Links April 2015

by Maria Popova "Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it." The most reliable portal into another's psyche is the mental library of that person's favorite books - those foundational idea-bricks of which we build the home for our interior lives, the integral support beams of our personhood and values.

by Maria Popova How to plant the seed for the lifelong pleasure of finding things out. Theoretical physicist and legendary science communicator Richard Feynman (May 11, 1918-February 15, 1988) remains known as "The Great Explainer" - a moniker at least as deserved as his Nobel Prize, merited by his enchanting explanations of such seemingly ordinary things as the magic of a flower, how rubber bands work, and why everything is connected to everything else.

Some sites get all the traffic. How do they do it? Are they publishing more? Are they just famous on social media? Is it email marketing? How? There's mostly one difference between high-traffic and low-traffic websites. Here it is: sites with big traffic have pages with information that people are looking for.

by Maria Popova "Friends hold a mirror up to each other; through that mirror they can see each other in ways that would not otherwise be accessible to them, and it is this mirroring that helps them improve themselves as persons."

by Maria Popova Why instilling admiration for hard work rather than raw talent is the key to fostering a well-adjusted mind. Despite ample evidence and countless testaments to the opposite, there persists a toxic cultural mythology that creative and intellectual excellence comes from a passive gift bestowed upon the fortunate few by the gods of genius, rather than being the product of the active application and consistent cultivation of skill.

The Creative Habits podcast is an interview show providing perspective from different people and their creative habits. These could be painters, writers, marketers, or just about anyone who creates on a regular basis. We delve into what their creative habits are that keep them creating, inspired, and alive with their craft.

SEO is slow. It can take years to build up the authority of a domain and the rankings of pages. Search engine optimization is the slowest form of marketing I know. It really is. But there's one big shortcut. This post is a step-by-step guide to improving your Google rankings quickly.

On Friday the 13th of March, 2015, I walked into St James's Hospital for a test. My stomach was acting weird and the doctor I had been referred to booked me in for a colonoscopy. It's a routine procedure but my girlfriend Sarah insisted on coming with me and picking me up.

Last year, I read four books. The reasons for that low number are, I guess, the same as your reasons for reading fewer books than you think you should have read last year: I've been finding it harder and harder to concentrate on words, sentences, paragraphs. Let alone chapters.