My Paper From Last Night

I received a 96% on the paper that I worked on last night. It took me about two hours to complete it but when it was done I was satisfied with it. It turns out that I'm one of those people who can work well under pressure. The only real way to know if you can handle any situation is to challenge yourself. If I was not use to challenging myself, there is no way I would have taking this many classes and developed the website at the same time. I know what I have accomplished, I'm confident that I will accomplish the goals that I set, so I set the bar a little higher in order to test my ability. It is to me the only real way to improve myself at everything that I do. If I continually accomplish the same thing then I'm just going around in circles.

My learning continues

My learning continues through this very trying summer. Potential2success.com is steadily growing as I add new articles and update almost everyday. Yesterday Yahoo listed it on it's directory. I also submitted an article to selfgrowth.com and they posted it so now if you search my name on any search engine you will find my article. I decided to write more articles and submit them so I can get more links to my site. I'm still in the process of earning my degree so I constantly have papers or projects due. As a matter of fact, it's 11:40pm and I have a 6 page paper due tomorrow on the book Brunelleschi's Dome. I started it today and will probably be up all night finishing it and another assignment due for another class. The other assignment is one that I have to e-mail to my professor by tomorrow morning. My work has also decided to assign me to a position that will require a lot more of my time and energy. I have not made up my mind as to how I will handle that situation yet. Overall the first half of the summer has been a challenge as I expected it to be. But I've always said that just because something is impossible, doesn't me I can't do it.

When I first started the summer of discipline I just intended to gain discipline from working 40 hours, taking 6 classes, and managing Potential2Success.com. But now that I am about half way through I've gained some other charateristics that I did not expect.

First my time managment has improved. A few semesters ago I was taking two classes and working and I felt like I had no time for anything. The truth is I had plenty of time, I just wasted much of it without knowing. Having so much to do has forced me to look at my day or week and find time to study or work on a paper.

Second my thinking has improved. I guess using my brain to complete homework, projects, papers, and set backs with the website, has made my mind stronger. Just like working out can make build your muscles, working out your brain can make your mind develop. My thoughts come clearer now and I find solutions to problems at work faster. I've never had this kind of mental challenge before at one time so my mind is stepping it up to meet the challange.

Third my memory and organization have improved. Before I started the semester I sent an e-mail to all of my professors asking them to send me the syllabus for the class. Once I got them I wrote down all of the important dates in my date book. Project due dates and class meeting that kind of thing. I took me an entire Sunday afternoon to do it but I was ready and really relying on the date book to keep me organized. I was going in the trunk of my car yesterday and saw my date book and realized that I hadn't used it once since I started school. Everything that I need to get done for the week I remember as I go. If a teacher assigns an assignment it just sticks I usually don't even need to write it down. My organization skills have also helped me at work and made me more efficient at managing the website.

Fourth my spelling has improved. Don't ask me why.

These are all unexpected benefits to the challenges that I'm facing and I'm looking forward to the other benefits to come

Making connections online

I'm still contacting different writers around the world asking for articles and offering exposure. I've gotten back a good number of responses and many of them offer to send me more articles than I asked for and that's good also. A few did tell me that I could take whatever article that I wanted from a site where they have them posted. I'll gladly do that but I'm not just in it for the articles. I could go around the net cutting and pasting articles until I have enough to get noticed but I want to do more. By contacting the authors themselves I have an opportunity to build relationships and possible add contacts. One person put a link to my site on her newsletter so that her readers could visit my site. I told her that I would headline her on my page so that people would be more likely to visit her site. This exchange could be beneficial for the both of us and I'm excited about bringing more people into the ring of connections that I am building.

I Have No Idea What I'm Doing

I haven't told anybody that I know the full name of my website even though it has been online for almost a week. The reason is that I'm tracking everything I do to see if the marketing techniques can generate traffic. If I tell my friends and family about it, I know that they will visit the site more than once and I'll never really know if what I'm doing is paying off. I checked my web statistics today and I saw that I had about 27 visitors to my site. 7 of them were unique visitors. I'm not really expecting to receive any visitors yet because if nobody knows the site exist, how can they find it. I was reading up on this kind of stuff and I read that the search engines take time to find sites. And just because you have a site and submit it to Yahoo, Google, or MSN, that doesn't grantee that you will be listed. Imagine my surprise when I saw that one of my unique visitors found me from Live.com. They found me! Live.com is not as popular as Google or those other guys but since I only have a few articles and 3 quote pages, I'm just happy that they found me. The fun part about this building a website thing is the fact that I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm playing everything by ear and learning along the way. It's exciting to not know exactly what the next step is and then it comes to. For that step three more steps come you; and when you take those three, four come to you and on and on. I have faith that the things I am doing will pay off and the challange of creating new ways to insure success is also a motivator. When its all said and done I know I'll look back at these begining days and say man i can't beileve I did that.

Balancing My Life

They say if you want to accomplish any goal you should write it down. Because when you write your goal down then that means that it is clear in your mind. I think that writing your goals down in also good because it helps you stay focused on your goal. To me staying focused on a goal (especially a long term one) can be a goal within its self. I read recently in a book about how balance in life is important but impossible. The author claimed that even the most successful of people had at least one part of their lives that was a disaster. I guess that is true when you think about it. Many successful people usually have to sacrifice something for that success. But, that's not going to stop me from trying to balance my life. For the next few months I've decided to really focus on what my goals are. I want to be able to see them clearly in my mind. At the same time I want to create a more balanced life so that I am not dedicating all of my time to one part of my life. Friends, relationships, finance, and everything else will get equal importance overall. I know going into this I will sometimes have to choose one over the rest but I think that's a judgement call and I'll have to live with the results.

Potential To Success

I'm still taking six classes this summer and I seem to be handling the amount of work pretty well. On top of all that I've been doing, I am now launching a website called Potential2Success.com. It will have a lot of useful information about success, motivation, and self improvement. They say if you are going to build a website you should choose a topic you love. I love to see people improve their lives. Anytime I come across someone I knew I always like to hear how much they have improved their lives. Just yesterday I ran into someone I haven't seen for about six years. He told me that life is going good and that he is trying to go into public speaking. Since a big part of my self improvement came when I realized how much I loved speaking in public, I was excited to hear that he was also interested. I think hearing about others succeeding motivates me also. I can't wait to get the website off the ground so I can be involved in self improvement around the world.