More on Personal Growth
Alex Mathers
3 years ago
12 habits of the zenith individuals I know
Calmness is a vital life skill.
It aids communication. It boosts creativity and performance.
I've studied calm people's habits for years. Commonalities:
Have mastered the art of self-humor.
Protectors take their job seriously, draining the room's energy.
They are fixated on positive pursuits like making cool things, building a strong physique, and having fun with others rather than on depressing influences like the news and gossip.
Every day, spend at least 20 minutes moving, whether it's walking, yoga, or lifting weights.
Discover ways to take pleasure in life's challenges.
Since perspective is malleable, they change their view.
Set your own needs first.
Stressed people neglect themselves and wonder why they struggle.
Prioritize self-care.
Don't ruin your life to please others.
Make something.
Calm people create more than react.
They love creating beautiful things—paintings, children, relationships, and projects.
Don’t hold their breath.
If you're stressed or angry, you may be surprised how much time you spend holding your breath and tightening your belly.
Release, breathe, and relax to find calm.
Stopped rushing.
Rushing is disadvantageous.
Calm people handle life better.
Are aware of their own dietary requirements.
They avoid junk food and eat foods that keep them healthy, happy, and calm.
Don’t take anything personally.
Stressed people control everything.
Self-conscious.
Calm people put others and their work first.
Keep their surroundings neat.
Maintaining an uplifting and clutter-free environment daily calms the mind.
Minimise negative people.
Calm people are ruthless with their boundaries and avoid negative and drama-prone people.
Leah
3 years ago
The Burnout Recovery Secrets Nobody Is Talking About
What works and what’s just more toxic positivity
Just keep at it; you’ll get it.
I closed the Zoom call and immediately dropped my head. Open tabs included material on inspiration, burnout, and recovery.
I searched everywhere for ways to avoid burnout.
It wasn't that I needed to keep going, change my routine, employ 8D audio playlists, or come up with fresh ideas. I had several ideas and a schedule. I knew what to do.
I wasn't interested. I kept reading, changing my self-care and mental health routines, and writing even though it was tiring.
Since burnout became a psychiatric illness in 2019, thousands have shared their experiences. It's spreading rapidly among writers.
What is the actual key to recovering from burnout?
Every A-list burnout story emphasizes prevention. Other lists provide repackaged self-care tips. More discuss mental health.
It's like the mid-2000s, when pink quotes about bubble baths saturated social media.
The self-care mania cost us all. Self-care is crucial, but utilizing it to address everything didn't work then or now.
How can you recover from burnout?
Time
Are extended breaks actually good for you? Most people need a break every 62 days or so to avoid burnout.
Real-life burnout victims all took breaks. Perhaps not a long hiatus, but breaks nonetheless.
Burnout is slow and gradual. It takes little bits of your motivation and passion at a time. Sometimes it’s so slow that you barely notice or blame it on other things like stress and poor sleep.
Burnout doesn't come overnight; neither will recovery.
I don’t care what anyone else says the cure for burnout is. It has to be time because time is what gave us all burnout in the first place.
Neeramitra Reddy
3 years ago
The best life advice I've ever heard could very well come from 50 Cent.
He built a $40M hip-hop empire from street drug dealing.
50 Cent was nearly killed by 9mm bullets.
Before 50 Cent, Curtis Jackson sold drugs.
He sold coke to worried addicts after being orphaned at 8.
Pursuing police. Murderous hustlers and gangs. Unwitting informers.
Despite his hard life, his hip-hop career was a success.
An assassination attempt ended his career at the start.
What sane producer would want to deal with a man entrenched in crime?
Most would have drowned in self-pity and drank themselves to death.
But 50 Cent isn't most people. Life on the streets had given him fearlessness.
“Having a brush with death, or being reminded in a dramatic way of the shortness of our lives, can have a positive, therapeutic effect. So it is best to make every moment count, to have a sense of urgency about life.” ― 50 Cent, The 50th Law
50 released a series of mixtapes that caught Eminem's attention and earned him a $50 million deal!
50 Cents turned death into life.
Things happen; that is life.
We want problems solved.
Every human has problems, whether it's Jeff Bezos swimming in his billions, Obama in his comfortable retirement home, or Dan Bilzerian with his hired bikini models.
All problems.
Problems churn through life. solve one, another appears.
It's harsh. Life's unfair. We can face reality or run from it.
The latter will worsen your issues.
“The firmer your grasp on reality, the more power you will have to alter it for your purposes.” — 50 Cent, The 50th Law
In a fantasy-obsessed world, 50 Cent loves reality.
Wish for better problem-solving skills rather than problem-free living.
Don't wish, work.
We All Have the True Power of Alchemy
Humans are arrogant enough to think the universe cares about them.
