This building, dating from the 19th century, was an old barn that needed to be repaired and re-built in order to give new life and brightness to the space. It is located in Landecy, Switzerland, and was left in the charge of architect Charles Picte. With the goal of making the interior a charming space, and at the same time, keeping the charm and character of the building alive, Charles..
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10 Reasons to Be Your Own Boss
Set work hours or a flexible schedule? Assigned projects or clients of your choice Representing an existing brand or creating your own voice?
These are just some of the many dilemmas faced by those who are tempted to take the leap into the entrepreneurial world and start chasing their dreams.
So how does being your own boss measure up to being someone else’s valued employee?
You choose your circle
Unlike your typical office where you will inevitably come across at least one annoying person you’d rather not work with, starting a business gives you the freedom to choose your associates.
From closest team members, clients, and all the way to your long-term business partners, you can surround yourself with like-minded individuals and those with whom you’ll enjoy collaborating.
Passion as your main drive
No matter what you do and where you work, you will strive towards finding a position that resonates with your inner values and purpose. However, few jobs (if any) can inspire the same level of personal involvement as your own invention.
Building your career around a concept that is close to your heart and based on passion can help your business soar in the entrepreneurial world. You will always have a reason to work for every new opportunity, push through the setbacks and rise back to the top, as nothing can fuel your drive for success as genuine passion.
See Also: 4 Key Ideas To Help Your Passion-fuelled Business Take Off Fast!
Make a difference
Although it might take a while before you can allow your business to contribute to a charity or a cause you believe in, one of the most rewarding aspects of building your own business is the ability to give back.
Once you have a stable structure and income in place, you can finally choose how to show support and appreciation to those who need it most.
An authentic voice
Whatever your chosen field is and regardless of how much competition you have, the market always has room for an innovator. If you truly have a genuine idea or you can give an old one a creative twist, you’ll easily find your target audience eagerly waiting for your launch.
In fact, kick-starting your own brain-child can lead to many more novelties in the course of your business development. A single idea can infuse your future endeavors with perseverance and lead to many more professional achievements.
Autonomy
If there’s a single predominant factor that seems to tip the scales for many solo entrepreneurs, it’s the financial self-reliance. Depending on a company or an employer to secure your future and constantly fretting over losing your job are not huge motivators in such a chaotic economy.
When your business is the foundation of your financial security, you have greater control over your income, pension plans, health insurance, and so much more. This also means more responsibilities, but with long-term benefits that go beyond financial gain.
Greater satisfaction
Once you have a taste of all the ups and downs of your business journey, nothing will measure up to the level of satisfaction you will feel for your accomplishments. Building a career on your terms while being your own leader creates a spirit that will help you outlast any challenges you come across.
On the other hand, inevitable failures will not be greeted with harsh criticism, judgment or losing your job, as you can always use them to change your tactics and improve your operation.
Self-development
Greater responsibilities of being your own boss come with numerous opportunities to broaden your business horizons. Networking events alone can account for a significant portion of your future alliances, while every conference or course you attend for the sake of improving your business is yet another way of growing your knowledge base.
As the market swiftly changes, you will need to adjust to the needs of your customers, which will often require going above and beyond your current abilities and stepping into the realm of the unknown before you can call yourself an expert in your field.
Flexible time
Never again will you have to hurry to the office to be there at eight or nine. Or punch the clock twice a day for as long as both you and your company shall live.
True, working under your own wing will often mean staying late and spending sleepless nights nose-deep in paperwork and contracts before you master the art of running a business. But the rewards of such efforts will always be greater than those of years of your life invested in someone else’s idea.
Even the sky is no longer the limit
Are you perhaps a fidgety person who cannot handle sitting for eight hours straight and sticking to a single type of work? While you have the freedom to dictate your daily work tempo, you can also choose where and how you conduct your business.
Brainstorm a proposal in a library, schedule a Skype call from a coffee place, make notes while on the plane to your family reunion, or lie comfortably in a bubble bath while negotiating your next meeting time via email.
