Friends,
I’m doing this video blogging, and I’m really enjoying myself and getting some great feedback, but, as grant points out, the sound is not up to par.
What do I need?
I have a nice camera with XLR input.
(I also have a jack to XLR convrerter.)
Do I need a directional mic I can mount on the camera?
Do I need a boomer that I place over my head outside of camera view?
Do I need a microport (wireless lavalier microphone) that I can click onto and “hide” on my t-shirt?
Do I need a large wired microphone that I put on the table in front of me and that’s going to be on camera (and also, I suspect, I need to be careful about moving around too much with).
I’m willing to invest some money, but would like to keep it minimal.
And I’d like to not have to think too much about the microphone while recording.
Do you have any experience or recommendations?
Thanks in advance for your help.
Seth Godin has a post today about how marketers are really destroying happiness by creating in us the want, the desire for stuff.
It’s exactly right.
Every moment, when you’re just present to that moment, is perfect. It’s our thoughts that it needs to be different, our thoughts about a future that needs to be different, that causes suffering.
And very often, that thought will be about things that we desire, things that we want. A new car, more money, a new spouse.
And getting those things feels good. For a while.
Because it’s not the thing that makes us feel good. It’s the absense of desire. It’s the fact that there’s no longer desire, and when there’s no desire, there’s just presence and peace. We momentarily wake up to the present moment, and it feels great.
But soon, another desire takes over, and we go for another ride.
Thanks, marketers!
The solution is obvious: Stop believing that the thing is going to change anything. Sure, you can have the desire for a new car. I’m no puritanist, I like things. But stop believing that it’s going to make you feel better, stop believing it’s going to change anything real.
I think almost anyone who have become wealthy will tell you that it feels great, but then after a little while, you’re still just yourself. And now you don’t even have the dream about “some day in the future I’m going to be wealthy and that’ll fix all my problems” to hold on to. Now you’re really on your own.
Terrifying, isn’t it?
P.S. Check out Coach TV Episode #4 for more on how to achieve peace without the new car.
I had an interesting experience last weekend while helping my friend carry out garbage from his renovation down 3 flights of stairs across a courtyard into a container. I really sucked at it, and felt miserable and sad, mentally rehearsing my excuses for my unified suckage, going over the reasons to politely say no next time someone asked me to do something like that.
But then something happened. Rather than tightening my jaw and struggling through it, I started sorting the garbage. Large pieces of plaster over here, small pieces of plaster over there. Long pieces of wood over here, short ones there, twisted aluminum frames over there by them selves. Gently pulling pieces of wood nailed together apart, so they were easier to carry.
It was a form of work that I enjoyed infinitely more, that I was infinitely better at, and that allowed the other two guys to just focus on carrying stuff up and down the stairs.
My friend then told me that they’d been working for hours before I came, and had accomplished almost nothing, because they wasted so much time trying to pull things out of the pile, but it was all tangled together, and the end result was that they mostly just stood there chatting, not doing anything. He said if I’d been there from the start, they’d have been all done hours ago.
It was obviously a great experience for me, but isn’t it remarkable how close I was to just giving up, resigning, finding any excuse to get the hell out of there becasue I wasn’t making any difference and I felt miserable? And the reality was I was just one small step away from feeling great and making a huge difference?
I bet that happens all the time. That we’re so focused on doing what’s expected, or what we ourselves expect of ourselves, rather than what we’d really enjoy, what we’d be really good at. It takes a little bit of courage to do that. To step out of the comfort zone and do what feels right. What if they don’t approve? Maybe they just think I’m being lazy, that I’m not being a team player. Maybe it won’t work, maybe I’ll actually suck at it. In any case, it feels so easy, it can’t really be valuable, can it?
I’m sure it happens all the time, and it’s a crime against humanity. Make a commitment today to look out for opportunities for you to stop perpetrating this crime.
Deal?
