How to Discover Your Life Purpose in About 20 Minutes

How do you discover your real purpose in life? I’m not talking about your job, your daily responsibilities, or even your long-term goals. I mean the real reason why you’re here at all — the very reason you exist.
Perhaps you’re a rather nihilistic person who doesn’t believe you have a purpose and that life has no meaning. Doesn’t matter. Not believing that you have a purpose won’t prevent you from discovering it, just as a lack of belief in gravity won’t prevent you from tripping. All that a lack of belief will do is make it take longer, so if you’re one of those people, just change the number 20 in the title of this blog entry to 40 (or 60 if you’re really stubborn). Most likely though if you don’t believe you have a purpose, then you probably won’t believe what I’m saying anyway, but even so, what’s the risk of investing an hour just in case?
Here’s a story about Bruce Lee which sets the stage for this little exercise. A master martial artist asked Bruce to teach him everything Bruce knew about martial arts. Bruce held up two cups, both filled with liquid. “The first cup,” said Bruce, “represents all of your knowledge about martial arts. The second cup represents all of my knowledge about martial arts. If you want to fill your cup with my knowledge, you must first empty your cup of your knowledge.”

How to Decide When to End a Long-term Relationship

August 15th, 2005 by Steve Pavlina

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Relationships are among of the most complex aspects of our lives, particularly long-term relationships such as marriage. Your relationships can elevate you to new heights or drag you down into the dumps.
But what if you’re somewhere in the middle?
What if your relationship is pretty good, like a 7 on a scale of 1 to 10? Should you stay, openly committing to that relationship for life? Or should you leave and look for something better, something that could become even better?
This is the dreadful state of ambivalence. You simply aren’t sure one way or the other. Maybe what you have is good enough and you’d be a fool to abandon it in search of a new relationship you may never find. Or maybe you’re seriously holding yourself back from finding a truly fulfilling relationship that would serve you well the rest of your life. Tough call.
Fortunately, there’s an excellent book that provides an intelligent process for overcoming relationship ambivalence. It’s called Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay by Mira Kirshenbaum. I read this book many years ago, and it completely changed how I think about long-term relationships.
First, the book points out the wrong way to make this decision. The wrong way is to use a balance-scale approach, attempting to weigh the pros and cons of staying vs. leaving. Of course, that’s what everyone does. Weighing the pros and cons seems logical, but it doesn’t provide you with the right kind of information you need to make this decision. There will be pros and cons in every relationship, so how do you know if yours are fatal or tolerable or even wonderful? The cons tell you to leave, while the pros tell you to stay. Plus you’re required to predict future pros and cons, so how are you going to predict the future of your relationship? Who’s to say if your problems are temporary or permanent?
Kirshenbaum’s solution is to dump the balance-scale approach and use a diagnostic approach instead. Diagnose the true status of your relationship instead of trying to weigh it on a scale. This will provide you the information you need to make an intelligent decision and to know precisely why you’re making it. If you’re ambivalent, it means your relationship is sick. So discovering the precise nature of the disease seems an intelligent place to begin.
In order to perform a relationship diagnosis, the author offers a series of 36 yes/no questions to ask yourself. Each question is explained very thoroughly with several pages of text. In fact, the diagnostic procedure is essentially the whole book.
Each question is like passing your relationship through a filter. If you pass the filter, you proceed to the next question. If you don’t pass the filter, then the recommendation is that you end your relationship. In order to achieve the recommendation that you should stay together, you must pass through all 36 filters. If even one filter snags you, the recommendation is to leave.
This isn’t as brutal as it sounds though because most of these filters will be very easy for you to pass. My guess is that out of the 36 questions, less than a third will require much thought. Hopefully you can pass filters like, “Does your partner beat you?” and “Is your partner leaving the country for good without you?” without much trouble. If not, you don’t need a book to tell you your relationship is going downhill.
The author’s recommendations are based on observing the post-decision experiences of multiple couples who either stayed together or broke up after suffering from a state of ambivalence related to one of the 36 questions. The author then watched how those relationships turned out in the long run. Did the person making the stay-or-leave decision feel s/he made the correct choice years later? If the couple stayed together, did the relationship blossom into something great or decline into resentment? And if they broke up, did they find new happiness or experience everlasting regret over leaving?
I found this concept extremely valuable, like being able to turn the page of time to see what might happen. The recommendations are based on the author’s observations and her professional opinion, so I don’t recommend you take her advice blindly. However, I personally found all of her conclusions utterly sensible and didn’t find any surprises. I doubt you’ll be terribly surprised to read that a relationship with a drug user is virtually doomed to failure. But what about a relationship with someone you don’t respect? What about a long-distance relationship? Or a relationship with a workaholic who makes 10x your income? Would you like to know how such relationships tend to work out if the couple stays together vs. if they break up?
Kirshenbaum explains that where a break-up is recommended, it’s because most people who chose to stay together in that situation were unhappy, while most people who left were happier for it. So long-term happiness is the key criteria used, meaning the happiness of the individual making the stay-or-leave decision, not the (ex-)partner.
If you’re facing a “too good to leave, too bad to stay” dilemma, I highly recommend this book. You’ll breeze through most of the filters, but you’ll probably hit a few that snag you and really make you think. But I recommend this book not just for people who aren’t sure about the status of their relationship but also those with healthy relationships who want to make it even better. This book will help you diagnose the weak points of your relationship that could lead to break-up and allow you to consciously attend to them.
Here are some diagnostic points from the book you may find valuable (these are my summaries, not the author’s exact words):

1. If God or some divine being told you it was OK to leave your relationship, would you feel relieved that you could finally leave? If your religion is the only reason you’re still together, your relationship is already long dead. Drop the self-torturing beliefs and choose happiness. Living together physically but not in your heart isn’t going to fool any divine being anyway, nor is it likely to fool anyone else around you. Leave the hypocrisy behind, and take off.
2. Are you able to get your needs met in the relationship without too much difficulty? If it takes too much effort to get your needs met, then your relationship is doing you more harm than good. Leave.
3. Do you genuinely like your partner, and does your partner seem to genuinely like you? If you don’t mutually like each other, you don’t belong together.
4. Do you feel a unique sexual attraction to your partner? If there’s no spark, there’s no point in staying.
5. Does your partner exhibit any behavior that makes the relationship too difficult for you to stay in, and do you find your partner is either unwilling or incapable of changing? Results matter far more than intentions. If your partner behaves in a way that’s intolerable to you, then permanent change is a must, or you need to leave. Example: “Quit smoking for good in 30 days, or I’m gone.” Trying to tolerate the intolerable will only erode your self-esteem, and you’ll see yourself as stronger in the past than in the present.
6. Do you see yourself when you look in your partner’s eyes? A metaphor… if you don’t sense a strong compatibility with your partner, you’re better off with someone else.
7. Do you and your partner each respect each other as individuals? No mutual respect = time to leave.
8. Does your partner serve as an important resource for you in a way that you care about? If your partner does little to enhance your life and you wouldn’t lose anything important to you by leaving, then leave. You’ll break even by being on your own and gain tremendously by finding someone else who is a resource to you.
9. Does your relationship have the demonstrated capacity for forgiveness? If you can’t forgive each other’s transgressions, then resentment will gradually replace love. Leave.
10. Do you and your partner have fun together? A relationship that’s no fun is dead. Leave.
11. Do you and your partner have mutual goals and dreams for your future together? If you aren’t planning to spend your future together, something’s terribly wrong. Take off.

