Mind Pilot – Take Self Control

So you have a problem to solve, or you are in a creative mood — how do you imagine the best possible outcome? I have always tried to work downwards, starting at the top by asking ‘ what is the best possible outcome, regardless of any known natural or human laws?’ I then ask what the best possible outcome might be considering the limitations of physics and nature, but making use of maximum human potential, and then after that I would consider the realistic best possible outcome considering the actual availability of the key resources of time, money, people and materials.

Thinking like this is a bit of a double-edged sword — of course, it can create some fantastic ideas, but it can also result in coming up with hundreds of different ideas and solutions to a problem, when only one workable answer is necessary. Having said that, I still have a number of business and personal problems I’m trying to work through the moment, and I haven’t yet formally taken them through this exercise. I think it is about time I did.

[ drawing to follow -- top of the pyramid -- one best answer, without limitations; base of the pyramid -- lots of answers, each with their own pros and cons]

It’s a bit of a late start, but I was late to bed last night, and over the last week or so I haven’t really been that bothered about specifically getting up at nine. I’d rather get up and stay awake, which I didn’t do yesterday. Still, having said that, it’s a really bright day outside, so maybe it would be nice to have got up a bit earlier and got out straight on my bike. I’m not quite feeling motivated to do that yet, but that might well change a bit later on. Today is going to be a short day work wise, as I have a concert in London later to go to, but I am not going to let that restrict me to just writing text.

I had another dream last night — hold on, do I really want to talk about this? I feel that there are certain boundaries that I am not so confident crossing, and talking about dreaming is one of them. I feel the same way about having people listening in where I am dictating content using voice recognition — even if most of the posts I publish here are taking pretty much verbatim from what I dictate, I still have the option to go back and correct or delete anything I don’t like. I know this website is all about dealing with mental challenges, and this will often be explaining how I think, and how this relates to the symptoms of the conditions this website is here to help people manage, but do I really want to feel as if I can just let anyone come in and drill through my head to see what I’m thinking? But the reality is that we all have dreams, and that most independent thinkers are extensive daydreamers, or should that be Daydream Believers, as well. Without dreams, there is nothing to aspire to, and life becomes strictly functional. Human nature just won’t accept that, so I think I will have to at least make some reference to what I’ve been dreaming about from time to time, just as much as I have already made frequent references to how I think. So the dream was actually quite a common one — I was at university — was that back at university, or had I enrolled on a new course? I was trying to catch up with the other students — that was always the case anyway when I was at university, but I think this time it was to do with trying to integrate being a student with running my business, and there was a study trip, which involved being given lectures on a train somewhere, either going to Hungary or Paris — you know how you can never quite recall all the details! I think there was a clear point though, and that was just a simple reminder of my long-held desire to build something ‘ real’ as opposed to websites, which I still sometimes just feel are a collection of pixels, text and code.

So is this ambition helpful? It is certainly something I’m trying to resolve within myself, and I still haven’t quite found the best way of doing so. I think there’s another few posts which could come off this particular thread of thought, back later.

Wednesday to Thursday 1 AM

As I bring up the ‘ half-century’ on Mind Pilot, I am opening myself up more and more to the concept of social networking on the Internet, but still wondering to what extent it will actually increase the number of useful visitors to my main website, and whether any social contacts made online will actually really amount to anything. I know that there are many other people out there who use the Internet to help them cope with a wide variety of medical challenges, but do I want to use the Internet to find more business, to find friends, or just to find people with whom I can share similar experiences? To be honest, I don’t really know, but I have recently found that a website like twitter is even more addictive than Facebook used to be when I first signed up to that. But I’m still trying to work out what it is overall point is — yes, it is a very quick way of sharing information about all kinds of different topics, but there is no focus to it, and it seems to be another way of just blurting out about anything to anyone. You know what they say about empty vessels making the most noise.

I still think I’ve got plenty of things that are worth saying, and I just have to go around finding the right place to say them. Perhaps it is a simple case of splitting my online time into three different areas — myself as an individual, which I managed through my own personal blog, my travel website and accompanying blog which is my main professional activity, and this Mind Pilot blog, where I hope I can share thoughts my about the different mood variations I’m going through.