Legacy
That lady with her cupcake business probably doesn’t seem as if she changed the direction of the world. Still, her contribution to the community must have helped that kid who needed a cupcake to feel better for losing a pet, or a mom of three whose day just got better after indulging her sweet tooth.
As small as your impact may seem from your standpoint, don’t underestimate the power to influence and improve other people’s lives one step at a time – even if it means making them a cup of coffee or offering them a previously-owned Agatha Christie novel.
You could, in fact, change the course of dozens of lives without ever knowing it, but as long as you stay true to your purpose, there will always be those who value and discover inspiration in your unique contribution.
See Also: 7 Power Habits of Great Leaders, Business Icons and Inspirational Achievers
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June 20th
5 Reasons Why You Must Actualize Your Dream
You’re reading 5 Reasons Why You Must Actualize Your Dream, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
‘’Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.’’ –Ralph Waldo Emerson
You probably never gave it a thought before, you assumed it wasn’t worth all the effort, but the truth is that you need to actualize your dream.
Your dream is whom you are; outside your dream, you are leaving another person’s life and you can never make it.
You are living a makeshift life. You can only end up being a member of the pack at best. The alpha status is not for you. You will always be led and directed to places you never wanted to go and you will never have any option.
‘’Why?’’ You may want to ask, the reason is very obvious — You refused to actualize your dream.
All hope is not lost as these 5 tips, will get you raring and ready to go.
- You will have rest of mind
The fact is your mind can never relax if, you have not actualized your dream. You will find yourself drifting, you can’t be stable because you are into the wrong thing. You are in another person’s world.
You will always be fidgety, confused and lack composure. People will use you and then dump. You can’t aspire to get to the top, you are in a strange land.
Since all these will happen to you and more, why won’t you get into your own world, by actualizing your dream? Just then, you can call the shots and be responsible for your own fate.
When you actualize your dream, things will flow, you will live your own life and stop being an attachment, an appendage.
- Silence your detractors
There are a lot of people out there who are only waiting to see your downfall, who don’t wish you well, who only want to mock you. They constantly want to see you trip and stumble.
They will put obstacles in your way, they reason that, if you move up, you won’t hero-worship them again, after all, you had been at their beck and call all along.
You can put a stop to all their trash, once you decide to silence them by actualizing your dreams.
A dream actualized, is a sucker punch, a deafening grand slam to your detractor.
‘’Hold faithfully to your unique vision and your detractors will eventually tire and give up.’’ -Bryant McGill
- Set a pace
Have you ever visualized yourself as a pacesetter before?
Don’t you know there is much joy in being an inventor?
When you set a pace, the recipe belongs to you. All others can only copy from you.
Your dream may be an innovation, nobody has ever tried it before, or even advancing ideas of others just as theme platforms like Colorlib were created to provide themes that will make WordPress more user-friendly.
Probably, you have always wanted to fashion out something, but you don’t know why; it is because you need to, and must allow that hidden ingenuity of yours, to burst out and cascade.
- You will be contented
Who on earth, wants to live a life full of worries? Such a life is only fit for those, who have refused, to actualize their dreams; those who have decided to live under other people’s shadows.
It is a rather useless thing to seek contentment elsewhere, you can only get it by actualizing your dream.
When you are contented, you are rich.
The whole world can only belong to you when you realize there is nothing missing, and that can only be when your dream is actualized.
- You will become a conqueror
You have been afraid to venture. You didn’t want to explore the unknown! But that is where your crown is, waiting all this while for you to come and fetch it.
Always have this in mind, work is lazy, it’s a chawner, a slackjack.
When you actualize your dream, you will be able to say with Gaius Julius Caesar ‘’I came, I saw, I conquered.’’
Apart from having a rest of mind, bashing your detractors, other benefits that have been mentioned above, you will have all the other sought-after things in life; the summer sun-tanned body, private yacht, adventurous holidays, surfing and other goodies will come in a jiffy.
All you have to do now is, devise the best approaches and strategies, and apply them to actualize your dreams.