These questions drive home the point that a relationship should enhance your life, not drain it. At the very least, you should be happier in the relationship than outside it. Even if a break-up leads to a messy divorce with complex custody arrangements, Kirshenbaum points out that in many situations, that can still lead to long-term happiness whereas staying in a defunct relationship almost surely prevents it.
Some of the diagnostic points might seem overly harsh in terms of recommending leaving in situations you might find salvageable. A relationship, however, requires the effort and commitment of both partners. One person can’t carry it alone. Even though you might come through with a miraculous save (such as by turning around an abusive relationship), such attempts are usually doomed to failure, and even where they succeed, they may take such a tremendous toll that you ultimately feel they weren’t worth the effort. You could be much happier in a new relationship (or living alone) instead of investing so much time trying to save a relationship that’s dragging you down. You’ll do a lot more good giving yourself to someone who’s more receptive to what you have to offer and who genuinely appreciates you for it. If you’re spending your relationship fighting resistance more than sharing love, you’re probably better off letting it go and embracing a relationship that will provide greater mutual rewards for less work.
You may find it revealing to apply these diagnostic questions to a broader set of human relationships, such as your relationships with your boss and co-workers. Perhaps you can skip the sexual attraction one… but mutual respect, fun, shared goals, tolerable behavior, getting your needs met, etc. all apply perfectly well to career-oriented relationships. For example, if your boss avoids you when you try to discuss your future with the company, I’d say that’s a very bad sign for one of you.
Don’t confuse the question of whether or not you should leave your current relationship with how you might find a new relationship. If it’s clear that your current relationship should end, then end it. Once you’re on your own again, then you can (re)develop the skills needed to attract a new partner. It’s unlikely you’ll be in a place to assess your chances of entering a new relationship while you’re still in one. For one, everyone around you will perceive you as unavailable while you’re still in a relationship, so you won’t be able to get a clear sense of where you stand until you’re free of that.
A proper diagnosis may also convince you that your relationship is indeed too good to leave. That situation may last your entire life, or it may change at some point. You can’t control all the variables. But at least you’ll have a method for deciding if you can commit to your relationship in the present moment or if you should be making plans to end it.
In any relationship, choose at the very least to achieve your own happiness.

How to Get Up Right Away When Your Alarm Goes Off

April 25th, 2006 by Steve Pavlina

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When your alarm wakes you up in the morning, is it hard for you to get up right away?  Do you find yourself hitting the snooze button and going right back to sleep?
That used to be part of my daily awakening ritual too.  When my alarm would blare its infernal noise, I’d turn the damned thing off right away.  Then under the cloak of that early morning brain fog, I’d slowly ponder whether or not I should actually get up:
It’s nice and warm under the covers.  If I get up, it’s going to be cold.  That won’t be too pleasant.
Oh, I really should get up now.  C’mon legs… move.  Go, legs, go.  Hmmm… that isn’t how I move my legs, is it?  They don’t seem to be listening to me.
I should go to the gym.  Yeah.  Hmmm… I don’t really feel like working out right now though.  I haven’t even had breakfast.  Maybe I should have a muffin first.  Banana nut.  Now that’s a good muffin.
Maybe I’m trying to get myself up too early.  I’m still sleepy, aren’t I?  Maybe getting up with an alarm is unnatural.  Won’t I function better with more sleep?
I don’t have to get up right this minute, do I?  Surely I can relax another five minutes or so.  The world isn’t going to end if I don’t get up right now.
I’ll bet my wife is toasty warm right now.  She told me she hates it when I try to snuggle her at 6am, but so what…  she loves me enough to forgive me, right?  I know… I’ll start massaging her back and shoulders first.  She can’t resist a good massage, even so early in the morning.  Then I’ll transition to a head scratching.  Yeah, that’ll do it.  And then slide right into the spoon position.  Won’t that be a pleasant way to start the day?
[ Scootch... scootch... Zzzzzzzz ]
Two hours later…
Me:  What time is it?  I don’t even remember the alarm going off.  That was a good snuggle though.  Oh well, guess I’ll have to skip exercise today.
Wife:  Why do you keep setting your alarm if you aren’t going to get up when it goes off?
Me:  Oh, did you think that was my wake-up alarm?  It’s actually my snuggle alarm.
OK, so I wasn’t really intending for it to be a snuggle alarm.  I had intended to get up when it went off, but my foggy brain kept negotiating me right back to sleep.
Fast forward to present day…
My alarm goes off sometime between 4:00 and 5:00am… never later than 5:00am, even on weekends and holidays.  I turn off the alarm within a few seconds.  My lungs inflate with a deep breath of air, and I stretch my limbs out in all directions for about two seconds.  Soon my feet hit the floor, and I find myself getting dressed while my wife snoozes on.  I go downstairs to grab a piece of fruit, pop into my home office to catch up on some emails, and then it’s off to the gym at 5:15.
But this time there’s no voice inside my head debating what I should do.  It’s not even a positive voice this time — it’s just not there.  The whole thing happens on autopilot, even before I feel fully awake mentally.  I can’t say it requires any self-discipline to do this every morning because it’s a totally conditioned response.  It’s like my conscious mind is just along for the ride while my subconscious controls my body.  When my alarm goes off each morning, I respond just like Pavlov’s dogs.  It would actually be harder for menot to get up when my alarm goes off.
So how do you go from scenario one to scenario two?
First, let’s consider the way most people tackle this problem — what I consider the wrong way.
The wrong way is to try using your conscious willpower to get yourself out of bed each morning.  That might work every once in a while, but let’s face it — you’re not always going to be thinking straight the moment your alarm goes off.  You may experience what I call the fog of brain.  The decisions you make in that state won’t necessarily be the ones you’d make when you’re fully conscious and alert.  You can’t really trust yourself… nor should you.
If you use this approach, you’re likely to fall into a trap.  You decide to get up at a certain time in advance, but then you undo that decision when the alarm goes off.  At 10pm you decide it would be a good idea to get up at 5am.  But at 5am you decide it would be a better idea to get up at 8am.  But let’s face it — you know the 10pm decision is the one you really want implemented… if only you could get your 5am self to go along with it.
Now some people, upon encountering this conundrum, will conclude that they simply need more discipline.  And that’s actually somewhat true, but not in the way you’d expect.  If you want to get up at 5am, you don’t need more discipline at 5am.  You don’t need better self-talk.  You don’t need two or three alarm clocks scattered around the room.  And you don’t need an advanced alarm that includes technology from NASA’s astronaut toilets.
You actually need more discipline when you’re fully awake and conscious:  the discipline to know that you can’t trust yourself to make intelligent, conscious decisions the moment you first wake up.  You need the discipline to accept that you’re not going to make the right call at 5am.  Your 5am coach is no good, so you need to fire him.
What’s the real solution then?  The solution is to delegate the problem.  Turn the whole thing over to your subconscious mind.  Cut your conscious mind out of the loop.
Now how do you do this?  The same way you learned any other repeatable skill.  You practice until it becomes rote.  Eventually your subconscious will take over and run the script on autopilot.
This is going to sound really stupid, but it works.  Practice getting up as soon as your alarm goes off.  That’s right — practice.  But don’t do it in the morning.  Do it during the day when you’re wide awake.
Go to your bedroom, and set the room conditions to match your desired wake-up time as best you can.  Darken the room, or practice in the evening just after sunset so it’s already dark.  If you sleep in pajamas, put on your pajamas.  If you brush your teeth before bed, then brush your teeth.  If you take off your glasses or contacts when you sleep, then take those off too.
Set your alarm for a few minutes ahead.  Lie down in bed just like you would if you were sleeping, and close your eyes.  Get into your favorite sleep position.  Imagine it’s early in the morning… a few minutes before your desired wake-up time.  Pretend you’re actually asleep.  Visualize a dream location, or just zone out as best you can.
Now when your alarm goes off, turn it off as fast as you can.  Then take a deep breath to fully inflate your lungs, and stretch your limbs out in all directions for a couple seconds… like you’re stretching during a yawn.  Then sit up, plant your feet on the floor, and stand up.  Smile a big smile.  Then proceed to do the very next action you’d like to do upon waking.  For me it’s getting dressed.
Now shake yourself off, restore the pre-waking conditions, return to bed, reset your alarm, and repeat.  Do this over and over and over until it becomes so automatic that you run through the whole ritual without thinking about it.  If you have to subvocalize any of the steps (i.e. if you hear a mental voice coaching you on what to do), you’re not there yet.
Feel free to devote several sessions over a period of days to this practice.  Think of it like doing sets and reps at the gym.  Do one or two sets per day at different times… and perhaps 3-10 reps each time.
Yes, it will take some time to do this, but that time is nothing compared to how much time you’ll save in the long run.  A few hours of practice today can save you hundreds of hours each year.
With enough practice — I can’t give you an accurate estimate of how long it will take because it will be different for everyone – you’ll condition a new physiological response to the sound of your alarm.  When your alarm goes off, you’ll get up automatically without even thinking about it.  The more you run the pattern, the stronger it will become.  Eventually it will be uncomfortable notto get up when your alarm goes off.  It will feel like putting on your pants with the opposite leg first.
You can also practice mentally if you’re good at visualizing.  Mental practice is faster, but I think it’s best to run through the whole thing physically.  There are subtle details you might miss if you only rehearse mentally, and you want your subconscious to capture the real flavor of the experience.  So if you do use mental practice, at least do it physically the first few times.
The more you practice your wake-up ritual, the deeper you’ll ingrain this habit into your subconscious.  Alarm goes off -> get up immediately.  Alarm goes off -> get up immediately.  Alarm goes off -> get up immediately.
Once this becomes a daily habit, you won’t have to do anymore daytime practice.  This type of habit is self-reinforcing.  You only have to go through the conditioning period once.  Then you’re basically set for life until you decide to change it.  Even if you fall out of the habit for some reason (like an extended vacation in a different time zone), you’ll be able to return to it more easily.  Think of it like muscle memory.  Once you’ve grooved in the pattern, it will still be there even if you let some weeds grow over it.
Any behavior pattern you experience when your alarm goes off will become self-reinforcing if you repeat it enough times.  Chances are that you already have a well-established wake-up ritual, but it may not be the one you want.  The more you repeat your existing pattern, the more you condition it into your subconscious.  Every time you fail to get up when your alarm goes off, that becomes ever more your default physiological response.  If you want to change that behavior, you’ll need to undertake a conscious reconditioning program such as the one I described above.
Beating yourself up about your bad wake-up habits will not work — in fact, you’ll just condition these mental beatings as part of the very routine you’re trying to change.  Not only will you not get up when your alarm goes off, but you’ll also automatically beat yourself up about it.  How lame is that?  Do you really want to keep running that dumb pattern for the rest of your life?  That’s exactly what will happen if you don’t condition a more empowering pattern.  For good or ill, your habits will make or break you.
Once you establish your desired wake-up ritual, I recommend you stick with it every single day – 7 days a week, 365 days a year.  And for the first 30 days, set your alarm for the same time every day.  Once the habit is established, then you can vary your wake-up times or occasionally go without the alarm if you want to sleep in, but until then it’s best to keep the pattern very tight.  That way it will become your default behavior, and you’ll be able to stray from time to time without serious risk of deconditioning it.
I’m confident that once you establish this habit, you’ll absolutely love it.  I consider this to be one my most productive habits.  It saves me hundreds of hours a year, and it keeps paying dividends day after day.  I also found this habit extremely valuable during my polyphasic sleep experiment.
Think about it — if you oversleep just 30 minutes a day, that’s 180+ hours a year.  And if you’re at 60 minutes a day, that’s 365 hours a year, the equivalent of nine 40-hour weeks.  That’s a lot of time!  Now I don’t know about you, but I can think of more creative things to do with that time than lying in bed longer than I need to.
I encourage you to give this method a try.  I know it seems silly to practice getting out of bed, but hey, what if it works?  What if you knew with total certainty that if you set your alarm for a certain time, you would absolutely get up at that time no matter what?  There’s no reason you can’t create that for yourself over the next few days.  Practice makes permanent.
And if you want some tips on establishing the habit of getting up early, I encourage you to read these two articles:

