Week 2 Update Post Launch and Merry Christmas!

Without even realizing, it has already been 10 days since PersonalExcellence.co was launched. I thought it will be good to write a post to wrap up the status so far and give readers an idea on what’s in store in the upcoming weeks and 2009.

First 2 weeks: Content so far

So far I have posted 2 series – Discovering Your Purpose (series – 7 articles) and Myth of Perfectionism (series – 3 articles).

Discover Your Purpose series

I have intentionally kicked off the site launch with the series on purpose because life truly begins when you define your real purpose. Every other self-help tip or topic falls secondary to your purpose. When you read the articles, don’t just read and forget about them later – I urge you to really dig deep, reflect upon them and apply them to your life. The best I can do as the writer is to serve as the catalyst to trigger thoughts and actions in you. How your life takes shape from here on is totally up to you. It is only when you start ownership and action for your life will you truly live the life that you are meant to live. I will do my best to help you, but if you do not take the first step I cannot do anything at all.

The Myth of Perfectionism series

The Perfectionism series was written because I was a neurotic perfectionist before and I know how limiting it can be to an individual. That aside, this series is ultimately relevant to everyone (not just self-professed perfectionists) because there IS a perfectionist in all of us as leaders of our lives! My inspiration for this topic arose due to my annoyance with my perfectionist tendencies while writing.

At the time, I was writing a series on Goal Achievement (it has since been finished – Read: Successful Goal Achievement: ESPER). Instead of writing the actual content and ‘meat’ of the article, I found myself repeatedly scrolling back to what I wrote before and tweaking words which did not make a big difference whatsoever! When I observed that blind spot, I was pretty amused with myself and chuckled.
I decided to put what I was writing on hold and started to write on Perfectionism instead. What started off as an article immediately got spun into a series of 3 parts, since there was so much I could relate to it. I am pretty satisfied with the net output; from the feedback, it seems that the readers have found value in it so I’m glad
If you have not had the chance to read the articles, remember to bookmark them so you can return at a later date for a proper read. There is a lot of lessons shared which can make a big difference if you apply them to your life.

What’s up ahead for PersonalExcellence.co

In the meantime, I have a whole series of articles lined up for publishing! In fact, my writing rate is currently faster than the posting rate of once/day – it makes me feel a little restless because I want to just share everything with everyone! I did contemplate posting everything at one go but decided against it – I did not want to alienate visitors with the flood of content. Besides, it is better to build up a momentum for the blog since it is just launched in mid-Dec.

For your information, here are the articles that are already done (titles are not finalized yet):

Upcoming series

• Become the Master of Your Time (series; 3 articles)
• Goal Achievement (series; 6 articles 7 articles)
• Being Conscious of Living (series; 3 articles)
• Separate, individual articles (3 articles)

That adds up to a whopping 15 articles in the queue! At the rate I am writing, the backlog of the queue is only going to get bigger and bigger! Not that I’m complaining, of course – I rather have a flood of ideas and inspiration than to be in a rut. Some of the articles I’m currently writing are:

Articles in the writing

• How to Increase Motivation (series)
• How to Induce Inspiration
• Overcoming Frustration

Add that to the other 100+ ideas I already have on hand for upcoming articles and you can see why I’m feeling restless about posting only one entry/day. For the couple of months though, I am still going to focus on writing and content creation so that there will a sizable repository of content when more visitors start coming in.

After the first 3 months, I foresee the posting rate will settle at 2~3 entries per week, when the blog archive is sufficiently built up for reading.

Ask Celes

‘How do you align yourself to a purpose when things are not going well?’ – Poh

Thanks for your question Poh! Coincidentally, yesterday’s post on ‘Living in alignment with your purpose‘ directly addresses your question, so I’m going to redirect you there instead. This also happens to be the last part of the purpose series.

Building Quality Content that is Timeless and Universal

I spend a lot of time on my articles to ensure they are quality content that span across time and space. A short article would take me an average of 4+ hours put in the research, writing, crafting and improvision, while a long one can easily take me over 10+ hours. For every topic, I ensure that I am conveying timeless, universal principles/solutions which apply regardless of when he/she reads it (time) or where the person is from (space).

My usual writing sequence is as follows – First, I develop a lead framework of thought based on my life examples. After that, I test the robustness of model by (a) imagining different scenarios across time and space (b) looking out for relevant situations/issues in my life currently where I can apply the model to. In the event where the model successfully resolves the various scenarios it is put against, I will start the actual writing of the article. If it doesn’t, I start troubleshooting on the situation to understand what did not work and improvise on it.

By putting my writings through this test and rigor, I make sure the content holds through regardless of the time and context. The content that you read now will be valuable to your life whether you read it 10 years ago, right now, 10 years after or even 50 years later. There are times when I have finished writing an article, only to realize later that what I wrote about was not robust enough. When that happens, I will relook into the whole material, troubleshoot, rethink then rewrite as needed. This was what happened for my Motivation series – I had originally finished it a few days ago, only to find out afterwards that the content did not stand true when I pitted it against a different multitude of scenarios. Instead of leaving it as is, I’m currently improvising and rewriting the whole series.

You might be thinking: ‘Why are you investing so much time and energy in this for?‘ Remember my objective of this blog is help you, the reader, achieve the best out of your life and live to your maximum potential. My objective for writing is to provide real, concrete value to you. I rather have quality of posts over quantity, at any day or time. So far, the articles I have written are very dense in information – while it is good for those who have been working on their personal growth, it might get a little overwhelming for those who are just coming into this topic for the first time. So if you feel that a certain article you have read was too much for you, just bookmark it so that you can return to read at a separate time. In the future, I will explore mixing my blog with single big idea articles so that information retention and value take away will be higher.

Interestingly, I had a visitor ask me a few days ago if I’m getting paid to write the articles My answer is no – I am writing this out of my desire to help improve others’ lives. While I’m not paid monetarily, the satisfaction and gratification I’m getting out of this is enormous – it’s uncomparable to anything else I have ever done in my life. I can honestly visualize myself just pursuing my purpose and doing this forever.

I can hear the next question coming – ‘So how are you planning to earn your living?’ Well, I am going to return to work next year, so that addresses the monetary concerns. Even though I’m doing that, I will still be living in alignment with my purpose within my situational context. In time to come, I plan to converge fully with my long term goals to be a full-time life coach, personal development educator and speaker.

Please help spread the word around on PersonalExcellence.co.

So far, traffic for the first 2 weeks has been looking promising despite partial attempts to promote the site – an average of 100+ unique visitors/day! My long-term, BHAG (big, hairy, audacious goal) for the blog is to have 100+ million unique visitors / month, so we have a decent way to go from here. Of course, there is no way this blog can achieve the goal without the help of you readers to help spread the word around.

If you have found my articles useful and helpful to you in one way or another, please help to share this site with your other friends so that they can benefit from it as well. Email the url to your friends, link to PersonalExcellence.co from your blog/website, share the url in your social bookmarking sites, mention it to your friends, whichever method is the best for you.

It doesn’t matter even if how much the traffic of your site is or how many people you are sharing with – every little bit counts. The objective of this site is to help everyone in this world live their best possible life and achieve their maximum growth – only with your help will we be able to achieve this goal. I cannot achieve this vision without your help.

It’s Christmas tomorrow, so there will not be a new post since I imagine most people will be out and not get on internet. The posting will resume on the day after Christmas Merry Christmas everyone and hope you enjoy the wonderful day, regardless of whether you celebrate the festival or not!

« Living in Alignment with Your Purpose

Become the Master of Your Time »

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Filed in: Updates | Published: Dec 24 2008 | By Celes