There is also a fourth dimension that I want to move into, and that is my interest in architecture, and also in doing maps and drawings which relate to various different buildings. Some of this can be due to be added as content on my travel website, but I think there is a difference between travelling as a tourist,  having an academic interest in architecture, and then ultimately putting buildings and other structures together, an ambition I have never lost sight of. In the meantime, my colleague has just told me that this month should see a slight revenue increase over February, which is a better sign than the fall in traffic that I had seen earlier in the week, so for now, I will carry back on with constructing my presence in cyberspace. Who knows where this will take me next.

Well, I have been up to 20 minutes, and no complaints so far. Anyone reading this who is thinking that 10 o’clock sounds like a bit of a lie in should remember that home-based web entrepreneurs don’t have to drag themselves into an office at some ungodly hour. I wonder why I’ve been stressing so much and trying to get myself started at nine — wasn’t this the very kind of pressure that I was trying to avoid? As far as I’m concerned, 10 o’clock is a perfectly respectable time to start the day, and I think I will get plenty done.

Unlike yesterday, when I was running around a lot during the day, which then meant a very late meal, I know that I can breeze through today without any interruptions, and I am already feeling the momentum building.

Other posts to follow here and elsewhere, and a few current thoughts –

·                     Content updates — continuing where I left off with Dallas flights from Edinburgh, Glasgow, London, Manchester and Newcastle.

·                     On the Web, you can make just about anything public, but how much do you want to? Why I want to make more of my thoughts public.

·                     Thoughts from first week of twittering properly.

·                     Go back over diary — there’s loads of stuff in there, not just personal posts to put up here in Mind Pilot, but there’s loads of really other good stuff for my other websites.

·                     Long-term reviews — an idea I have for a simple review based website.

·                     I’ve taken out all that fruit and veg from the fridge, isn’t it time to eat some of it?

·                     Trying to maintain a balance between doing stuff that is really creative, though it won’t pay any bills, or at least it certainly won’t pay today’s bills, and doing stuff that might add a lot of value to the website, but which is incredibly tedious. Of course, the best stuff to work on is both creative and financially rewarding, but I’m not finding too much of that about at the moment. Still, having said that, I think that I will find more and more opportunities to do this as I get my head round the whole concept of social networking and bring this into the development of my websites, so they aren’t just about putting up content and hoping people will read it. There’s definitely a few ‘brass eye graphs’ to be done here!

·                     Looking at my computer screen as I’m dictating text into various different lists on this file, it seems about half of what I’m thinking is worth putting up on a website somewhere, and that I will keep the other half to myself.

·                     I’m getting very hungry, but I have sat down now, so the impetus is to go for a full hour of voice recognition, and then get up at the end of it. Maybe I’ll just do 45 minutes, does it really matter so early on in the day, when I know I’m going to have the momentum to keep going?

·                     Dragon (voice recognition programme) is annoying me a little this morning — this should be a list in bullet points, but it keeps on cutting out. Then it just won’t spell programme properly.

·                     I’ve just gone into the Dragon voice recognition dictionary, and deleted the Americanised spelling of ‘program’. What a relief! That is certainly worth a quick twitter, but only when I’m back online later.

·                     I am creating a whole load of content about flights between different city pairs — this stuff is certainly very tedious, when compared to more prose-based articles.

·                     I mustn’t forget to take the bin out.

·                     Here I go getting up and continuing to produce all this content, but last night I was listening to a Tony Robbins CD talking about how people need to adapt to constant change in order to compete and thrive. Two years ago, concentrating on content alone might have been the best way for us to grow, but is it really still the same case now?

·                     Why did Dragon just pop the last sentence out of the bullet points that I have been using for this list?It is all down to the usage of question marks? No, not in the case of this bullet point!

·                     If I put a question mark at the end of this line, will it move out of bulleted list form? No? I still have no idea how Dragon chooses to format these lists, but never mind I will move on.