A few days ago I wrote about how we got about 5x the signups per day when we dropped the name field. Well, I decided to do a split test on this on my friend Pernille Melsted’s signup page, and much to my surprise, the results over there seem to be the opposite – 85% sign up when I ask for both name and email, but only 57% when I ask for just email. Surprising, no?
The numbers aren’t quite statistically significant yet, so I’m going to let it run for a few more days to confirm, but i can only speculate that perhaps it’s because the nature of the relationship between Pernille and her audience is deeper and warmer (after all, Pernille helps people find their passion), being asked for just email makes the interaction it seem too cold?
I don’t know, but I’m mildly surprised.
Coach Eye er en (for mig) ny coaching portal i Danmark, hvor man kan finde og direkte booke coaches.
Det ser rigtig godt ud, og det er skønt med noget konkurrence på det marked.
Det er gratis at tilmelde sig som coach. Forretningsmodellen består i at de tager sig af de trælse ting, som booking og betaling mod en kommission på 6 eller 12%, afhængig af om kunden har fundet dig via portalen eller du selv har sendt dem derover.
For teknikerne blandt jer derude er det værd at bemærke at den er lavet i Rails. Nice job.
Episode #3 of Coach TV, the new passionate video blog on productivity, happiness, and life improvement, is live, and you don’t want to miss it.
It’s about how taking teeny tiny small steps each day will help you achieve your goals, without the pain, fear, and stress that can often come with goals.
Check it out here, and make sure you subscribe to the feed, as I’m not going to post about every new video over here.
Friends,
This is the inaugural episode of my new video blog show, called “Coach TV”. Check it out, I think you’re going to like it!
It’s going on, over at CoachTVBlog.com
Tags:beliefs·coaching·growth·happiness·life·personal development·success
For about a month or so we’ve had one of those annoying boxes that pops up on the page and asks if you want to sign up for our newsletter over at Børn i byen. It’s annoying, but it works like a charm – gets us about 10 new subscribers a day, and if you click the “Box go away” link, it won’t show up for another 10 days or so, so it’s not overly intrusive.
Now, it’s good to have the name of your subscribers as well, right, so you can personalize your mailings? Well, when we added a name field to the box, signups dropped to about 3 a day. That’s cutting it down to a third!
After a week of testing that, we switched back to email-only, and things are now back to on average 10 signups per day.
I was reminded of this story when Ryan Deiss wrote about his experiences with email-only signup here. Our numbers are much more staggering than his. 5-8% isn’t bad, but 200% is even better.
Another tid-bit from our experience is that initially we offered 4 free movie tickets with every signup. When we ran out of tickets after about 20 signups, we replaced the text with one that just stated what we’d cover in the newsletter, with no special signup gifts. And much to our surprise, the signup numbers remained completely unchanged.
The most common pitfall when you start out as a freelancer is to just multiply your billable rate with the number of hours per week (say, 40), and say to yourself “wow, I’m going to be rich”.
Alas, you can’t bill that much time, and you have other expenses other than your own salary.
For example:
- Sick time
- National holidays
- Vacation
- Business development, marketing, contract negotiation
- Down time
- Retirement savings
- Accounting and legal fees
- Software, hardware, rent, and other costs of doing business
All in all, you have a lot less time and a lot more costs than most of us think.
I’ve been in business for myself as both the owner of a software consulting business and as a sole freelancer for almost seven years now, yet I’ve never sat down and done the math for this until this past weekend. Shame on me, but don’t let that happen to you: I’ve decided to share my simple rate calculator spreadsheet.
I know there’s already an Hourly Rate Calculator by FreelanceSwitch, but I don’t like it much. It’s too granular for me. “How much do you spend annually on travel?” I have no clue. But, I do have a rough guesstimate of how much money I spend on various stuff per month, on average. And if not, after a few months or a year of doing business, you can start to calculate or just sum up this number pretty easily.
Instructions
- Click here for the spreadsheet.
- Sign in to your Google account, or create one if you don’t have one, then click File and “Copy spreadsheet…” to copy it to your own account, so you can modify it.
- Edit the numbers in the boxes with gray background to suit your needs.
