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Attaining Perfection

[reblogged from 2013]

Today in church we had a discussion about “attaining perfection” – and the presenter went to the sports analogy. Give examples of perfection in sports. The others in the room went to the classics. Pitching a no-hitter. A season with no losses. The usual suspects.

Striving for perfection

Of course, my mind went in the opposite direction from the no-hitter example. How about a baseball game where every single last hitter gets on base? Is that even possible? I really doubt it, though a baseball fan can totally comment below with stats for me. But as far as I see it, that game would still be in progress somewhere, right? Attaining perfection might not be so simple as that. What about golf? Is the hole in one the example of perfection? So ultimately, wouldn’t 18 hole in one’s in a row be the perfect example of attaining perfection? Golf fans: has it ever been done? in competition?

I love a perfect sunset

When I thought of my own examples for attaining perfection, I visualized sunsets. Flowers. Cliffs. I am reminded of a favorite movie quote about the culmination of the search for the perfect cherry blossom:

“Perfect … they are all … perfect” – Katsumoto, The Last Samurai

The reality of attaining perfection

While nature provides many excellent examples of perfection, we all fall quite short of this lofty goal. I think that in this case attaining doesn’t refer to the end result of “being” perfect, but rather the journey of “becoming” perfect. Stuff happens. True. We can’t control it. True. But we do have control over our emotions. Over our response to stuff that happens. We can look at the challenge and the potential for growth. We can step around or over the obstacles. Maybe even learn how to leap over them. And in the process strive for something better.

Summit of Orizaba in Mexico – highest volcano in North America

If you’ve been following my ebooks on Amazon, you’ll notice that I write openly about my failures. I keep plugging away though. I keep trying. I recently completed Orizaba, which I first attempted in miserable failure 5 years ago. I was too weak to go beyond 17,000′. This time I climbed it on my first acclimatization hike on March 5. My partner and I felt strong and well trained. In my opinion this is an example of attaining perfection.

I know that if you set your sights on a worthy goal and apply yourself, you too can be attaining perfection in your endeavors. Health, fitness, training, fat loss. I know you have it in you.

Who should you follow back on Twitter?

[reblogged from 2012]

If your Twitter activity is up where it should be, you’ll likely get some Followers before too long, sometimes in droves. If you wonder who to follow back, I have a few suggestions based on my own experiences. I actually should have named this one “who should you NOT follow back on Twitter”

Twitter Egg Avatar – several colors available – the default

First of all, never follow anyone back that you do not physically know until you go to their profile and skim their posts and mentions. Their profile image or avatar can tell you a few things about them. If they have the default Egg Avatar, it could be a warning, especially if they already have a lot of Tweets and Followers. If they only have a few of each, then it’s possible it’s a new account, but overall, with Social being what it is, they should have an avatar, hopefully a face.

Quote after quote – maybe a bot?

Another thing to consider is their Tweet quality. If it’s a few thousand quotes that might not be a good sign. As well, if it’s one after the other talking about getting more followers, that might not be good either.

3rd World Followers always make you look “genuine”

If you decide to follow someone relatively “benign” – those with 3000 quotes, or 3 Tweets and 6 Followers – expect to get an auto-generated DM (Direct Message) within seconds of Following them, often with something “To reward you for following me, here’s a link to something you will really like”.

Twitter DM for an amazing opportunity to reward me for following

These are probably not all that bad, and so long as you never click the link you’ll probably be okay and never hear from them again. Bots tend not to unfollow you, so it will add to your stats (if that’s important to you).

I highly recommend you do not follow back the 5,000 follower bots. For one thing Twitter really is all about authenticity, and if you are hooked up with these people, you’ll probably hate yourself for it later.

The quotes are pretty benign too, and if you want to fluff up your Tweet count and your activity stats, retweeting the occasional quote is pretty harmless, so long as it is meaningful to you and your followers.

Be careful – it’s a jungle out there 

Is Google Exact Match Domain Penalty Illogical?

[from October 2012]

Recently Google Spam Master Matt Cutts hinted that low-quality exact match domains could be penalized. This is aside from either Penguin or Panda, and as far as I know doesn’t yet have a cutesy animal name that starts with P, like Platypus.

An “exact match domain” is one in which the keyword is used as the domain name. A simple and almost meaningless example is for a company that sells yellow golf balls, and uses the domain “yellowgolfballs.com”. Supposedly, this is a suspect domain name, since it matches keywords that are logical for searching, and until now, was actually encouraged for your SEO marketing efforts. Some algorithm from Panda or Penguin would test the quality of the content on the site, and if it’s deemed low, would essentially ban it from search results.

A Real World Exact Match Domain Example

How does this apply to a realistic situation? Let’s go for the simplest example I can imagine. Ed the Plumber. Ed is a hypothetical local plumber who has been in the same town for twenty years. You’ve seen him driving around town in his big white van, labeled “Ed’s Plumbing”. You know who he is and what he is, and your family has been using him for two generations. One day at the dawn of the 21st Century Ed decides to get a website, and in the interest of simplicity, buys “edsplumbing.com” and has it painted on his truck. Like any other service industry professional, he lists what he does, what his service area is, what his hours are, and his general pricing structure, about ten pages on his website.

So is this a “Exact Match Domain”? What do you think people who are trying to find Ed’s phone number will type into the search box at Google? “Ed’s Plumbing” and that then becomes the keywords you are searching for, and blam, it’s an Exact Match Domain. So now let’s review the quality of the content. The list of a plumber’s services is probably fairly generic, and is probably almost word-for-word duplicated on thousands of sites, as are the hours, and probably a hundred businesses list the same geographic locations. Ed is probably pretty busy fixing pipes and stuff, so he’s not generating a dozen fresh, exciting articles each month on relevant exciting plumbing topics, like “advances in wax ring technology since 1952”. Not only that, but in all honesty, most everything in your house plumbing-wise hasn’t changed a lot in the last fifty years. The odds of constantly generating exciting fresh content are slim to none.

Inbound links? How is poor Ed supposed to get quality organic inbound links? Spamming blogs would probably work, if he could find some relevant home repair blogs, since relevance seems to now be important for inbound links, but then Ed is pretty busy doing pipe stuff. It’s not like a lot of people outside his town would stumble across Ed’s ten page site and put up links on their own – even with the wax ring articles. It’s especially not like the portal sites are doing all that well right now, which could give Ed a share of links with other plumbers for relevance mixed in with their spun articles.

So poor Ed, getting banned from Google, just because he has a valid site, with a valid URL, and a valid business, being searched for by valid customers using valid keywords. Illogical, don’t you think?

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Dumb Down the Product

A quick thought on “Dumbing Down” …

Rainbow Dash knows all about the best possible result

If you dumb something down to the level of the stupidest person in the room, can you simultaneously hope for the best possible result?

That would be nuts. I think this might apply equally to several types of endeavors. Education, science, business. Catch yourself dumbing down your product, and you’ll save yourself the hardship of putting out a less than desirable result.