My online session earlier really didn’t do much to maintain spirits — in fact, it did quite the opposite. As I was saying last week, I’m trying to avoid spending too much time on looking up how many visitors my website is getting, or how much it is earning from one day to the next — this is a common mistake that people in our industry make, and it can end up wasting so much time in causing so much demoralisation when things don’t change overnight. (18:40) — rather than just comment on this, I’ve used it as a starting point for two articles on running revenue generating websites — one about the top mistakes to avoid, and the other about the things that have kept us in business. I’m still slightly wary of doing this — Web traffic has fallen now for three consecutive weeks. I know there is still plenty of bad economic news out there, but March should normally show an increase compared to February, and we’ve already seen a massive drop-off in this year compared to last year. So who am I to write articles about how to run a successful Internet business? Well, the best businesses know how to keep going through the bad as well as the good, and even if I wouldn’t exactly say we are thriving at the moment, we are still surviving, and there are plenty of things we are trying to do to pull ourselves back up again. It might be extremely demoralising when a whole load of effort goes into improving your website, only to find that three or four weeks down the line, there is no change, but again I need to take a reality check here — these things can take months to turn round, so hold tight!

Just before five, I got a phone call to say that the bike wheel had been sorted out, but I then messed around having a couple of Skype conversations, and didn’t leave the house until 10 past, making it a bit tight to get to the bike shop. As I was driving there, I was getting more and more angry, especially as there was (unsurprisingly considering the time) so much more traffic on the road than I’m used to, and twice I just missed the traffic lights at busy junctions. Looking back on it now, this is the kind of frustration that most commuters have to put up with twice every single day, but as I am so used to working from home now, and as most travel I do outside the city is by train, the idea of having to wait more than a minute at a traffic light fills me with dread! As I am thinking back over my worries of web traffic going down, and how further reductions in revenue could really squeeze us, I’m also thinking of this utility of having to sit in traffic just so I can go and collect the wheel that I need to get my bike working again. I am also watching the time and thinking that if I miss the shop by one minute, I will have wasted this journey completely, just because I didn’t pull myself away from a Skype conversation which really can awaited until another time. Luckily, my worry is needless, as I just catch the shop as they are about to switch the lights off. When I’m in an irritable mood, I do try and find something to pull me out of it, but I’m not always successful. Relieved that I had just managed to get the wheel sorted, I was driving out of Kenilworth, and noticed a row of seven houses which all had what appeared to be recently thatched roofs — there I am thinking ‘what a nice little touch’, but somebody must have spent a lot of time coordinating that!

(18:55) I’m back at home now, and this little dictation session seems to have done a reasonable job at stabilising my mood. In many ways I’d rather be a little bit angry than lethargic and depressed — at least when I’m angry, I will have the motivation to do something about it. On the additional plus side, my brother, who is normally there to reign in my more fanciful ideas, is considerably more upbeat about how the business is going than I am right now. He reminded me of all the things we are doing to turn things around, and I know that there are numerous content ideas we have talked about which could bring in extra visitors and useful links. I think I’ve talked enough about mood management for now — or at least enough for me to put that area of my mind onto autopilot, so I can go back and sit in business class and create some content for my other website.

I’m driving towards a bike shop in Kenilworth to get my rear wheel fixed, when one my favourite dance anthems comes on the radio — Insomnia by Faithless.

The immediate reaction to hearing the opening bars of a tune like this is to hit the accelerator and go full throttle. It is easy to see how someone might overdo this even more when in a manic state, but I am rapidly held back.

This isn’t about being totally sensible — the emotion free driver will just carry on driving at the same speed regardless of what was on the radio. Rather, I am held back because my highly analytical nature tells me that driving too fast round corners is a recipe for disaster, especially on narrow country lanes. So just as I want to hit the accelerator pedal, my mind is coming back with calculations about fatalities on rural roads and I ease off.

As for the tune – well, Insomnia was certainly something I was afflicted with towards the end of last week, but today has just been drowsiness. Having said that, as I get round to uploading this (7:40pm), I’ve had my caffeine injection and I am feeling much more alert. I said in my earlier post that this post wasn’t making much sense, but I hope it does now get across the exact point it is trying to make – namely that the bipolar mind might well want to expose itself to taking more risks, but the analytical, Darwinian inspired statistical mind will always trump it with facts.

