The Art of Expressing Yourself

With­out express­ing your­self, it will be nearly impos­si­ble for you to get to where you want to be. If you don’t tell peo­ple, they won’t be able to help you. Even if you’re work­ing under the overly proud assump­tion that you can make it all on you own, peo­ple won’t be able to get out of your way.

If you’re for­tu­nate, like me, you have an employer that actu­ally lis­tens. If you’re unfor­tu­nate, like most peo­ple, it will be tough. But the fact remains that if you never com­mu­ni­cate what you truly love and desire, you’re left with a very minor chance of reach­ing your goal—no mat­ter if it’s artic­u­lated as The Law of Attrac­tion or sim­ply a ratio­nal truth.

If you look at most suc­cess­ful, famous and infa­mous peo­ple around the world, they have this in com­mon; they are very clear about what they do. They’ve found their thing and the next and most nat­ural step is to com­mu­ni­cate it. Some­times it can be too excit­ing to keep quiet about. But even if you haven’t found “the thing” yet, talk­ing about what you do and what you enjoy gives you a far greater chance of find­ing it.

We’re liv­ing in the golden age of the web, where this kind of com­mu­ni­ca­tion is sim­ple and incred­i­bly acces­si­ble. As long as you have a device with inter­net access, the pos­si­bil­i­ties seem near end­less. With­out pay­ing a cent, you have plat­forms and sites such as Twit­ter, Word­Press, Flickr, Tum­blr, Face­book, Snipt, LinkedIn and many oth­ers. The options you have and what you can do with them can sim­ply be described as “amaz­ing” but are at the same time, for most of us, noth­ing special.

My advice is to get out there and artic­u­late your pas­sion; spread your word. Out of the mil­lions of peo­ple who have access to your opin­ions, some­one is bound to find them inter­est­ing. In the highly unlikely event that no one does, you may at least have come just a lit­tle bit closer under­stand­ing your­self and what you want to spend your life doing.

If you don’t do it, you should try it. It’s fun.
If you already do it, con­tinue to do it, to grow and understand.

Some ser­vices are bet­ter than oth­ers. As always, this is a mat­ter of per­sonal pref­er­ence. Below you’ll find a small intro­duc­tion to the ones I like. Some of these I don’t even use but I like their con­cept and how I’ve seen other peo­ple use them. Have fun!

Twit­ter

This one is at the top of the list because of it’s pure sim­plic­ity. At first, I didn’t get it. After using it for a while, you start under­stand­ing its value and how use­ful it actu­ally is. Once you fol­low a decent amount of inter­est­ing peo­ple and begin reply­ing and repost­ing, it can be inspi­ra­tional, use­ful and a whole lot of fun.

I rec­om­mend Tweetie as a client—for both Mac OS and the iPhone—to get the sim­plest and smoothest experience.

http://www.twitter.com

Blog­ging

Blog­ging has taken the world by storm and many peo­ple think it’s over­rated and hyped. How­ever, it’s a great and con­ve­nient way of express­ing your­self. The best thing about it is that it offers the flex­i­bil­ity to do almost any­thing from almost any­where. No mat­ter if you write long nov­els, photo blog your sketch­book or just pub­lish­ing what­ever, a blog is suitable.

Besides, if you don’t like the word, you don’t have to call it your “blog”. Call it your “idea box” or “emo­tional waste basket.”

Per­son­ally, I’m a long time user of Word­Press, which has a beau­ti­ful admin­is­tra­tion inter­face and is easy to theme and develop with. It’s what makes the wheels spin on this beauty, for example.

Tum­blr

Tum­blr is some­thing I have never tried but as I under­stand it, it’s some­where in between Twit­ter and blog­ging. This seems to be a good start­ing point as well as an easy yet com­plex way for expe­ri­enced peo­ple to express them­selves. If I wasn’t such a Word­Press fan­boy, I’d def­i­nitely try it out since it seems pol­ished, tightly inte­grated with other ser­vices and very easy to use for all kinds of content.

http://www.tumblr.com

Other note­wor­thy mentions

Every­one knows Face­book but it may also be a good idea to linger on the more bor­ing and pro­fes­sional LinkedIn. There are also more spe­cial­ized ser­vices, like Snipt for web devel­op­ers which is a con­cept I really love—it allows you to quickly and eas­ily save and share your code snip­pets. This shows the incred­i­ble diver­sity of the inter­net and it’s spe­cial­ized ways of doing some­thing nat­ural and essential—simply express­ing yourself.

• Day 18: Typo(graphy)
• Day 29: Review, The Prin­ci­ples of Suc­cess­ful Freelancing
• Day 22: Pas­sive Income
• Day 12: Writ­ing Headlines
• Day 24: Blog­ging For Clients