This morning, my listing for Health Month went up on flippa.com. Check it out! Pass it around! Make a bid! Etc.
(As a sidenote, so far my experience with flippa.com has been great. My contact at their company is a big fan of Health Month, and is doing a lot to help me make the listing as useful and informative as possible.)
It’s bittersweet to have to sell this site. The number of people who’ve already made offers (informally and formally) has been incredibly encouraging. I’m confident that no matter what happens, the site and spirit of the community will continue on in some form. In a more amazing form, even. One of my primary goals with selling it is that it will go to a person or company that has the time and energy to help it grow!
Why you should consider bidding on Health Month
Because it is awesome. Because you are awesome. Because you have ideas for it. Because you have the time, energy, and skills to make it more awesome. Because you want to have an entry point to making a real impact on healthy behavior change in the world.If you can’t make a bid for whatever reason, but know someone who might be interested, please send this along to them! Friends of friends are usually the best place to find connections like this. Be the connector!Here’s the link. Thank you.
Today, I’m 36!
Here’s what I had to say about turning 35 last year. The motto for the year was more presciently chosen than I could’ve known at the time. Love the Struggle.
Every year I chose a theme for the year. Here are a few of the previous:
Most of the struggle this year had to do with running a business on a tight budget, with a difficult problem, and a tiny team. I have some regrets for the year, mostly about not making decisions quickly and confidently enough. Maybe I was too tolerant of the struggle.
Overall, though, I do love the struggle. I love being close to the core, close to the most meaningful work. It was painful to stay focused on the meaningful parts of the life (trying to add value to the world, being connected to family, helping others) even while less important but more urgent items nipped at my heels. The strange thing about life is that nobody else can really know how difficult the decisions were to make, and they probably wouldn’t care if you told them.
For my 36th year, I would like my motto to be to Talk it out. I’ve been keeping a lot of my struggle to myself (and some close friends/family). It’s part of the default mindset one has when running a business and being afraid to show weakness to investors, press, the public, etc.
However, when things really did get difficult, and I had no choice but to tell the story with others, and ask for help, things got a lot less strugglesome and became more of a shared challenge. My fear of disappointing others was mostly unfounded.
I’ve been going to counseling too for similarly themed topics in my relationship with Kellianne. Talking it out takes two steps. It forces me to first think about what it is I am trying to say. And second of all, to say it in a way that the person/people I’m talking to are best able to hear it.
Most of communication is about creating or breaking connections. Even contentless small talk is about finding a point of relation between two people. As I’ve started paying attention to this, I’ve noticed just how many times the content of a conversation appears to be one thing (connect) while the tone or context of the conversation says exactly the opposite (disconnect).
As we’ve learned to be public on the internet, I think many of us (myself included) have created strategies for appearing sincere without actually being sincere. By trying to talk it out this year, I’m gonna try to think out loud a bit more, mixing up my personal and professional lives, sharing the difficulties as well as the successes and the boring parts.
Speaking of allowing myself to be boring, my birthday also marks the anniversary of my 8:36pm project, which has now been going for 4 years. I wrote a longer post about that that should go out sometime soon so I won’t say much more about that yet.
Every year since 2007 I spend a moment on my birthday reviewing and editing my list of “rules to live by”. Here it is:
Part one of talking it out is that I’ve started using a public Github repository to share my rules for living, my beliefs, and my life list.
If you’re in Seattle, come to Saint Johns tomorrow (Tuesday May 29th) around 8 o’clock to have a drink with me.
Happy Memorial Day!
(Source: myjetpack)
Through a series of personal realizations and business inevitabilities, it looks like I’m going to have to try to find a new owner for Health Month.
Ideally, it would be someone from the community who loves it and has the time, energy, and resources to keep it going in the same spirit. If this sounds like you, PLEASE contact me immediately. 206-355-9718 or busterbenson@gmail.com. I’m not looking to make a lot of money off of it… just to find it a good home.
The worst case scenario would be that I couldn’t find the right buyer and would have to shut the site down. It DOES sustain itself with the monthly $5 games, but it’s not quite enough to justify full-time work at the moment, and we’ve got so many other projects on our plates.
In any case, just a heads up. Nothing will change in the next month or so. If you’re at all interested, or know someone who is, please put yourself, or them, on the horn to me.
I love Health Month. Long live Health Month!
Please spread the word. I know it’s Memorial Day weekend, so I’ll probably send this out again early next week.
Update: Here’s the listing for the sale.
I was a bit surprised when I first saw the screen above on the (great) new Facebook Camera app. That’s the initial screen you get when you first open the app. But how on Earth did the app know my name? I assumed, of course, it was related to the fact that I also had the main Facebook iOS app installed on my iPhone — but still, how did those two apps talk to one another as neither is system-level?
It’s a smart way to do it (though it may get a bit of backlash). And it will allow Facebook to continue to build separate apps for key features — perhaps an Events app next? — that are quick and easy to install and use. Now just imagine if this was baked into iOS itself so other apps could use it. It would save a lot of typing and/or a number of clicks for app switching (Single Sign On). In my mind, this “hack” shows why Facebook eventually needs to do their own mobile OS. Deep integration and seamless use are paramount in mobile.