Oh well, at least next time I feel the need for speed I will be back on two wheels. Now if you want the facts for that, afaik, cycling is always more dangerous per mile than driving, but on average regular cyclists live 10 years longer than non-cyclists, because of the fitness gains. Then again, bipolar is supposed to take 10 years off your life too. I think there is some offsetting going on here Forget about CO2 offset, that’s my BP offset programme!

I’m scanning through what I’ve written above, and thinking that it doesn’t really give much detail about mood changes, as that would require going into much longer articles, which I’d like to do if I have time. After Friday, I know that I could easily keep this blog full of detailed posts about the different thoughts I have, and my thoughts about those thoughts, but that this could soon get stuck into its own never-ending loop, and that’s not what I’m trying to achieve here. So before I go back and go into any details about the previous four days, it might be better to jot down a few notes from earlier on today, and to carry on from there:

·                     Driving to the bike shop — wanting to hit the accelerator when a classic tune comes on the radio.

·                     At the swimming pool — can’t really be bothered to do any swimming.

·                     Supermarket checkout — is that the healthiest trolley load I have ever purchased?

·                     As I write this diary update, why is my energy waning?

·                     Will I get anywhere near the amount of content I created on Friday? I’m not really trying to do that, I’ll be happy with half that amount, as long as most of it goes to my commercial website.

·                     Come to think of it, and I still going to be awake in 15 minutes? My mood is fine, I’m just feeling tired, but I haven’t had my caffeine injection yet today. I’m not sure how well that blue cheese (the one food sin that stayed in the trolley) agrees with my system, but it certainly tasted really good!

·                     Should this text be put back in paragraphs, or is it nicer to break it down into bullet points like this. I quite like using using the bullet points, and I generally find it easier to read text that is broken down in this way. I should never forget that a lot of people with wandering minds have very short attention spans. The only problem is that it is a bit of a nuisance to format when transferring from Dragon voice recognition into a WordPress blog.

·                     I’m just want to keep sitting here until four, then I might get the caffeine shot out. I might feel tired, and I might be making a very late start, but at least I can give myself a little pat on the back for the fact that I’ve already done my exercise for the day. I still don’t fully understand how swimming, including going to the jacuzzi/steamer/sauna impacts my mood and energy levels, but at this time of day I’m usually scrambling to get out of the house to make it there by four, which is the latest time of peak members can go, so the fact that I have finished my swim, gone to the supermarket, had some lunch, and sat down to write content by now isn’t actually too bad going at all.

·                     I am reminding myself that I am often slow to get going, no matter what time I start. Even when I start with a seemingly massive burst of energy, this often fizzles out after just a few minutes, and might then take a couple of hours before I really get back into the swing of things again. As I was out all day yesterday, today is effectively the first day of the week, so I could still be having a short dose of Monday morning blues, even though it is Tuesday afternoon.

·                     I should point out that as I dictate this, I’m trying to report on how I felt at different times across the last five days, and that if I get a chance, I would like to go back further than that. So it is only natural that I’m reporting on different moods at different times, but on the whole the last few days have still been extremely positive, and when I have had down periods, this has been due to tiredness, rather than any kind of depression. I mean come on, anyone would be knackered after cycling the equivalent distance of three marathons, so it is no wonder I’m feeling a bit groggy after going for a swim.

·                     (15:53) – Ok, that is enough for now, the blog post which was going to follow this doesn’t really make that much sense and I need that recharge.

Like last Friday, I am making a very late start, but at least I got up at a reasonable time (10 AM), after yesterday’s very long day in London. Although I do have a tendency to panic and get all worked up when I start late at this, I’m really not too bothered today, as I have already got a few things ‘ under my belt’ as such, and this also includes a ‘belt tightening’ swimming session! I really should be getting on with some text for my main website, but after I left off on Friday with such a massive block of blog posts and Mind Pilot, I feel there is was a natural momentum that I had got started which I want to at least carry on for an hour or so this afternoon, before getting started on my other work. Thankfully, my mood has been kept pretty much on an even keel through the last few days, with a major sense of breakthrough after Sunday’s bike ride. Here’s a summary of the last few days, which I hope to stick into some longer blog posts shortly:

·                     Friday evening — went to bed after waffling on for over 8000 words that day, but still had plenty of thoughts buzzing around, and was still awake at dawn the following morning. Perhaps writing that much content had made me a little bit manic, and apart from when we came back very late from Liverpool couple of weeks ago, this was certainly the first time I’d stay up until dawn for quite a while.