And you’ll no longer be an appendage but the master.
You’ve read 5 Reasons Why You Must Actualize Your Dream, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
The countries that have the most powerful passports in the world
The Banality of Putin
It’s easy to see why Oliver Stone puts up with being lied to in The Putin Interviews, Stone’s new four-part documentary. He needs Putin’s indulgence to make the series. The harder question is why Putin made so much time for Stone, given that Putin has a country to run. Stone does not have much to offer, and Putin cannot help but run rings around him for three of the four interviews.
A Step-By-Step Guide To Writing Good Web Content That Can Sell For $100
Not so long ago, UX Myths posted an article which demonstrates that people are not too fond of web content reading. In fact, they only read around 20% of all the articles and there’s no guarantee that they actually read everything.
So, it seems kind of unfair that you have to spend hours picking the right keywords, writing and polishing texts only to have readers simply scan through your article.
This, however, should not bother you. As long as you create worthy content and find your audience, you will have no trouble having people that will read your articles. Moreover, you will be able to easily sell this content and make money from it.
Sounds fantastic, don’t you think?
We can almost see you asking us how can you sell your writing for at least $100. And it’s a good thing because we do have an answer.
So, meet this complete guide to good web content writing.
Content is the king
The question of whether your content is read or only scanned through relies heavily on how good the content is. Of course, the style, lists, and visual aids are vital. But, unless your content is interesting and engaging, you will not draw your readers’ attention.
What makes for good content?
According to Kissmetrics, high-quality content is:
- original
- actionable
- accurate
- engaging
- though-provoking
- diverse
- easy to read
It might sound a bit overwhelming and you might be forced to spend long hours polishing and changing your text. Well, you don’t have to do that. All you need to do is spend some time learning how to create content that will grab readers’ attention.
Identify the audience
Each one of your articles needs to target the correct audience. It’s the secret of successful writing.
Once you start writing some general articles that talk about everything and at the same time about nothing in particular, you won’t be able to sell it.
People will only want to buy content that is likely to bring them traffic and, as a result, revenue. And for that, it has to speak to a specific audience on specific topics.
So, before you grab a pen or hit the keys, make sure to create a clear picture of who your audience is. Think of why they would be listening to you, what they expect to hear, what pain they have and what solutions you can offer.
Go over each one of these statements if you want to reach them with your message – and voila! – your content will easily be in demand!
Follow the latest trends
You wouldn’t want to be left behind. So, try your best to understand the latest trends these days. Know what people expect to see and what channels you can use to reach out to new people.
For instance, you need to remember that 34% of all online users only read their emails through mobile devices, states the Impact. The same applies to the blog posts on social networks.
Therefore, if you want more people to read your content, you need to optimize it for mobile devices. This means that paragraphs and sentences need to be shorter, the font should be bigger and the formatting eye-catching.
Moreover, keep in mind that more people read content via social media. Posts on Facebook should not be long, must have catchy headlines and contain many visual aids.
All in all, follow the latest trends for better results!
See Also: How To Avoid A Content Crisis When Your Deadline Is Looming
Use the right copywriting techniques
Another important thing when it comes to content writing is to use proper copywriting techniques that can bring your writing to a whole new level.
Among common methods every copywriter must know include:
- using keywords
- having one main idea per section
- adding lists and bullet points
- using sub-headings
- writing short paragraphs, sentences, and words
- inserting links to reliable sources
You will be surprised to see what results such an approach can bring! If you follow these recommendations, that 79% of users that do not read the whole article will be more likely to finish your whole piece. So, why not try it?
Find a good site to sell your articles
Thanks to the latest trends, more and more people are willing to work from home. Thus, new sites for freelancers emerge. All you need to do is to find the one that fits your expectations.
We have gathered a list of good sites where you can start your career as a freelancer.
Remember that it is good to have a good and persuasive portfolio at first so that when asked about your experience, you would be able to present good examples of your writing.