How to Make Money From Your Blog

May 3rd, 2006 by Steve Pavlina

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StevePavlina.com was launched on Oct 1st, 2004.  By April 2005 it was averaging $4.12/day in income.  Now it brings in over $200/day $1000/day(updated as of 10/29/06).  I didn’t spend a dime on marketing or promotion.  In fact, I started this site with just $9 to register the domain name, and everything was bootstrapped from there.  Would you like to know how I did it?
This article is seriously long (over 7300 words), but you’re sure to get your money’s worth (hehehe).  I’ll even share some specifics.  If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to bookmark it or print it out for later.
Do you actually want to monetize your blog?
Some people have strong personal feelings with respect to making money from their blogs.  If you think commercializing your blog is evil, immoral, unethical, uncool, lame, greedy, obnoxious, or anything along those lines, then don’t commercialize it.
If you have mixed feelings about monetizing your blog, then sort out those feelings first.  If you think monetizing your site is wonderful, fine.  If you think it’s evil, fine.  But make up your mind before you seriously consider starting down this path.  If you want to succeed, you must be congruent.  Generating income from your blog is challenging enough — you don’t want to be dealing with self-sabotage at the same time.  It should feel genuinely good to earn income from your blog — you should be driven by a healthy ambition to succeed.  If your blog provides genuine value, you fully deserve to earn income from it.  If, however, you find yourself full of doubts over whether this is the right path for you, you might find this article helpful:  How Selfish Are You?  It’s about balancing your needs with the needs of others.
If you do decide to generate income from your blog, then don’t be shy about it.  If you’re going to put up ads, then really put up ads.  Don’t just stick a puny little ad square in a remote corner somewhere.  If you’re going to request donations, then really request donations.  Don’t put up a barely visible “Donate” link and pray for the best.  If you’re going to sell products, then reallysell them.  Create or acquire the best quality products you can, and give your visitors compelling reasons to buy.  If you’re going to do this, then fully commit to it.  Don’t take a half-assed approach.  Either be full-assed or no-assed.
You can reasonably expect that when you begin commercializing a free site, some people will complain, depending on how you do it.  I launched this site in October 2004, and I began putting Google Adsense ads on the site in February 2005.  There were some complaints, but I expected that — it was really no big deal.  Less than 1 in 5,000 visitors actually sent me negative feedback.  Most people who sent feedback were surprisingly supportive.  Most of the complaints died off within a few weeks, and the site began generating income almost immediately, although it was pretty low — a whopping $53 the first month.  If you’d like to see some month-by-month specifics, I posted my 2005Adsense revenue figures earlier this year.  Adsense is still my single best source of revenue for this site, although it’s certainly not my only source.  More on that later…
Can you make a decent income online?
Yes, absolutely.  At the very least, a high five-figure annual income is certainly an attainable goal for an individual working full-time from home.  I’m making a healthy income from StevePavlina.com, and the site is only 19 months old… barely a toddler.  If you have a day job, it will take longer to generate a livable income, but it can still be done part-time if you’re willing to devote a lot of your spare time to it.  I’ve always done it full-time.
Can most people do it?
No, they can’t.  I hope it doesn’t shock you to see a personal development web site use the dreaded C-word.  But I happen to agree with those who say that 99% of people who try to generate serious income from their blogs will fail.  The tagline for this site is “Personal Development for SmartPeople.”  And unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your outlook), smart people are a minority on this planet.  So while most people can’t make a living this way, I would say that most smart people can.  How do you know whether or not you qualify as smart?  Here’s a good rule of thumb:  If you have to ask the question, you aren’t.
If that last paragraph doesn’t flood my inbox with flames, I don’t know what will.  OK, actually I do.
This kind of 99-1 ratio isn’t unique to blogging though.  You’ll see it in any field with relatively low barriers to entry.  What percentage of wannabe actors, musicians, or athletes ever make enough money from their passions to support themselves?  It doesn’t take much effort to start a blog these days — almost anyone can do it.  Talent counts for something, and the talent that matters in blogging is intelligence.  But that just gets you in the door.  You need to specifically apply your intelligence to one particular talent.  And the best words I can think of to describe that particular talent are:  web savvy.
If you are very web savvy, or if you can learn to become very web savvy, then you have an excellent shot of making enough money from your blog to cover all your living expenses… and then some.  But if becoming truly web savvy is more than your gray matter can handle, then I’ll offer this advice:  Don’t quit your day job.
Web savvy
What do I mean by web savvy?  You don’t need to be a programmer, but you need a decent functional understanding of a variety of web technologies.  What technologies are “key” will depend on the nature of your blog and your means of monetization.  But generally speaking I’d list these elements as significant:

