and blogs, but pretty rarely will I spend more than a minute or so on them.

In the past I have tried to absorb as much information from as many places as possible, and it turned out very badly. I ended up learning a fair amount, but nothing happened. When you spend all your time/energy consuming you have less time/energy to create. It’s as simple as that.

I trust my people.

Censorship of the internet cannot be allowed to happen

If you haven’t heard about all the news regarding the pieces of legislation called SOPA and PIPA, then watch the video below to get a better understanding of them and how dangerous they could be if passed. The video explains the issues better than I can.

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

This is serious stuff, and you can help keep the internet as awesome as it is right now, so it can continue to get more awesome in the future.

One little thing you can do is sign this petition on Google’s website. It takes a few seconds. You can also send a message to your representative here.

After that, do whatever you can to spread the word.

Problem solving the right way

A couple of days ago I went to check how the websites a friend and I have been working on together were ranking. I’m hoping to go into more detail regarding this business venture in the near future.

Anyway, to my dismay, I saw that two of our sites had been hacked with malware, and were redirecting to some sort of sweepstakes website. The Google listings for the sites were showing a warning, which if not fixed quickly could be a huge deal, as we’ve been working to get these sites ranking well for months.

It was hard not to panic, as I didn’t know how to fix the hacks, but I held it together pretty nicely.

I emailed my friend and told him what was up. He said he’d take a look around and try to figure it out. He’s much smarter than me with stuff like this.

After a few emails back and forth and far too much time Google searching for a solution, he took a deep look around and found the infected files, and got rid of them.

A sigh of relief, but, the problem was really only half solved.

How do we make sure that this doesn’t happen again? And if it does, what will we do next time so there are no questions, just quick actions to take and solve it quickly?

I don’t want my business partner to have to go into pages and pages of php and look for hidden snippets of code. Nobody likes to do that. It takes too much time and there are better things to do.

We needed a fix that was more systematic – an “Okay, man, ___ has been hacked. Did this and this, and we’re back and put in a site review request to Google. And here’s something I found that could be good for us to work on today…”

So I did some research about the easiest way to fix the issue (minus all the code digging and searching), talked with my friend and we set up a new system that would make things a breeze. We had neglected to do it before. Bad move. But now it’s fixed, and we learned.

Solving a problem the first time it happens is usually a pretty ugly business. You’ll feel better afterwards, but you really shouldn’t.

You should feel better when systems are put in place to make things go smoother the next time around — so you only have to deal with the pain in the ass once. That is real problem solving, I think. And I need to get better at doing things this way on a consistent basis.

Have time to goof off and still do great work

Last night I watched a bunch of videos on YouTube, then watched Entourage for a couple hours. It’s actually a very regular thing. Not every day, but pretty often. My main focus right is to build things of value and make the world a better place. I do everything I can each day to get [...]

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Choices and opportunities according to my grandfather

“When I was young, people would tell us anything is possible. I don’t really think it was true though back then. But now, for you, it really is. The opportunities you have now are amazing.” My grandfather said this to me a while back. It was one of those moments where someone says something to [...]

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If you like it right now that’s enough

So that thing that you’re doing and enjoying right now, just do it. Even though you realize that someday you may not enjoy it. Stop being dumb. I’m talking to myself here. I have this weird anxiety about things like this. It’s ridiculous. I like writing for this site and working on the book I’m [...]

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I Think You Regret Things

Warning: I’m not sure how much sense this makes due to my poor ability to articulate my thoughts, but bear with me. A lot of people, many of them being extremely smart, like to act like they live by the idea of “no regrets,” like they do not regret anything they’ve done in life. I’ve [...]

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I’ll Speak Up Next Time

So the other day I was at a book store. Tattered Cover in Denver, a great place. I was browsing through the travel section, and the guy next to me told his young son to check out 3 MPH by Polly Letofsky. He picked it up and was browing through it, and I said, “That’s [...]

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Canyon Christmas

Being away from family for the holidays, I knew I had to do something fun and not just mope around. My friend Lacey had the same idea, as she was away from family too. This resulted in the Christmas of canyons road trip. We left Denver, just beating out the snow storm that was rolling [...]

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