That things happen as if the universe notices our nanosecond existences.
Things simply happen. Period.
By changing our perspective, we can turn good things bad.
The alchemists' search for the philosopher's stone may have symbolized the ability to turn our lead-like perceptions into gold.
Negativity bias tints our perceptions.
Normal sparring broke your elbow? Rest and rethink your training. Fired? You can improve your skills and get a better job.
Consider Curtis if he had fallen into despair.
The legend we call 50 Cent wouldn’t have existed.
The Best Lesson in Life Ever?
Neither avoid nor fear your reality.
That simple sentence contains every self-help tip and life lesson on Earth.
When reality is all there is, why fear it? avoidance?
Or worse, fleeing?
To accept reality, we must eliminate the words should be, could be, wish it were, and hope it will be.
It is. Period.
Only by accepting reality's chaos can you shape your life.
“Behind me is infinite power. Before me is endless possibility, around me is boundless opportunity. My strength is mental, physical and spiritual.” — 50 Cent
You might also like
Tim Soulo
3 years ago
Here is why 90.63% of Pages Get No Traffic From Google.
The web adds millions or billions of pages per day.
How much Google traffic does this content get?
In 2017, we studied 2 million randomly-published pages to answer this question. Only 5.7% of them ranked in Google's top 10 search results within a year of being published.
94.3 percent of roughly two million pages got no Google traffic.
Two million pages is a small sample compared to the entire web. We did another study.
We analyzed over a billion pages to see how many get organic search traffic and why.
How many pages get search traffic?
90% of pages in our index get no Google traffic, and 5.2% get ten visits or less.
90% of google pages get no organic traffic
How can you join the minority that gets Google organic search traffic?
There are hundreds of SEO problems that can hurt your Google rankings. If we only consider common scenarios, there are only four.
Reason #1: No backlinks
I hate to repeat what most SEO articles say, but it's true:
Backlinks boost Google rankings.
Google's "top 3 ranking factors" include them.
Why don't we divide our studied pages by the number of referring domains?
66.31 percent of pages have no backlinks, and 26.29 percent have three or fewer.
Did you notice the trend already?
Most pages lack search traffic and backlinks.
But are these the same pages?
Let's compare monthly organic search traffic to backlinks from unique websites (referring domains):
More backlinks equals more Google organic traffic.
Referring domains and keyword rankings are correlated.
It's important to note that correlation does not imply causation, and none of these graphs prove backlinks boost Google rankings. Most SEO professionals agree that it's nearly impossible to rank on the first page without backlinks.
You'll need high-quality backlinks to rank in Google and get search traffic.
Is organic traffic possible without links?
Here are the numbers:
Four million pages get organic search traffic without backlinks. Only one in 20 pages without backlinks has traffic, which is 5% of our sample.
Most get 300 or fewer organic visits per month.
What happens if we exclude high-Domain-Rating pages?
The numbers worsen. Less than 4% of our sample (1.4 million pages) receive organic traffic. Only 320,000 get over 300 monthly organic visits, or 0.1% of our sample.
This suggests high-authority pages without backlinks are more likely to get organic traffic than low-authority pages.
Internal links likely pass PageRank to new pages.
Two other reasons:
Our crawler's blocked. Most shady SEOs block backlinks from us. This prevents competitors from seeing (and reporting) PBNs.
They choose low-competition subjects. Low-volume queries are less competitive, requiring fewer backlinks to rank.
If the idea of getting search traffic without building backlinks excites you, learn about Keyword Difficulty and how to find keywords/topics with decent traffic potential and low competition.
Reason #2: The page has no long-term traffic potential.
Some pages with many backlinks get no Google traffic.
Why? I filtered Content Explorer for pages with no organic search traffic and divided them into four buckets by linking domains.
Almost 70k pages have backlinks from over 200 domains, but no search traffic.
By manually reviewing these (and other) pages, I noticed two general trends that explain why they get no traffic:
They overdid "shady link building" and got penalized by Google;
They're not targeting a Google-searched topic.
I won't elaborate on point one because I hope you don't engage in "shady link building"
#2 is self-explanatory:
If nobody searches for what you write, you won't get search traffic.
Consider one of our blog posts' metrics:
No organic traffic despite 337 backlinks from 132 sites.
The page is about "organic traffic research," which nobody searches for.
News articles often have this. They get many links from around the web but little Google traffic.
People can't search for things they don't know about, and most don't care about old events and don't search for them.
Note:
Some news articles rank in the "Top stories" block for relevant, high-volume search queries, generating short-term organic search traffic.
The Guardian's top "Donald Trump" story:
Ahrefs caught on quickly:
"Donald Trump" gets 5.6M monthly searches, so this page got a lot of "Top stories" traffic.
I bet traffic has dropped if you check now.