·                     Saturday — relaxed all-day, but still got up just before 10 to go to Birmingham. This could potentially develop into quite a long blog post, but for now I’m putting it to one side.

·                     Sunday — I got up with the intention of joining the local cycling club which is supposed to meet in a nearby park at 9 AM. Although this was a part of Sunday morning I’m not normally used to seeing, I didn’t actually get out of the house until nine, and it was only then that I realised that my spare bike, which I keep at the back of the house, had two flat tyres. The rear wheel was also rubbing against the frame, and this was proving to be very difficult to sort out, so I wasn’t finally ready to leave the house until 9:45. Having missed the cycling club, I wanted to make sure that I went on a decent enough bike ride on my own, so I headed off towards the Cotswolds. Needless to say, some eight hours later, I finally made it back home, and this felt like a real return to form, as I hadn’t cycled this kind of distance since the summer of 2007, just before my last serious manic episode kicked off.

·                     Monday — after Sunday’s marathon cycle ride, I was glad that I could still get up in time to make the train for a lunchtime event in London, where I had been asked to be a panellist. This was a rare opportunity to talk about the industry I work in, and it was nice to be sitting next to other panellists who represented businesses far larger than my own. Come to think of it, considering how much most people are supposed to have a total fear of public speaking, than event actually went extremely smoothly, so I hope I can get another opportunity to do something similar soon. After the event, I decided to go for a walk from the event hotel in Bloomsbury to the Tate Modern, but by chance ended up meeting up with another person from the Internet industry, who just happened to be having a drink with one or the other people from the event I just attended. I was then supposed to meet a friend for curry, but his phone seems to be on the blink, so I ended up making a brief visit to the Tate modern, before grabbing some food inside St Pancras International and then heading home.

Earlier this evening, I followed a link to a blog post which had a very good list about the top 30 websites by gross revenue generated. It listed the founders of each website, together with how much each earned on annual basis, and how much each of these websites earned per second — and yes, I would be more than grateful for a few seconds of Google’s time right now!

Although the list was interesting, it didn’t give any information about the history of each website, and what particular success traits each of these people possessed in order to get where they are now. To find out more about their stories, it would certainly be more useful to look up these websites and the people behind them on Wikipedia. Anyway, I digress — the list could have done with some commentary, but it was still useful. To the right hand side of this blog post was an advert saying that the developer of this blog had grown his income by over 1000% since October last year, and how he was a ‘ 20 year old living the Internet dream.’

Now you can take income claims with a pinch of salt — if you start with £1 each month and grow by 1000%, your earnings have still only gone up to £10 — hardly enough to live on. Maybe this person is doing well, maybe he isn’t, but just exactly what is living the Internet dream? He defines it by saying he is able to work where he wants and when he wants, but just exactly what does he mean by work? I expect that there is some form of e-book or newsletter subscription which you will be expected to sign up for, which in turn will tell you that you can make a fortune by selling the same product on to other people. That’s not really generating proper wealth in my books, nor is it providing anything new or original on the Internet. I also just wonder sometimes how this Internet dream is defined. Last year, I was sent by a friend to a website called the four hour working week, which seems to look at the same idea of making money with no effort. Of course, I always want to do more with less, but I just don’t think I can relate to the idea of doing next to nothing week and getting paid a fortune for it.

Still, I’d much rather be spending more time on the drawing, or even painting, so if I can get earnings back up my main website, I should at least free up enough time to enjoy doing what I really want to do a little bit more, rather than doing stuff that I guess I only partially enjoy, if that makes any sense?

Anyway, I’m always going to be a motormouth, so I can knock off now pretty satisfied, having done 8000 words of content in the one-day. Maybe I will get those paintbrushes out tomorrow, or at least a sketch pad!