• blog publishing software
• HTML/CSS
• blog comments (and comment spam)
• RSS/syndication
• feed aggregators
• pings
• trackbacks
• full vs. partial feeds
• blog carnivals (for kick-starting your blog’s traffic)
• search engines
• search engine optimization (SEO)
• page rank
• social bookmarking
• tagging
• contextual advertising
• affiliate programs
• traffic statistics
• email

Optional:  podcasting, instant messaging, PHP or other web scripting languages.
I’m sure I missed a few due to familiarity blindness.  If scanning such a list makes your head spin, I wouldn’t recommend trying to make a full-time living from blogging just yet.  Certainly you can still blog, but you’ll be at a serious disadvantage compared to someone who’s more web savvy, so don’t expect to achieve stellar results until you expand your knowledge base.
If you want to sell downloadable products such as ebooks, then you can add e-commerce, SSL, digital delivery, fraud prevention, and online databases to the list.  Again, you don’t need to be a programmer; you just need a basic understanding of these technologies.  Even if you hire someone else to handle the low-level implementation, it’s important to know what you’re getting into.  You need to be able to trust your strategic decisions, and you won’t be able to do that if you’re a General who doesn’t know what a gun is.
A lack of understanding is a major cause of failure in the realm of online income generation.  For example, if you’re clueless about search engine optimization (SEO), you’ll probably cripple your search engine rankings compared to someone who understands SEO well.  But you can’t consider each technology in isolation.  You need to understand the connections and trade-offs between them.  Monetizing a blog is a balancing act.  You may need to balance the needs of yourself, your visitors, search engines, those who link to you, social bookmarking sites, advertisers, affiliate programs, and others.  Seemingly minor decisions like what to title a web page are significant.  In coming up with the title of this article, I have to take all of these potential viewers into consideration.  I want a title that is attractive to human visitors, drives reasonable search engine traffic, yields relevant contextual ads, fits the theme of the site, and encourages linking and social bookmarking.  And most importantly I want each article to provide genuine value to my visitors.  I do my best to create titles for my articles that balance these various needs.  Often that means abandoning cutesy or clever titles in favor of direct and comprehensible ones.  It’s little skills like these that help drive sustainable traffic growth month after month.  Missing out on just this one skill is enough to cripple your traffic.  And there are dozens of these types of skills that require web savvy to understand, respect, and apply.
This sort of knowledge is what separates the 1% from the 99%.  Both groups may work just as hard, but the 1% is getting much better results for their efforts.  It normally doesn’t take me more than 60 seconds to title an article, but a lot of experience goes into those 60 seconds.  You really just have to learn these ideas once; after that you can apply them routinely.
Whenever you come across a significant web technology you don’t understand, look it up on Google or Wikipedia, and dive into it long enough to acquire a basic understanding of it.  To make money from blogging it’s important to be something of a jack of all trades.  Maybe you’ve heard the expression, “A jack of all trades is a master of none.”  That may be true, but you don’t need to master any of these technologies — you just have to be good enough to use them.  It’s the difference between being able to drive a car vs. becoming an auto mechanic.  Strive to achieve functional knowledge, and then move on to something else.  Even though I’m an experienced programmer, I don’t know how many web technologies actually work.  I don’t really care.  I can still use them to generate results.  In the time it would take me to fully understand one new technology, I can achieve sufficient functional knowledge to apply several of them.
Thriving on change
Your greatest risk isn’t that you’ll make mistakes that will cost you.  Your greatest risk is that you’ll miss opportunities.  You need an entrepreneurial mindset, not an employee mindset.  Don’t be too concerned with the risk of loss — be more concerned with the risk of missed gains.  It’s what you don’t know and what you don’t do that will hurt you the worst.  Blogging is cheap.  Your expenses and financial risk should be minimal.  Your real concern should be missing opportunities that would have made you money very easily.  You need to develop antennae that can listen out for new opportunities.  I highly recommend subscribing to Darren Rowse’s Problogger blog — Darren is great at uncovering new income-generating opportunities for bloggers.
The blogosphere changes rapidly, and change creates opportunity.  It takes some brains to decipher these opportunities and to take advantage of them before they disappear.  If you hesitate to capitalize on something new and exciting, you may simply miss out.  Many opportunities are temporary.  And every day you don’t implement them, you’re losing money you could have earned.  And you’re also missing opportunities to build traffic, grow your audience, and benefit more people.
I used to get annoyed by the rapid rate of change of web technologies.  It’s even more rapid than what I saw when I worked in the computer gaming industry.  And the rate of change is accelerating.  Almost every week now I learn about some fascinating new web service or idea that could potentially lead to big changes down the road.  Making sense of them is a full-time job in itself.  But I learned to love this insane pace.  If I’m confused then everyone else is probably confused too.  And people who only do this part-time will be very confused.  If they aren’t confused, then they aren’t keeping up.  So if I can be just a little bit faster and understand these technologies just a little bit sooner, then I can capitalize on some serious opportunities before the barriers to entry become too high.  Even though confusion is uncomfortable, it’s really a good thing for a web entrepreneur.  This is what creates the space for acollege student to earn $1,000,000 online in just a few months with a clever idea.  Remember this isn’t a zero-sum game.  Don’t let someone else’s success make you feel diminished or jealous.  Let it inspire you instead.
What’s your overall income-generation strategy?
I don’t want to insult anyone, but most people are utterly clueless when it comes to generating income from their blogs.  They slap things together haphazardly with no rhyme or reason and hope to generate lots of money.  While I’m a strong advocate of the ready-fire-aim approach, that strategy does require that you eventually aim.  Ready-fire-fire-fire-fire will just create a mess.
Take a moment to articulate a basic income-generating strategy for your site.  If you aren’t good at strategy, then just come up with a general philosophy for how you’re going to generate income.  You don’t need a full business plan, just a description of how you plan to get from $0 per month to whatever your income goal is.  An initial target goal I used when I first started this site was $3000 per month.  It’s a somewhat arbitrary figure, but I knew if I could reach $3000 per month, I could certainly push it higher, and $3000 is enough income that it’s going to make a meaningful difference in my finances.  I reached that level 15 months after launching the site (in December 2005).  And since then it’s continued to increase nicely.  Blogging income is actually quite easy to maintain.  It’s a lot more secure than a regular job.  No one can fire me, and if one source of income dries up, I can always add new ones.  We’ll address multiple streams of income soon…
Are you going to generate income from advertising, affiliate commissions, product sales, donations, or something else?  Maybe you want a combination of these things.  However you decide to generate income, put your basic strategy down in writing.  I took 15 minutes to create a half-page summary of my monetization strategy.  I only update it about once a year and review it once a month.  This isn’t difficult, but it helps me stay focused on where I’m headed.  It also allows me to say no to opportunities that are inconsistent with my plan.
Refer to your monetization strategy (or philosophy) when you need to make design decisions for your web site.  Although you may have multiple streams of income, decide which type of income will be your primary source, and design your site around that.  Do you need to funnel people towards an order form, or will you place ads all over the site?  Different monetization strategies suggest different design approaches.  Think about what specific action you want your visitors to eventually take that will generate income for you, and design your site accordingly.
