What if you’d already not only finished college, but had graduated from medical school and even completed an internship at the Mayo Clinic, then finally admitted to yourself that your passion was not the medicine and surgery you’d spent all that time and effort and money training for, but art instead? I think many of us would think we had no choice but to stick with our original path, even though it might not the best path for us after all. Turns out there’s one guy who had the courage to not only admit to himself that he had found his true niche in life, but to totally leave medicine to pursue being a full-time artist. That guy is Donald B. Stewart, M.D., and his studio, DS Art, is MiscBytes niche of the month!

It wasn’t that Dr. Stewart hadn’t really wanted to be a doctor. He had wanted to be a physician since he was 5 years old, and he never stopped loving science and making people happy, but by the time he completed his internship he had already seen that he met very few surgeons who were having any fun. He saw how the excellent doctors he trained with had already had the fun and spontaneity beaten out of them by the time they finished their residencies, and he soon realized that life was not for him!

Here are a few samples of those drawings from the online gallery. Grab a magnifying glass if you have one, because every time you look at these, you’ll see still more cool things. The drawings are full of intelligent humor, including lots of visual puns. Each intricately drawn picture is actually a composite of smaller, related, complex drawings, all created with a ballpoint pen! There are drawings that include medical terminology, as well as pieces devoted to various sports, food and wine, and other topics. If you’re looking for a great gift that your friend or coworker has never seen before, one of these drawings might be what you need!

French Horn | French Bread, French Toast, French Vanilla, French Perfume, French Wine, French Phone, French Cheese, French Chop, French Kiss, French Heel, French Door, French Dressing, French Pastry, French Mustard, French Maid, French Poodle, French Quarter, French Fries, Tour de France, Franks

Brain (Left) | N. Gin. Earring – with Calculators, Calipers, Protractor, Micrometer, Mortar, Pestle, Pocket Protector, T-Square, Triangle, Design Specs, Taped Specs, Slide Rule, Sweep Second Hand, Mother “Bored”, and a Mental Block.

Golf Bag | King of Clubs. Driver, Iron, Shootin’ Iron (for long shots), Wood (duck), Chipping, Pitching, Pin High, Highball, Handicap, Hook, Slice, Cup, Cart, Cap, Trap, Trophy, Dog Leg, Birdie, Bogey, Eagle, Double Eagle, Captain’s Choice, Round Robin, Visor, Wedge, Water Hazard, Glove, Green, Links, Match, Marker, Marshall, Shotgun Start, Shag Balls, Shoe, Shades, Score Card, Spike Wrench, Club Sandwich, Divot Lifter, Commemorative Stamps, Umbrella, Towel, Address (D. Ball), Wedding Ring (from Golf Widow), 18 Tees, i On The Ball, and a Whole Set of Clubs, - all carried by the Caddie.

One last thing – in case you’re not sure which drawing you like best, Dr. Stewart now has a hard back coffee table book available, containing 56 of his best and funniest drawings from his first 20 years in the studio. The drawings have the component lists as well as humorous commentary, so you can enjoy a nice variety of things that are fun for your brain, or like I said, order in time for a holiday gift!

Top photo: Saxophone | Musical Scales – Harmony in the Key of Sea.
The original drawing is now displayed in the Dan C. Holliman Biological Specimen Room at Birmingham-Southern College.

This is a guest post by Stefan Nilsson, the blogger at Ducedo, where he blogs about The Art of Making Money Online.

I have been making money online for a few years now with different methods, including blogging, but it was not until this summer I decided to begin writing in English and it has been great to being able to develop my English writing. My blog Ducedo is now three months old and I thought it would be a great idea to take the next step by writing a guest post. I contacted Christie who kindly approved the idea and here I am. Many thanks, Christie.

I will take this opportunity to talk about my background and draw parallels to what I love to do today. This post ended up a bit longer then I had expected, but bare with me, when you are done reading it you will have the material to find your inner passion.