One of the quickest and most effective SEO wins is:
Find your website's pages with the most referring domains;
Do keyword research to re-optimize them for relevant topics with good search traffic potential.
Bryan Harris shared this "quick SEO win" during a course interview:
He suggested using Ahrefs' Site Explorer's "Best by links" report to find your site's most-linked pages and analyzing their search traffic. This finds pages with lots of links but little organic search traffic.
We see:
The guide has 67 backlinks but no organic traffic.
We could fix this by re-optimizing the page for "SERP"
A similar guide with 26 backlinks gets 3,400 monthly organic visits, so we should easily increase our traffic.
Don't do this with all low-traffic pages with backlinks. Choose your battles wisely; some pages shouldn't be ranked.
Reason #3: Search intent isn't met
Google returns the most relevant search results.
That's why blog posts with recommendations rank highest for "best yoga mat."
Google knows that most searchers aren't buying.
It's also why this yoga mats page doesn't rank, despite having seven times more backlinks than the top 10 pages:
The page ranks for thousands of other keywords and gets tens of thousands of monthly organic visits. Not being the "best yoga mat" isn't a big deal.
If you have pages with lots of backlinks but no organic traffic, re-optimizing them for search intent can be a quick SEO win.
It was originally a boring landing page describing our product's benefits and offering a 7-day trial.
We realized the problem after analyzing search intent.
People wanted a free tool, not a landing page.
In September 2018, we published a free tool at the same URL. Organic traffic and rankings skyrocketed.
Reason #4: Unindexed page
Google can’t rank pages that aren’t indexed.
If you think this is the case, search Google for site:[url]. You should see at least one result; otherwise, it’s not indexed.
A rogue noindex meta tag is usually to blame. This tells search engines not to index a URL.
Rogue canonicals, redirects, and robots.txt blocks prevent indexing.
Check the "Excluded" tab in Google Search Console's "Coverage" report to see excluded pages.
Google doesn't index broken pages, even with backlinks.
Surprisingly common.
In Ahrefs' Site Explorer, the Best by Links report for a popular content marketing blog shows many broken pages.
One dead page has 131 backlinks:
According to the URL, the page defined content marketing. —a keyword with a monthly search volume of 5,900 in the US.
Luckily, another page ranks for this keyword. Not a huge loss.
At least redirect the dead page's backlinks to a working page on the same topic. This may increase long-tail keyword traffic.
This post is a summary. See the original post here
ANDREW SINGER
3 years ago
Crypto seen as the ‘future of money’ in inflation-mired countries
Crypto as the ‘future of money' in inflation-stricken nations
Citizens of devalued currencies “need” crypto. “Nice to have” in the developed world.
According to Gemini's 2022 Global State of Crypto report, cryptocurrencies “evolved from what many considered a niche investment into an established asset class” last year.
More than half of crypto owners in Brazil (51%), Hong Kong (51%), and India (54%), according to the report, bought cryptocurrency for the first time in 2021.
The study found that inflation and currency devaluation are powerful drivers of crypto adoption, especially in emerging market (EM) countries:
“Respondents in countries that have seen a 50% or greater devaluation of their currency against the USD over the last decade were more than 5 times as likely to plan to purchase crypto in the coming year.”
Between 2011 and 2021, the real lost 218 percent of its value against the dollar, and 45 percent of Brazilians surveyed by Gemini said they planned to buy crypto in 2019.
The rand (South Africa's currency) has fallen 103 percent in value over the last decade, second only to the Brazilian real, and 32 percent of South Africans expect to own crypto in the coming year. Mexico and India, the third and fourth highest devaluation countries, followed suit.
Compared to the US dollar, Hong Kong and the UK currencies have not devalued in the last decade. Meanwhile, only 5% and 8% of those surveyed in those countries expressed interest in buying crypto.
What can be concluded? Noah Perlman, COO of Gemini, sees various crypto use cases depending on one's location.
‘Need to have' investment in countries where the local currency has devalued against the dollar, whereas in the developed world it is still seen as a ‘nice to have'.
Crypto as money substitute
As an adjunct professor at New York University School of Law, Winston Ma distinguishes between an asset used as an inflation hedge and one used as a currency replacement.
Unlike gold, he believes Bitcoin (BTC) is not a “inflation hedge”. They acted more like growth stocks in 2022. “Bitcoin correlated more closely with the S&P 500 index — and Ether with the NASDAQ — than gold,” he told Cointelegraph. But in the developing world, things are different:
“Inflation may be a primary driver of cryptocurrency adoption in emerging markets like Brazil, India, and Mexico.”
According to Justin d'Anethan, institutional sales director at the Amber Group, a Singapore-based digital asset firm, early adoption was driven by countries where currency stability and/or access to proper banking services were issues. Simply put, he said, developing countries want alternatives to easily debased fiat currencies.