When devising your income strategy, feel free to cheat.  Don’t re-invent the wheel.  Copy someone else’s strategy that you’re convinced would work for you too.  Do NOT copy anyone’s content or site layout (that’s copyright infringement), but take note of how they’re making money.  I decided to monetize this site with advertising and affiliate income after researching how various successful bloggers generated income.  Later I added donations as well.  This is an effective combo.
Traffic, traffic, traffic
Assuming you feel qualified to take on the challenge of generating income from blogging (and I haven’t scared you away yet), the three most important things you need to monetize your blog are traffic, traffic, and traffic.
Just to throw out some figures, last month (April 2006), this site received over 1.1 million visitors and over 2.4 million page views.  That’s almost triple what it was just six months ago.
Why is traffic so important?  Because for most methods of online income generation, your income is a function of traffic.  If you double your traffic, you’ll probably double your income (assuming your visitor demographics remain fairly consistent).  You can screw almost everything else up, but if you can generate serious traffic, it’s really hard to fail.  With sufficient traffic the realistic worst case is that you’ll eventually be able to monetize your web site via trial and error (as long as you keep those visitors coming).
When I first launched this blog, I knew that traffic building was going to be my biggest challenge.  All of my plans hinged on my ability to build traffic.  If I couldn’t build traffic, it was going to be very difficult to succeed.  So I didn’t even try to monetize my site for the first several months.  I just focused on traffic building.  Even after 19 months, traffic building is still the most important part of my monetization plan.  For my current traffic levels, I know I’m undermonetizing my site, but that’s OK.  Right now it’s more important to me to keep growing the site, and I’m optimizing the income generation as I go along.
Traffic is the primary fuel of online income generation.  More visitors means more ad clicks, more product sales, more affiliate sales, more donations, more consulting leads, and more of whatever else that generates income for you.  And it also means you’re helping more and more people.
With respect to traffic, you should know that in many respects, the rich do get richer.  High traffic leads to even more traffic-building opportunities that just aren’t accessible for low-traffic sites.  On average at least 20 bloggers add new links to my site every day, my articles can easily surge to the top of social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, and I’m getting more frequent requests for radio interviews.  Earlier this year I was featured in USA Today and in Self Magazine, which collectively have millions of readers.  Journalists are finding me by doing Google searches on topics I’ve written about.  These opportunities were not available to me when I was first starting out.  Popular sites have a serious advantage.  The more traffic you have, the more you can attract.
If you’re intelligent and web savvy, you should also be able to eventually build a high-traffic web site.  And you’ll be able to leverage that traffic to build even more traffic.
How to build traffic
Now if traffic is so crucial, how do you build it up to significant levels if you’re starting from rock bottom?
I’ve already written a lengthy article on this topic, so I’ll refer you there:  How to Build a High Traffic Web Site (or Blog).  If you don’t have time to read it now, feel free to bookmark it or print it out for later.  That article covers my general philosophy of traffic-building, which centers on creating content that provides genuine value to your visitors.  No games or gimmicks.
There is one other important traffic-building tip I’ll provide here though.
Blog Carnivals.  Take full advantage of blog carnivals when you’re just starting out (click the previous link and read the FAQ there to learn what carnivals are if you don’t already know).  Periodically submit your best blog posts to the appropriate carnivals for your niche.  Carnivals are easy ways to get links and traffic, and best of all, they’re free.  Submitting only takes minutes if you use amulti-carnival submission form.  Do NOT spam the carnivals with irrelevant material — only submit to the carnivals that are a match for your content.
In my early traffic-building days, I’d do carnivals submissions once a week, and it helped a great deal in going from nothing to about 50,000 visitors per month.  You still have to produce great content, but carnivals give you a free shot at marketing your unknown blog.  Free marketing is precisely the kind of opportunity you don’t want to miss.  Carnivals are like an open-mic night at a comedy club — they give amateurs a chance to show off their stuff.  I still submit to certain carnivals every once in a while, but now my traffic is so high that relatively speaking, they don’t make much difference anymore.  Just to increase my traffic by 1% in a month, I need 11,000 new visitors, and even the best carnivals don’t push that much traffic.  But you can pick up dozens or even hundreds of new subscribers from each round of carnival submissions, so it’s a great place to start.  Plus it’s very easy.
If your traffic isn’t growing month after month, does it mean you’re doing something wrong?  Most likely you aren’t doing enough things right.  Again, making mistakes is not the issue.  Missing opportunities is.
Will putting ads on your site hurt your traffic?
Here’s a common fear I hear from people who are considering monetizing their web sites:
Putting ads on my site will cripple my traffic.  The ads will drive people away, and they’ll never come back.
Well, in my experience this is absolutely, positively, and otherwise completely and totally… FALSE.  It’s just not true.  Guess what happened to my traffic when I put ads on my site.  Nothing.  Guess what happened to my traffic when I put up more ads and donation links.  Nothing.  I could detect no net effect on my traffic whatsoever.  Traffic continued increasing at the same rate it did before there were ads on my site.  In fact, it might have even helped me a little, since some bloggers actually linked to my site just to point out that they didn’t like my ad layout.  I’ll leave it up to you to form your own theories about this.  It’s probably because there’s so much advertising online already that even though some people will complain when a free site puts up ads, if they value the content, they’ll still come back, regardless of what they say publicly.
Most mature people understand it’s reasonable for a blogger to earn income from his/her work.  I think I’m lucky in that my audience tends to be very mature — immature people generally aren’t interested in personal development.  To create an article like this takes serious effort, not to mention the hard-earned experience that’s required to write it.  This article alone took me over 15 hours of writing and editing.  I think it’s perfectly reasonable to earn an income from such work.  If you get no value from it, you don’t pay anything.  What could be more fair than that?  The more income this blog generates, the more I can put into it.  For example, I used some of the income to buy podcasting equipment and added a podcast to the site.  I’ve recorded13 episodes so far.  The podcasts are all ad-free.  I’m also planning to add some additional services to this site in the years ahead.  More income = better service.
At the time of this writing, my site is very ad-heavy.  Some people point this out to me as if I’m not aware of it:  “You know, Steve.  Your web site seems to contain an awful lot of ads.”  Of course I’m aware of it.  I’m the one who put the ads there.  There’s a reason I have this configuration of ads.  They’re effective!  People keep clicking on them.  If they weren’t effective, I’d remove them right away and try something else.
I do avoid putting up ads that I personally find annoying when I see them on other sites, including pop-ups and interstitials (stuff that flies across your screen).  Even though they’d make me more money, in my opinion they degrade the visitor experience too much.
I also provide two ad-free outlets, so if you really don’t like ads, you can actually read my content without ads.  First, I provide a full-text RSS feed, and at least for now it’s ad-free.  I do, however, include a donation request in the bottom of my feeds.
If you want to see some actual traffic data, take a look at the 2005 traffic growth chart.  I first put ads on the site in February 2005, and although the chart doesn’t cover pre-February traffic growth, the growth rate was very similar before then.  For an independent source, you can also look at my traffic chart on Alexa.  You can select different Range options to go further back in time.
Multiple streams of income
You don’t need to put all your eggs in one basket.  Think multiple streams of income.  On this site I actually have six different streams of income.  Can you count them all?  Here’s a list:

