In talking to members at CFNYC, I’ve noticed that almost all New Year’s resolutions are about creating habits, about doing (or not doing) some single, simple thing, reliably and consistently over the course of the coming year.

I’ve read and received all kinds of advice about building habits, but the best of it seems to boil down to one simple idea: make the hurdle of that new habit as small as possible. Commit to running three miles a day and you won’t make it two weeks; commit to putting on your workout clothes and sneakers and then stepping outside your door each day and you can make that happen for months and years at a stretch. The idea being, of course, that while, on some days, you turn around and head right back inside, on many others, you actually go for a run. And that the mileage built over those many jaunts quickly totals far more than what you can rack up in two, abortive three-mile-a-day weeks.

So, for example, if you want to get back to blogging, to actually writing stuff regularly, you probably need to be willing to put up something on January first, even if you don’t really have much to say, even if the post turns out something like this.

Blogging is far, far easier when done on a daily basis.

1.

A few people have noted that I’m blogging again more frequently. They are correct.

Or, at least, I’m trying.

2.

A few other people have also noted, however, that I’m not talking much about Cyan’s movies on the blog (and haven’t since the start of production on our Yankees film, The Keeper of the Pinstripes, a year and a half back). They’re also correct.

Fortunately, Cyan is very busy. We’re currently in production with one film and in pre-production on another, and are pulling together a new venture fund for non-movie investing.

However, blogging about the fund puts me in dicey territory regarding SEC regulation of public solicitation.

Whereas saying anything at all about specific movies seems to somehow piss off somebody, somewhere, who’s somehow crucial to the film getting made or released. I’ve by now determined that whatever small promotional bump I can drive through this blog is more than offset by the headaches that produces.

So, in short, don’t expect to see much movie stuff – or even, really, Cyan stuff in general – around here any time soo.

[And, in answer to the specific questions I get about Keeper: it’s not dead, it’s just slower moving (by far) than we expected, having already been ‘lapped’ by other films we started later and have already theatrically released. Hang in there.]

3.

Finally, while I’m totally smitten with this new, clean, single-column design, it does make for a strange intermixing of real blog posts and salmagundi links.

I’ve also been trying to Tweet more frequently (see @joshuanewman), and have been posting links there in parallel.

Going forward, I’m going to try only posting links on the Twitter feed. If that ruins your life, please complain vigorously, as I’m still on the fence about this and might go back to posting links / videos / etc. here, too.

It’s been more than six years since I last redesigned this site – or last updated its back-end – so a change was long overdue.

Hence the new Self-Aggrandizement, which you’re reading now.

In back, the infrastructure shift from Movable Type to WordPress should allow me to more easily post photo galleries, blog on the road from the iPad, and otherwise generally get more and better content up here faster.

Up front, the big switch is to this single-column design, which I really like for its minimalist, all-about-the-text approach.

As for Salmagundi – the links that previously lived in my right sidebar – they’re still alive and well. I’ll just be intermixing them between the longer posts in this single column. (However, if you’d rather just see the links, you can check out the Salmagundi category archives, or the RSS feed from that page.)

Anyway, it’s up. Back to it.

My life has been mayhem of late, and I haven’t had the time to post regularly here (or to finish the Making Movies series of advice to young folks gunning for a spot in the film world, despite a couple of emails requesting more).

But, at the same time, I’ve certainly had spare minutes, and have similarly come across countless interesting articles and sites that I could have at least quickly posted to the slowly decaying ‘salmagundi’ section of my right sidebar.

So, as happens about once a year, I’ve been having a slight blogging crisis of confidence.

This time, however, unlike my normal self-questioning – why am I keeping this blog? – I instead focused on a new area – how am I keeping this blog?

Which is to say, as the underlying infrastructure of this site has gotten cruftier and cruftier by the year – I last redesigned self-aggrandizement.com in 2004 – is the blogging software itself creating a barrier to posting entry, and keeping me from updating as much as I otherwise might?