- Find your required income revealed in the boxes with yellow background
A few notes:
- The first group is about how many days you’re working and how many hours per day.
- Be realistic. I find it hard to bill more than 4-5 hours per day, and I need on average at least one day per week for new biz development, conferences, etc.
- The second group of gray boxes is about your costs – salary, fixed costs, variable costs. Needless to say, it’s good to keep fixed costs down.
- Fixed costs are in a separate area at the bottom. Add more rows as needed, and make sure to check that the totals for fixed costs count all the rows. If you add rows at the bottom, the total generally doesn’t change to include those rows.
Armed with your new information, you can still have a little flexibility. If for example you have a contract where you can effectively bill 7-8 hours per day, then your rate can be lower – just look at the day rate instead of the hourly rate.
As always, the key to insight lies in being really specific about your reality.
I’m curious to hear what you learn, if you’ve done this calculation before, and what insights you have that I’ve overlooked.
Have at it in the comments.
I learned several years ago about how they make gum. It may or may not apply to today’s methods, but I’ve always been fascinated by the technique.
The challenge is that cleaning the machines take a relatively long time and is costly, so you want to avoid that as much as possible. So what they do instead is start with the mildest, weakest flavor, and then go to progressively stronger flavors, ending with licorice as the king of flavors.
That way, in essence, each flavor contains residuals of all the flavors that have gone before it, but it’s okay, because the latest one dominates, so you can’t really tell. Clever, no?
I was reminded of that story today as I was having some dark chocolate (Edelbitter) from Ritter Sport, and it struck me how it tasted so much like their other chocolates, like their Marzipan og Nugat varieties.
Could they be applying the same technique to chocolate making?
Next time you go for a run, try practicing just being present, without thinking or passing judgment on anything. Just notice everything around you. The trees, the birds, the wind, the ground, your breath, how your body feels. No judgment, just noticing.
“Hello, tree. Oh, there’s a bird. Hmm, let’s see how the ground feels under my feet. There’s a slight vibration in my lower back, how interesting. Now there’s an uncomfortable feeling in my thighs.”
And on and on. See how long you can keep it up.
Every once in a while, you’re going to get caught up in thoughts or start to judge whether something is good or bad, pleasant or painful.
Just notice that, too, and gently get back to non-judging.
It’s a great way to augment your physical exercise with something that benefits you on a much deeper level as well.
It’ll work for any type of solitary exercise, but clearly best for outdoors activities. It would be great for biking as well.
Give it a try next time you exercise, and let me know how it felt.
Check Computer-Zen, hvor jeg deler ud af mine bedste tips til hvordan man får flow og god energi ind i sin computer-oplevelse.
For eksempel:
- Hvordan du aldrig igen glemmer at svare på en vigtig email
- Hvordan du sikrer dig at du altid har en frisk backup uden at skulle tænke over det
- Hvordan du får dit website til rent faktisk at generere leads og kunder til din forretning
- Hvordan du får styr på helvedet med de mange passwords man altid skal huske
Og meget andet.
Så check videoen med det samme.
Most of us do everything we can to obstruct our own best laid plans, without even knowing it! Unless we change this, we’ll never achieve the success we deserve.
Click here to watch the video
We celebrated the baptism this weekend with great food from Magasin Catering.
Unfortunately, a small hiccup on their end cause a third of the food to arrive about 3 hours too late.
It wasn’t a disaster by any means – people were fed, there was food left over, and we got to eat the extra food for dinner. But it was clearly a mistake on their part, and we intended to ask for a comparable discount.
But that’s not what we got. When we called them this morning, they already knew about the error and they immediately told us the whole thing was going to be on the house. That’s right, they are not going to charge us at all.
That’s the kind of service that makes you respect them, want to buy from them again, and want to tell your friends about them. For example on your blog, like now.
So next time you’re hosting a party in Copenhagen and don’t want to cook yourself, consider Magasin Catering. They’re make really tasty food, are fairly cheap (140 kr per person is not expensive at all), and they understand the value of customer service. Kudos!