1. Google Adsense ads (pay per click and pay per impression advertising)
2. Donations (via PayPal or snail mail — yes, some people do mail a check)
3. Text Link Ads (sold for a fixed amount per month)
4. Chitika eMiniMalls ads (pay per click)
5. Affiliate programs like Amazon and LinkShare (commission on products sold, mostly books)
6. Advertising sold to individual advertisers (three-month campaigns or longer)

Note:  If you’re reading this article a while after its original publication date, then this list is likely to change.  I frequently experiment with different streams.
Adsense is my biggest single source of income, but some of the others do pretty well too.  Every stream generates more than $100/month.
My second biggest income stream is actually donations.  My average donation is about $10, and I’ve received a number of $100 donations too.  It only took me about an hour to set this up via PayPal.  So even if your content is free like mine, give your visitors a means to voluntarily contribute if they wish.  It’s win-win.  I’m very grateful for the visitor support.  It’s a nice form of feedback too, since I notice that certain articles produced a surge in donations — this tells me I’m hitting the mark and giving people genuine value.
These aren’t my only streams of income though.  I’ve been earning income online since 1995.  With my computer games business, I have direct sales, royalty income, some advertising income, affiliate income, and donations (from the free articles).  And if you throw in my wife’s streams of income, it gets really ridiculous:  advertising, direct book sales, book sales through distributors, web consulting, affiliate income, more Adsense income, and probably a few sources I forgot.  Suffice it to say we receive a lot of paychecks.  Some of them are small, but they add up.  It’s also extremely low risk — if one source of income dries up, we just expand existing sources or create new ones.  I encourage you to think of your blog as a potential outlet for multiple streams of income too.
Automated income
With the exception of #6, all of these income sources are fully automated.  I don’t have to do anything to maintain them except deposit checks, and in most cases I don’t even have to do that because the money is automatically deposited to my bank account.
I love automated income.  With this blog I currently have no sales, no employees, no products, no inventory, no credit card processing, no fraud, and no customers.  And yet I’m still able to generate a reasonable (and growing) income.
Why get a regular job and trade your time for money when you can let technology do all that work for you?  Imagine how it would feel to wake up each morning, go to your computer, and check how much money you made while you were sleeping.  It’s a really nice situation to be in.
Blogging software and hardware
I use WordPress for this blog, and I highly recommend it.  Wordpress has lots of features and a solid interface.  And you can’t beat its price — free.
The rest of this site is custom-coded HTML, CSS, PHP, and MySQL.  I’m a programmer, so I coded it all myself.  I could have just as easily used an existing template, but I wanted a simple straightforward design for this site, and I wanted the look of the blog to match the rest of the site.  Plus I use PHP and MySQL to do some creative things outside the blog, like the Million Dollar Experiment.
I don’t recommend using a hosted service like Blogger if you want to seriously monetize your blog.  You don’t get enough control.  If you don’t have your own URL, you’re tying yourself to a service you don’t own and building up someone else’s asset.  You want to build page rank and links for your own URL, not someone else’s.  Plus you want sufficient control over the layout and design of your site, so you can jump on any opportunities that require low-level changes.  If you use a hosted blog, you’re at the mercy of the hosting service, and that puts the future of any income streams you create with them at risk.  It’s a bit more work up front to self-host, but it’s less risky in the long run.
Web hosting is cheap, and there are plenty of good hosts to choose from.  I recommend Pair.com for a starter hosting account.  They aren’t the cheapest, but they’re very reliable and have decent support.  I know many online businesses that host with them, and my wife refers most of her clients there.
As your traffic grows you may need to upgrade to a dedicated server or a virtual private server (VPS).  This web site is hosted by ServInt.  I’ve hosted this site with them since day one, and they’ve been a truly awesome host.  What I like most about them is that they have a smooth upgrade path as my traffic keeps growing.  I’ve gone through several upgrades with them already, and all have been seamless.  The nice thing about having your own server is that you can put as many sites on it as the server can handle.  I have several sites running on my server, and it doesn’t cost me any additional hosting fees to add another site.
Comments or no comments
When I began this blog, I started out with comments enabled.  As traffic grew, so did the level of commenting.  Some days there were more than 100 comments.  I noticed I was spending more and more time managing comments, and I began to question whether it was worth the effort.  It became clear that with continued traffic growth, I was going to have to change my approach or die in comment hell.  The personal development topics I write about can easily generate lots of questions and discussion.  Just imagine how many follow-up questions an article like this could generate.  With tens of thousands of readers, it would be insane.  Also, nuking comment spam was chewing up more and more of my time as well.
But after looking through my stats, I soon realized that only a tiny fraction of visitors ever look at comments at all, and an even smaller fraction ever post a comment (well below 1% of total visitors).  That made my decision a lot easier, and in October 2005, I turned blog comments off.  In retrospect that was one of my best decisions.  I wish I had done it sooner.
If you’d like to read the full details of how I came to this decision, I’ve written about it previously:  Blog Comments and More on Blog Comments.
Do you need comments to build traffic?  Obviously not.  Just like when I put up ads, I saw no decline in traffic when I turned off comments.  In fact, I think it actually helped me.  Although I turned off comments, I kept trackbacks enabled, so I started getting more trackbacks.  If people wanted to publicly comment on something I’d written, they had to do so on their own blogs and post a link.  So turning off comments didn’t kill the discussion — it just took it off site.  The volume of trackbacks is far more reasonable, and I can easily keep up with it.  I even pop onto other people’s sites and post comments now and then, but I don’t feel obligated to participate because the discussion isn’t on my own site.
I realize people have very strong feelings about blog comments and community building.  Many people hold the opinion that a blog without comments just isn’t a blog.  Personally I think that’s utter nonsense — the data just doesn’t support it.  The vast majority of blog readers neither read nor post comments.  Only a very tiny and very vocal group even care about comments.  Some bloggers say that having comments helps build traffic, but I saw no evidence of that.  In fact, I think it’s just the opposite.  Managing comments detracts from writing new posts, and it’s far better to get a trackback and a link from someone else’s blog vs. a comment on your own blog.  As long-term readers of my blog know, when faced with ambiguity, my preference is to try both alternatives and compare real results with real results.  After doing that my conclusion is this:  No comment.  
Now if you want to support comments for non-traffic-building reasons like socializing or making new contacts, I say go for it.  Just don’t assume that comments are necessary or even helpful in building traffic unless you directly test this assumption yourself.
Build a complete web site, not just a blog
Don’t limit your web site to just a blog.  Feel free to build it out.  Although most of my traffic goes straight to this blog, there’s a whole site built around it.  For example, the home page of this site presents an overview of all the sections of the site, including the blog, article section, audio content, etc.  A lot of people still don’t know what a blog is, so if your whole site is your blog, those people may be a little confused.
Testing and optimization
In the beginning you won’t know which potential streams of income will work best for you.  So try everything that’s reasonable for you.  If you learn about a new potential income stream, test it for a month or two, and measure the results for yourself.  Feel free to cut streams that just aren’t working for you, and put more effort into optimizing those streams that show real promise.
A few months ago, I signed up for an account with Text Link Ads.  It took about 20 minutes.  They sell small text ads on my site, split the revenue with me 50-50, and deposit my earnings directly into my PayPal account.  This month I’ll make around $600 from them, possibly more if they sell some new ads during the month.  And it’s totally passive.  If I never tried this, I’d miss out on this easy extra income.