To create a portfolio, you might offer your articles to bloggers who can post them in the “Guest posts” section of their sites. You can also start your own blog on any topic you are good at or start writing good informative posts on your page on Facebook.
Good websites to check out
- CollegeHumor – It’s not hard to guess what this site is looking for from their writers. Should you have relevant content, don’t hesitate to offer it to them.
- Love To Know – It is a perfect resource for writers focusing on the financial topics, fashion, beauty, technology, and many other subjects.
- Freelance Writing Gigs – This site offers you a list of openings for writers you can check out as well as helpful tips for the beginners.
- iWriter.com – This site has fixed rates for the articles. The problem with this is that once your writing is rejected, you get no money.
- Upwork – This is a place where both freelancers and clients meet. You can find the job you will enjoy here in no time.
- Tuts+ – If you are an experienced writer, you can write for this website as well.
The list can go on and on. You absolutely have all the chances to enter the niche and make your first $100 in the nearest time. Just learn how to write well or polish your skills – and get paid for the amazing content you are crafting.
See Also: 21 Must-Read Tips To Write Better Web Content
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Dance of Life: Amelia Gray and “Isadora”
For the pioneering dancer Isadora Duncan (1878–1927), ideas about how the world should be were not abstract but woven into the bodily art for which she is still remembered. The boldness that defined her dancing, her personal life, her politics, and her sexuality all seem decidedly ahead of her time. In an article in The New Yorker from January 1927, Janet Flanner wrote, “A decade ago her art, animated by her extraordinary public personality, came as close to founding an esthetic renaissance as American morality would allow,” and Flanner later dubbed her “the last of the trilogy of great female personalities our century produced.”
Amelia Gray’s new novel, Isadora, is set over approximately two years of Duncan’s life. In a prologue, Gray writes, “April 1913: Isadora Duncan is at the height of her power.” That’s soon to change, though; an accident in Paris will claim the lives of her two children later that same month, causing her to sink into a severe depression and deepening fissures in her personal life. Duncan retreated into seclusion in Greece for a few years, attempting to recover from the aftermath of these events. Isadora, then, is the story of a figure grappling with an unimaginable loss, and how that affects the people closest to her.
As befitting a novel whose central character upended the aesthetics of her field, this novel also marks a seismic shift in tone for Gray, whose work up until now — three acclaimed collections of short stories, plus the award-nominated novel Threats — has eluded easy categorization and pushed firmly into the experimental realm. In the case of Isadora, readers will likely encounter a disorienting sensibility at work — but it’s less to do with perceptions of realities breaking down or the impossible being translated onto the page; instead, it’s a sense of personal collapse even as aspects of the world are being remade.
Gray is far from the first writer to translate Duncan’s life into prose. Over the last century, she has shown up in literary works by a host of notable figure, a phenomenon that began while she was still alive. John Dos Passos worked aspects of her life into his USA trilogy, while Aleister Crowley’s 1923 novel Moonchild, about two camps of warring musicians, included a fictionalized version of Duncan among its cast of characters. And Duncan herself contributed to the mythmaking via her posthumously published memoir, My Life. The version that was published then was edited due to concerns over some of the material contained therein; an unedited version was released by Liveright in 2012.
Writing in the London Review of Books in 2013, Laura Jacobs called My Life “a splendid book, an inspiring book, doors and windows and eyes and arms wide open to the world.” Though My Life may have some of its own issues with full veracity. In her review of the 2013 edition in the New York Review of Books, Joan Acocella wrote that Duncan’s working process for her memoir was somewhat contentious:
For six months she worked on the book, dictating, as a rule, and usually after a number of drinks. It is reported that her first typist could be heard saying, “Miss Duncan, you don’t mean to say this . . . you simply cannot.”
Feel free to insert your favorite commentary from the long and recent debate over the porous boundary between fiction and nonfiction here. Alternately: it may well be that dance was not the only artistic discipline in which Duncan was ahead of her time.
