Lately I’ve been making a concerted effort to use the RSS feed-reader to aggregate favorite spots in the cybersphere. It’s a practical tool and easy to use for collecting favorite blogs, news sites, Facebookers, or Tweeters under one roof. So many are way ahead of me on this, but I’ve finally realized what a time saver the feed-reader is. Every morning when I sit down at the computer, checking the feed is my first stop, along with LinkedIn. My RSS feed of choice is Google Reader.
This morning I started by reading a collection of posts in discussion groups at LinkedIn. And then I moved over to Mike Magnuson’s blog: Mag’s Sentence. I’ve always liked Mike’s writing –like it a lot actually, and it was great to see so many of his posts in one spot. I was riveted to the screen for half an hour. No exaggeration. His descriptions of the Tour Of California and the luminaries that raced there this year, along with his personal accounts of training in Los Angeles, remind me of a cross between John Belushi and Hunter Thompson.
I was first introduced to Mike’s work a few years ago when I found his book Heft On Wheels in my local book shop, The Northshire Bookstore, here in southern Vermont. In this book Mike describes how rediscovering the bicycle turned his life around. He would probably say this is an understatement. Mike’s book was an inspiration for me and reading it accompanied a turning point in my own life. But that’s another story.
I’m not going to tell you about Mike or his work work, except that he’s taught creative writing at the graduate level, and that you should read his blog. If you have a creative bone anywhere in your body, you’ll learn something valuable. I promise. Whatever you take away from his work is yours to find and have, but what I see in his work is a raw honesty that is non-the-less genuine, a quality which I believe everyone should try to emulate if not as a writer, then at least within the privacy of inner dialog.
Yes, I know, in business there are taboo subjects. If you’re building a presence on the web or on any other platform one of the last things you want to do is to risk offending potential clients by expressing points of view that that might be perceived as coarse or controversial and therefore offensive to some. Right?
If you’re genuine, and honest, and have the courage of your convictions, it’s almost a certainty that ruffling some feathers is unavoidable. But in the end, honesty will take you down your own path and not that of the herd. Walking your own path you’ll find the right people who want to do business with you, who want to associate with you. And you’ll also have a lot more respect for yourself.