For many months I’ve been tweaking the Adsense ads on this site.  I tried different colors, sizes, layouts, etc.  I continue to experiment now and then, but I have a hard time beating the current layout.  It works very well for me.  Adsense doesn’t allow publishers to reveal specific CPM and CTR data, but mine are definitely above par.  They started out in the gutter though.  You can easily double or triple your Adsense revenue by converting a poor layout into a better one.  This is the main reason why during my first year of income, my traffic grew at 20% per month, but my income grew at 50% per month.  Frequent testing and optimization had a major positive impact.  Many of my tests failed, and some even made my income go down, but I’m glad I did all that testing.  If I didn’t then my Adsense income would only be a fraction of what it is now.
It’s cheap to experiment.  Every new advertising or affiliate service I’ve tried so far has been free to sign up.  Often I can add a new income stream in less than an hour and then wait a month to see how it does.  If it flops then at least I learned something.  If it does well, wonderful.  As a blogger who wants to generate income, you should always be experimenting with new income streams.  If you haven’t tried anything new in six months, you’re almost certainly missing some golden opportunities.  Every blog is different, so you need to test things for yourself to see what works for you.  Failure is impossible here — you either succeed, or you learn something.
Pick your niche, but make sure it isn’t too small
Pick a niche for your blog where you have some significant expertise, but make sure it’s a big enough niche that you can build significant traffic.  My wife runs a popular vegan web site.  She does pretty well within her niche, but it’s just not a very big niche.  On the other hand, my topic of personal development has much broader appeal.  Potentially anyone can be interested in improving themselves, and I have the flexibility to write about topics like productivity, self-discipline, relationships, spirituality, health, and more.  It’s all relevant to personal development.
Pick a niche that you’re passionate about.  I’ve written 400+ articles so far, and I still feel like I’m just getting started.  I’m not feeling burnt out at all.  I chose to build a personal development site because I’m very knowledgeable, experienced, and passionate about this subject.  I couldn’t imagine a better topic for me to write about.
Don’t pick a niche just because you think it will make you money.  I see many bloggers try to do that, and it’s almost invariably a recipe for failure.  Think about what you love most, and then find a way to make your topic appealing to a massive global audience.  Consider what will provide genuine value to your visitors.  It’s all about what you can give.
A broad enough topic creates more potential advertising partners.  If I keep writing on the same subtopic over and over, I may exhaust the supply of advertisers and hit an income ceiling.  But by writing on many different topics under the same umbrella, I widen the field of potential advertisers.  And I expand the appeal of my site at the same time.
Make it clear to your visitors what your blog/site is about.  Often I visit a blog with a clever title and tagline that reveals nothing about the site’s contents.  In that case I generally assume it’s just a personal journal and move on.  I love to be clever too, but I’ve found that clarity yields better results than cleverness.
Posting frequency and length
Bloggers have different opinions about the right posting length and frequency.  Some bloggers say it’s best to write short (250-750 word) entries and post 20x per week or more.  I’ve seen that strategy work for some, but I decided to do pretty much the opposite.  I usually aim for about 3-5 posts per week, but my posts are much longer (typically 1000-2000 words, sometimes longer than 5000 words, including the monster you’re reading right now).  That’s because rather than throwing out lots of short tips, I prefer to write more exhaustive, in-depth articles.  I find that deeper articles are better at generating links and referrals and building traffic.  It’s true that fewer people will take the time to read them, but those that do will enjoy some serious take-away value.  I don’t believe in creating disposable content just to increase page views and ad impressions.  If I’m not truly helping my visitors, I’m wasting their time.
Expenses
Blogging is dirt cheap.
I don’t spend money on advertising or promotion, so my marketing expenses are nil.  Essentially my content is my marketing.  If you like this article, you’ll probably find many more gems in the archives.
My only real expenses for this site are the hosting (I currently pay $149/month for the web server and bandwidth) and the domain name renewal ($9/year).  Nearly all of the income this site generates is profit.  This trickles down to my personal income, so of course it’s subject to income tax.  But the actual business expenses are minimal.
The reason I pay so much for hosting is simply due to my traffic.  If my traffic were much lower, I could run this site on a cheap shared hosting account.  A database-driven blog can be a real resource hog at high traffic levels.  The same goes for online forums.  As traffic continues to increase, my hosting bill will go up too, but it will still be a tiny fraction of total income.
Perks
Depending on the nature of your blog, you may be able to enjoy some nice perks as your traffic grows.  Almost every week I get free personal development books in the mail (for potential review on this site).  Sometimes the author will send it directly; other times the publisher will ship me a batch of books.  I also receive CDs, DVDs, and other personal development products.  It’s hard to keep up sometimes (I have a queue of about two dozen books right now), but I am a voracious consumer of such products, so I do plow through them as fast as I can.  When something strikes me as worthy of mention, I do indeed write up a review to share it with my visitors.  I have very high standards though, so I review less than 10% of what I receive.  I’ve read over 700 books in this field and listened to dozens of audio programs, so I’m pretty good at filtering out the fluff.  As I’m sure you can imagine, there’s a great deal of self-help fluff out there.
My criteria for reviewing a product on this site is that it has to be original, compelling, and profound.  If it doesn’t meet these criteria, I don’t review it, even if there’s a generous affiliate program.  I’m not going to risk abusing my relationship with my visitors just to make a quick buck.  Making money is not my main motivation for running this site.  My main motivation is to grow and to help others grow, so that always comes first.
Your blog can also gain you access to certain events.  A high-traffic blog becomes a potential media outlet, so you can actually think of yourself as a member of the press, which indeed you are.  In a few days, my wife and I will be attending a three-day seminar via a free press pass.  The regular price for these tickets is $500 per person.  I’ll be posting a full review of the seminar next week.  I’ve been to this particular seminar in 2004, so I already have high expectations for it.  Dr. Wayne Dyer will be the keynote speaker.
I’m also using the popularity of this blog to set up interviews with people I’ve always wanted to learn more about.  This is beautifully win-win because it creates value for me, my audience, and the person being interviewed.  Recently I posted an exclusive interview with multi-millionaire Marc Allen as well as a review of his latest book, and I’m lining up other interviews as well.  It isn’t hard to convince someone to do an interview in exchange for so much free exposure.
Motivation
I don’t think you’ll get very far if money is your #1 motivation for blogging.  You have to be driven by something much deeper.  Money is just frosting.  It’s the cake underneath that matters.  My cake is that I absolutely love personal development – not the phony “fast and easy” junk you see on infomercials, but real growth that makes us better human beings.  That’s my passion.  Pouring money on top of it just adds more fuel to the fire, but the fire is still there with or without the money.
What’s your passion?  What would you blog about if you were already set for life?
Blogging lifestyle
Perhaps the best part of generating income from blogging is the freedom it brings.  I work from home and set my own hours.  I write whenever I’m inspired to write (which for me is quite often).  Plus I get to spend my time doing what I love most — working on personal growth and helping others do the same.  There’s nothing I’d rather do than this.
Perhaps it’s true that 99 out of 100 people can’t make a decent living from blogging yet.  But maybe you’re among the 1 in 100 who can.
On the other hand, I can offer you a good alternative to recommend if you don’t have the technical skills to build a high-traffic, income-generating blog. Check out Build Your Own Successful Online Business for details.

