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After the travails of the last three weeks1, it’s time to get back to the business of blogging and creating top-quality content for all my readers again.

To that end, a very useful little initiative popped up in my Google Reader RSS feed this morning – The Domino Project‘s #Trust30 initiative, based around their new release Self Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

#Trust30 is a month-long commitment to create something new every day for 30 days, whether it’s blogging, writing, painting, filmmaking or anything in between. The aim is simple to create.

I’m committed, are you? If you’ll be taking part, leave us a link to your site in the comments so we can all help to hold each other accountable.

 

1. detailed in 3 posts on my Journal Blog here, here and http://www.olilewington.co.uk/smilethroughit/2011/05/31/the-sage-concluded/ [↩]

I wrote a few weeks ago about getting ‘a job‘ to help get me out of the house and a little less stir-crazy (one of the pitfalls of working from a home office).  I expected it to be hard work, but that was kind of the point; it would hep my mental state, my writing and my honeymoon fund.

What I didn’t realise was that it would be such hard physical work and that as a consequence, I’d become stronger and fitter so much more quickly than I’d been planning on with my regime at the gym.

The unexpected benefits of the things we do in life can be some of the best. The same thing goes for business, writing and filmmaking, too. Sometimes we do things because we enjoy them, sometimes we do things because we think they’ll be good for us or for others and sometimes we do things because we feel we have to.

Whatever your motivation for doing something – positive, negative or self-serving – it’s always good to be on the look-out for those things we’d never have had access to or experienced had we not taken that certain task on.

Just before Christmas, Seth Godin, über-leader of tribes and the man behind the seminal ideavirus revolution, created the website for a new publishing project aiming to launch in early 2011, in association with Amazon.

If you haven’t already, go subscribe to their newsletter and have a look around the site. The Domino Project is, in their own words1, “reinventing what it means to be a publisher”.

These are exciting times for global publishing; when someone with Seth’s ability, influence and forward-thinking partners up with such a global powerhouse as Amazon something exciting is likely to happen, whatever it may eventually be.

If you want to be a part of it, they’re also looking for a Domino Street Team across the world to help them roll out their plans throughout the next 6 months or so. You can read more about the role and the people they’re looking for here or head straight over to the application form and dive right in2; I already have.

The Domino Project is named after the domino effect—one powerful idea spreads down the line, pushing from person to person. The Project represents a fundamental shift in the way books (and digital media based on books) have always been published. Eventually consisting of a small cadre of stellar authors, this is a publishing house organized around a new distribution channel, one that wasn’t even a fantasy when most publishers began.

The Domino Project, thedominoproject.com

1. and I emphasise the “their” in that sentence – it’s truly a collaborative effort [↩]
2. you’ve got until this Friday, 28th Jan 2011 [↩]