“The larger flows may still come from institutions and developed countries, but the actual users may come from places like Lebanon, Turkey, Venezuela, and Indonesia.”
“Inflation is one of the factors that has and continues to drive adoption of Bitcoin and other crypto assets globally,” said Sean Stein Smith, assistant professor of economics and business at Lehman College.
But it's only one factor, and different regions have different factors, says Stein Smith. As a “instantaneously accessible, traceable, and cost-effective transaction option,” investors and entrepreneurs increasingly recognize the benefits of crypto assets. Other places promote crypto adoption due to “potential capital gains and returns”.
According to the report, “legal uncertainty around cryptocurrency,” tax questions, and a general education deficit could hinder adoption in Asia Pacific and Latin America. In Africa, 56% of respondents said more educational resources were needed to explain cryptocurrencies.
Not only inflation, but empowering our youth to live better than their parents without fear of failure or allegiance to legacy financial markets or products, said Monica Singer, ConsenSys South Africa lead. Also, “the issue of cash and remittances is huge in Africa, as is the issue of social grants.”
Money's future?
The survey found that Brazil and Indonesia had the most cryptocurrency ownership. In each country, 41% of those polled said they owned crypto. Only 20% of Americans surveyed said they owned cryptocurrency.
These markets are more likely to see cryptocurrencies as the future of money. The survey found:
“The majority of respondents in Latin America (59%) and Africa (58%) say crypto is the future of money.”
Brazil (66%), Nigeria (63%), Indonesia (61%), and South Africa (57%). Europe and Australia had the fewest believers, with Denmark at 12%, Norway at 15%, and Australia at 17%.
Will the Ukraine conflict impact adoption?
The poll was taken before the war. Will the devastating conflict slow global crypto adoption growth?
With over $100 million in crypto donations directly requested by the Ukrainian government since the war began, Stein Smith says the war has certainly brought crypto into the mainstream conversation.
“This real-world demonstration of decentralized money's power could spur wider adoption, policy debate, and increased use of crypto as a medium of exchange.”
But the war may not affect all developing nations. “The Ukraine war has no impact on African demand for crypto,” Others loom larger. “Yes, inflation, but also a lack of trust in government in many African countries, and a young demographic very familiar with mobile phones and the internet.”
A major success story like Mpesa in Kenya has influenced the continent and may help accelerate crypto adoption. Creating a plan when everyone you trust fails you is directly related to the African spirit, she said.
On the other hand, Ma views the Ukraine conflict as a sort of crisis check for cryptocurrencies. For those in emerging markets, the Ukraine-Russia war has served as a “stress test” for the cryptocurrency payment rail, he told Cointelegraph.
“These emerging markets may see the greatest future gains in crypto adoption.”
Inflation and currency devaluation are persistent global concerns. In such places, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are now seen as the “future of money.” Not in the developed world, but that could change with better regulation and education. Inflation and its impact on cash holdings are waking up even Western nations.
Read original post here.
Michael Le
3 years ago
Union LA x Air Jordan 2 “Future Is Now” PREVIEW
With the help of Virgil Abloh and Union LA‘s Chris Gibbs, it's now clear that Jordan Brand intended to bring the Air Jordan 2 back in 2022.
The “Future Is Now” collection includes two colorways of MJ's second signature as well as an extensive range of apparel and accessories.
“We wanted to juxtapose what some futuristic gear might look like after being worn and patina'd,”
Union stated on the collaboration's landing page.
“You often see people's future visions that are crisp and sterile. We thought it would be cool to wear it in and make it organic...”
The classic co-branding appears on short-sleeve tees, hoodies, and sweat shorts/sweat pants, all lightly distressed at the hems and seams.
Also, a filtered black-and-white photo of MJ graces the adjacent long sleeves, labels stitch into the socks, and the Jumpman logo adorns the four caps.
Liner jackets and flight pants will also be available, adding reimagined militaria to a civilian ensemble.
The Union LA x Air Jordan 2 (Grey Fog and Rattan) shares many of the same beats. Vintage suedes show age, while perforations and detailing reimagine Bruce Kilgore's design for the future.
The “UN/LA” tag across the modified eye stays, the leather patch across the tongue, and the label that wraps over the lateral side of the collar complete the look.
The footwear will also include a Crater Slide in the “Grey Fog” color scheme.
BUYING
On 4/9 and 4/10 from 9am-3pm, Union LA will be giving away a pair of Air Jordan 2s at their La Brea storefront (110 S. LA BREA AVE. LA, CA 90036). The raffle is only open to LA County residents with a valid CA ID. You must enter by 11:59pm on 4/10 to win. Winners will be notified via email.