How to Become an Early Riser

May 23rd, 2005 by Steve Pavlina

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It is well to be up before daybreak, for such habits contribute to health, wealth, and wisdom.
- Aristotle
Are morning people born or made? In my case it was definitely made. In my early 20s, I rarely went to bed before midnight, and I’d almost always sleep in late. I usually didn’t start hitting my stride each day until late afternoon.
But after a while I couldn’t ignore the high correlation between success and rising early, even in my own life. On those rare occasions where I did get up early, I noticed that my productivity was almost always higher, not just in the morning but all throughout the day. And I also noticed a significant feeling of well-being. So being the proactive goal-achiever I was, I set out to become a habitual early riser. I promptly set my alarm clock for 5AM…
… and the next morning, I got up just before noon.
Hmmm…
I tried again many more times, each time not getting very far with it. I figured I must have been born without the early riser gene. Whenever my alarm went off, my first thought was always to stop that blasted noise and go back to sleep. I tabled this habit for a number of years, but eventually I came across some sleep research that showed me that I was going about this problem the wrong way. Once I applied those ideas, I was able to become an early riser consistently.
It’s hard to become an early riser using the wrong strategy. But with the right strategy, it’s relatively easy.
The most common wrong strategy is this: You assume that if you’re going to get up earlier, you’d better go to bed earlier. So you figure out how much sleep you’re getting now, and then just shift everything back a few hours. If you now sleep from midnight to 8am, you figure you’ll go to bed at 10pm and get up at 6am instead. Sounds very reasonable, but it will usually fail.
It seems there are two main schools of thought about sleep patterns. One is that you should go to bed and get up at the same times every day. It’s like having an alarm clock on both ends — you try to sleep the same hours each night. This seems practical for living in modern society. We need predictability in our schedules. And we need to ensure adequate rest.
The second school says you should listen to your body’s needs and go to bed when you’re tired and get up when you naturally wake up. This approach is rooted in biology. Our bodies should know how much rest we need, so we should listen to them.
Through trial and error, I found out for myself that both of these schools are suboptimal sleep patterns. Both of them are wrong if you care about productivity. Here’s why:
If you sleep set hours, you’ll sometimes go to bed when you aren’t sleepy enough. If it’s taking you more than five minutes to fall asleep each night, you aren’t sleepy enough. You’re wasting time lying in bed awake and not being asleep. Another problem is that you’re assuming you need the same number of hours of sleep every night, which is a false assumption. Your sleep needs vary from day to day.
If you sleep based on what your body tells you, you’ll probably be sleeping more than you need — in many cases a lot more, like 10-15 hours more per week (the equivalent of a full waking day). A lot of people who sleep this way get 8+ hours of sleep per night, which is usually too much. Also, your mornings may be less predictable if you’re getting up at different times. And because our natural rhythms are sometimes out of tune with the 24-hour clock, you may find that your sleep times begin to drift.
The optimal solution for me has been to combine both approaches. It’s very simple, and many early risers do this without even thinking about it, but it was a mental breakthrough for me nonetheless. The solution was to go to bed when I’m sleepy (and only when I’m sleepy) and get up with an alarm clock at a fixed time (7 days per week). So I always get up at the same time (in my case 5am), but I go to bed at different times every night.
I go to bed when I’m too sleepy to stay up. My sleepiness test is that if I couldn’t read a book for more than a page or two without drifting off, I’m ready for bed. Most of the time when I go to bed, I’m asleep within three minutes. I lie down, get comfortable, and immediately I’m drifting off. Sometimes I go to bed at 9:30pm; other times I stay up until midnight. Most of the time I go to bed between 10-11pm. If I’m not sleepy, I stay up until I can’t keep my eyes open any longer. Reading is an excellent activity to do during this time, since it becomes obvious when I’m too sleepy to read.
When my alarm goes off every morning, I turn it off, stretch for a couple seconds, and sit up. I don’t think about it. I’ve learned that the longer it takes me to get up, the more likely I am to try to sleep in. So I don’t allow myself to have conversations in my head about the benefits of sleeping in once the alarm goes off. Even if I want to sleep in, I always get up right away.
After a few days of using this approach, I found that my sleep patterns settled into a natural rhythm. If I got too little sleep one night, I’d automatically be sleepier earlier and get more sleep the next night. And if I had lots of energy and wasn’t tired, I’d sleep less. My body learned when to knock me out because it knew I would always get up at the same time and that my wake-up time wasn’t negotiable.
A side effect was that on average, I slept about 90 minutes less per night, but I actually felt more well-rested. I was sleeping almost the entire time I was in bed.
I read that most insomniacs are people who go to bed when they aren’t sleepy. If you aren’t sleepy and find yourself unable to fall asleep quickly, get up and stay awake for a while. Resist sleep until your body begins to release the hormones that rob you of consciousness. If you simply go to bed when you’re sleepy and then get up at a fixed time, you’ll cure your insomnia. The first night you’ll stay up late, but you’ll fall asleep right away. You may be tired that first day from getting up too early and getting only a few hours of sleep the whole night, but you’ll slog through the day and will want to go to bed earlier that second night. After a few days, you’ll settle into a pattern of going to bed at roughly the same time and falling asleep right away.
So if you want to become an early riser (or just exert more control over your sleep patterns), then try this: Go to bed only when you’re too sleepy to stay up, and get up at a fixed time every morning.
Edit (5/31/05):  Due to the incredible popularity of this post, I’ve written a follow-up with some extra detail and clarifications: How to Become an Early Riser – Part II. And if you really want to take sleep to the next level, read about my experiences with Polyphasic Sleep, where you only sleep 2-3 hours a day by taking 20-minute naps every few hours, around the clock.
Edit (5/29/06):  Be sure to read the related article How to Get Up Right Away When Your Alarm Goes Off.