Tech industry friends have pointed me in a slew of directions: Tumblr was built to address just this very question. As was, at least on the link-sharing front, Twitter. WordPress is so customizable and nimble. And even Movable Type has come eons forward since the version upon which this site is predicated.

But at the same time, I can’t help but think of the proverbial “it’s the poor crafstman who blames his tools.” Or, similarly, but think of the many years – more than a decade – I spent looking for the perfect trumpet mouthpiece, before finally settling into the sad realization that – in the brass playing world, as in the rest of life – there is no secret beyond hard work, done consistently for years at a time, day in and day out.

So, perhaps, updating the code here, or the blogging platform is a fool’s errand. A way of avoiding the underlying issue – that writing posts, and curating links, takes real work. Yet, at the same time, I can’t help but think it’s not just the poor crafstman who blames his tool, but also the poor craftsman who can’t tell the difference between a good and a bad one.

So, fair readers, save me. How should I update the front- and back-end of this site?

I always figured I’d reached the pinnacle of something; I’d just previously been unsure of what.

[Via]

Sometimes, after long breaks in blogging, I think about why I maintain this site. Do I have something to say? Does the exercise of regular writing hold some benefit itself?

Perhaps, and perhaps. But, more importantly, this site keeps me atop the Google results for ‘joshua newman’, ‘josh newman’, and a slew of other similar searches. Yes, in point of fact, this entire site is an elaborate form of SEO.

So, to that end (and, possibly, some others), back to it. In the words of the inimitable Will Rogers, even if you’re on the right track, you get run over if you just sit there.

Remember when I used to write a blog?

Me too.

Sorry, things have been insane of late – though, fortunately, in a good way – as Cyan has been getting a number of initiatives up to speed.

That said, a year and a half ago, when I similarly fell off the blogging bandwagon, I posted a commitment to shitty first drafts that got me writing regularly again.

I’m reposting it below, in the hopes it will work similarly a second time through:

As Anne Lamott observed, the best cure for writer’s block is a shitty first draft. Convince yourself you don’t have to write something good – just that you have to write something – and it becomes far easier to get words flowing.

Which makes sense in the world of novels, where authors iterate months or years between first draft and final product. But not in blogs, where the first draft usually is the final product.

That puts the pressure back on a blogger with writer’s block. And as the length of time from one post to the next mounts, the pressure worsens. Drop posting frequency from near-daily to at-best-monthly (as I have of late), and each entry need be Pulitzer-worthy to justify itself.

Yet experience dictates that I blog best as habit – post regularly, day in and day out, and, intermittently, excellence emerges.

So, for the balance of this year, it’s consistency over quality. In other words, I’ll be doing my best to accept shitty first drafts. And I hope you will, too.

When you’re starting a company, the hardest part is often deciding what the company won’t do. The possibilities are initially endless, yet a small company (and, really, a large company, too) can only do so many things well.

It’s a bit like going to a restaurant – you can eat anything on the menu, but you can’t eat everything on the menu, at least without getting sick.

Blogging follows suit. Good blogs tend to focus in on one topic, or just a handful. Yet this one, over the past eight years, has wandered haphazardly from one topic to the next.

So, finally, and long, long overdue, I’ve been giving some thought to what this blog should be about. Based on the emails that roll in, it seems there are four areas about which people are particularly happy to read:
– Personal adventures and misadventures
– Productivity and entrepreneurship
– Food, dining and nutrition
– Technology for non-technologists

Those four, I think, cover about 90% of the best read entries in self-aggrandizement’s past.

So, as an experiment, rather than simply randomly blogging up whatever strikes my fancy, I’ll be trying to cycle through those four topics. That way, whichever one you’re coming to find, you’ll regularly get a dose of new, relevant content.

And, hopefully, with a snarkily egotistic perspective as the thematic link across all four, you’ll want to give each and every post a careful read, no matter which of the categories you like most.

After all, self-aggrandizement is already ‘doubtless one of the best sites on the internet’. If I do say so myself.