“I drew some dialogue from her autobiography,” Gray says about the writing of Isadora. She also acknowledges that My Life is considered to have taken some liberties with the truth, which appealed to her in terms of fictionalizing Duncan’s life. “It was a nod to the reality that she wanted to create, which was this fabulous dialogue and baroque exchanges between people, that no doubt did not actually happen,” Gray says. “It ended up being a collage or pastiche of reality. But it was important to me to have it be a jumping-off point rather than the whole stage.” In the acknowledgements for the novel, she also cites two works of nonfiction: Peter Kurth’s biography Isadora: A Sensational Life and Charles Emmerson’s 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War.
Gray first encountered Duncan’s life when working on an article about “It Girls” in history. “I read about how she insisted on living her own particular life, despite what was going on around her, and I was really fascinated by that,” she says. Her research process included everything from familiarizing herself with the political, social, and cultural climates of the early twentieth century to taking a couple of dance classes. (“[I] learned that it’s incredibly difficult.”) But for all that choosing to write about circa-1913 Isadora Duncan makes for an abundance of powerful emotional moments in the novel, it also allows for numerous moments of historical foreshadowing, as the First World War and the subsequent rise of fascism in Europe both loom in the background of numerous scenes.
As Gray tells it, the sense of encroaching political dread was something that echoed her process of writing the book. “I started writing the book right after Obama’s second term began,” she says. “I had the luxury of not thinking daily about politics. And I was very surprised to see that mirrored in history.” To Duncan and her peers, the imminent war would come as a terrible surprise; 1913 hardly felt like the eve of a conflagration. “The stuff you read about in history class was all happening, but people were optimistic and living their lives and enjoying new technology.” Their conversation was about “art galleries and shows and performances opening. It started to look pretty similar to today in a way that seems pretty obvious in hindsight.”
Part of the challenge for any novelist who puts an artist at the center of their work is the question of description. “Ballet,” Gray points out, “has a ton of beautiful terms, and you can visualize them.” In writing about Duncan. whose approach to dance turned away from ballet’s rigid forms, Gray also needed to find the right language to evoke Duncan’s theories and practices. She opted to describe it in terms of “natural movement than anyone can visualize: your toe making a half circle across the floor. Anyone can see that, and most can do that,” she says. “And even if one can’t, it’s a thing that’s felt rather than being academically understood.”
For Gray, there was also an affinity with Duncan’s particular philosophy of dance. “[S]he worked so hard to create what felt like natural movement, what seemed to the audience to be spontaneous natural movement, but had a lifetime of rehearsals and practice and effort behind it,” Gray says. “Which is the same thing as writing fiction. The goal is, it comes off invisibly, and the work takes years and years.”
While Isadora may seems like an aesthetic break from Gray’s past work, she doesn’t necessarily see it that way. “I like inhabiting voices, getting really close to how somebody might think,” she says. “That was an iteration of that, which I already do. It just happened to be in a totally different sense.” Fundamentally, she describes Isadora as “the story of grief, as apprehended through an incredibly self-centered character.”
Where will her next work take her? “I find that the artistic life moves in a duet with the real. I have been trying to come closer to my self, to operate in a more thoughtful sense in my life, and in a more meditative sense with my surroundings,” she says.
“I don’t know what kind of work will come out of that. I’m finding as I move through my thirties, there’s a patience with the work that I haven’t felt before, and a patience with not-knowing that is new to me. I’m just as curious as anyone, I guess.”
The Barnes & Noble Review http://ift.tt/2sPiE4d
Millimeter Interior Design Remodel a Private Residence in Silverstrand, Hong Kong
This beautiful house, located in Silverstrand, Hong Kong, is embedded into the mountains and has wonderful sea views. It has 300 square meters of construction, and was recently remodeled by the architectural firm Millimeter Interior Design. It had been inhabited by its present owners for 15 years, but they decided that it was time to give it a new face and make it more functional and adaptable to their current..
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Sometimes you just need to get away. Here’s a brilliant sunrise…
Sometimes you just need to get away. Here’s a brilliant sunrise from Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. Photo courtesy of Chris Militzer.
Sig Nordal 