I’m impressed by the entire execution of this app, down to this little detail.
No news is better than Fox News – in a study of current events awareness, scientists find those watching Fox news could answer fewer questions than those watching no media at all. NRP comes out on top.
I wish NPR was actually NRP.
Friends! I have a new 20x200 print. Get it here→
Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon | Buy the limited-edition art on 20x200.com here.
In the newsletter, Charlie writes:
Today’s edition, and the book it came from, all originated from a list of 10 principles Austin wished someone had shared with him when he was first starting out. Eager to share his list with everyone (as he is with all his work, including “deleted scenes” and his sketchbook), he turned his pointers from a talk to college students into a blog post (which quickly went viral), and eventually into a book. It wasn’t long before Steal Like an Artist became his second New York Times bestseller.
We’ve learned a lot about behavior change in the last 2 years. Here’s a bit of my current thinking on it all, and a new free app that you can print out and put in your wallet.
1) Which behavior should I change?
One that helps you learn the habit of changing habits (learn once, use forever). One that’s linked directly to something you desperately crave more of in your life (meaning you crave it on a subconscious level as much as a conscious one). One that’s about doing more of something rather than less than something. One that you can work towards every day. One that takes less than 5 minutes, and that you can do at the same time every day. One that you can enjoy in some way, or that makes you feel good about yourself even just for a few seconds.
2) How many habits should I try to change?
Only one at a time. Please trust me on this one. Stick with one, stick with it for 60 or even 90 days. Then, if you really want, start another. Life is long. Think of how many habits you can change with the tortoise strategy in a year verses how many you start and stop with the hare strategy. Every change creates an equal and opposite force of resistance to change. To keep resistance low, change slower than your excitement propels you to. Hold yourself back… it builds anticipation. If you don’t, excitement inevitably wears off, and resistance will chop you down when you’re weakest, putting you back to square one. One. Habit. At. A. Time. Aim for changes that stick a year, 3 years, or 10 years, and pace yourself accordingly.
3) What if I get distracted or sick or go on vacation?
Get in the habit of being easy on yourself. Break streaks. Don’t beat yourself up for missing a day. Think long term. Appreciate small steps towards progress. Forgive yourself for falling off the wagon. Just get back on when you’re feeling ready again. Give yourself a special day every month to restart anything that got stamped out over the last month. Put it on your calendar and set an alarm. Course correction is the most important meta-habit to cultivate, and often gets ignored in the presence of excitement and big promises and positive thinking. Expect and plan for failure, and have a plan for recovering from it.
4) iPhone app, Android app, pedometer, wrist band, or other?
It doesn’t matter. Paper works just as well.
On that note…
Here’s a paper app you can print out, fold up, and put in your wallet. It’s free! And it encapsulates the best thinking Amelia and I and many others (see Nick Crocker’s great recent article and Leo Baubata’s extensive work) have on the subject.
Give it a try. For extra points, print it out and take a cool picture of yourself with it and tag it #hipsterhabitapp on Instagram.
IPA #hipsterhabitapp (Taken with instagram)
Poetic #hipsterhabitapp (Taken with Instagram at Under a tree)
Sneak preview of the #hipsterhabitapp we’re launching soon: http://hipsterhabitapp.com (Taken with instagram)
Tiny interview with April about her 10+ year habit of taking a multi-vitamin when she wakes up.
What’s the habit or routine that you’ve done daily for over a year? When did it start?
I’ve been taking a multi-vitamin every morning for about 10 years.
What do you think makes this habit stick better than other habits you might have tried to start?
I do it every morning, after I drink a glass of kombucha (another habit!) while I drink my morning glass of water (yet another habit). It’s a very simple routine; wake, feed the cats, drink kombucha, take vitamin, drink a glass of water. I don’t have a set time of day I do it, just whenever I wake up. Doing it during/while/after an event instead of a time makes it easier than setting a time of day. Most other habits I start depend on a time of day or aren’t tied to an event that happens every day; so with things like meditation, I have a very difficult time doing it during the weekends because I’m not working and that’s something I do every day when I get home from work.
How does doing this every day make you feel?
Taking a vitamin every day makes me feel like I’m doing one little thing to take care of my health, even if that’s the only health-contributing thing I do that day.
Follow @the_april on Twitter!
- Calculated by RescueTime (details here)
(via Malfunctions in the hype machine. - Indexed)
To put this into practice, rate things both by your expectations going in, and your impression coming out. So, 5/5 would be the most difficult score to achieve… high expectations and those expectations were beat.
More common is a 5/2 or a 5/3, where you had high expectations and your expectations were met.
Lately, a lot of books and movies aim for low expectations and make up for it by beating them. See Game of Thrones, 50 Shades of Grey, etc.
I love this. I’d probably buy them if they included a variety of promised symptom reliefs.