Our passion comes from our childhood

In high school I began studying psychology and learned more about the famous psychologist Sigmund Freud. If I remember correctly Freud insisted that almost any feeling could be traced back to our childhood. Even though I would love to be able to blame a few things on my parents instead of myself I understand that their influence shaped me into who I am today.

Think about your best friend who loves football. In my case one of my friends started to cheer for Liverpool FC since his brother cheered for them. And to go further his brother cheered for them because their father did it. To mention another less positive feeling my father hates dogs. Well, hate is not the right word to use but he is a bit afraid of them since he got bit as a kid. In return I ended up being afraid for dogs even though I have not had one single bad encounter with one. Today I have managed to conquer this feeling and actually love dogs and I will most certainly get one when it is time for me to settle down, but I still give a jump when a dog barks unexpectedly.

The point I’m trying to make is that feelings you get in your childhood stays with you for a long time. This also includes passions and thanks to this our childhood is a great resource when we decide to choose a niche or decided for what we want to work with.

How I found my passion

I have tried a lot of things in my life which has resulted in me jumping from one activity to another. Now I can see how much time my parents spent on me, driving me to swimming practice, football practice, football matches, golf, scouting and a lot more. Today I have given up on most of them but I still play football and golf a few times every week.

When I began creating websites a few years ago I did the same thing all over again. I started out with football, cameras, piracy, TV and several other niches. After just a few weeks in a niche I got bored and found a new one. Today I still own websites in several different niches but I have hired people to manage the websites for me.

One evening when I got bored, again, I sat down and started to think about my childhood to find out what I really love to do. Thanks to a method I will explain better in the next section I found out that my true passion is not cameras or TV, but to find different methods to make money.

The first memory I have about making money is from long before I even started kindergarten. I knew we always had a package of gum in one of our kitchen cupboards, so I convinced my neighbour (she was the same age as me) to go with me and we ended up walking street up and street down to sell gums to people. It took a few minutes before we met our first potential customer and she ended up convincing us to follow her home to get paid. She went in while we stood outside waiting for her to come out again and a few minutes later our parents showed up. Apparently she understood something was wrong and called them directly. But yes, we did get the money as well…

This memory combined with several similar stories convinced me to create a Swedish blog about making money online and as I told you above, this summer I expanded by starting to write in English. Now I can say without hesitation, this is my true passion.

How to find your passion

This post ended up a bit longer then I would have expected but now it is time to share my method which you can use to find your inner passion.

1. Start with a piece of paper – I know how tempting it is to just skip through and do this exercise without writing anything down, but I promise you it will become much more useful.

2. Draw a line – Put the paper straight in front of you and draw a line from one and to another. Write a 0 in the beginning and your current age at the end. Then you mark every third or fifth year from the beginning to the end of this line.

3. Think of happy memories – Now begin at the span from 0 to 3 and think of every happy memory you have back then. Continue and work your way forward to present time. I know it might be difficult in the beginning when you have few memories, but they might be as important as the memories you have from your last week.

4. Draw parallels – Now you should have a bunch of happy memories, depending on how old you are. If you only have a few, redo the last task since I am sure you will find more. When this is done you should try to find something that combines two memories. If you loved to play football and loved to take photos, could it be a football photographer? Try to combine as many memories as possible and find out what the perfect niche would be.

If you have followed the above tasks you should now have one or several ideas to what your true passion could be. Unfortunately I can’t give you a simple answer to which one of them you should go for, but I can recommend you to try them all before deciding for a niche.

Discussion

Now I would love to hear your personal story. Have you found your true passion? If yes, how did you find it and what have you done since then to take advantage of it?

Photo credit: jim68000

The following is a review I wrote last fall on a previous blog, but since I referred to this book again only last weekend I was reminded of how jam packed with great information it is. Steve Pavlina has been studying personal development for a long time, and if that doesn’t interest you (I wasn’t sure it interested me), he makes a full time living from his website. Naturally I’m all ears to any advice he may give on that score!

I was honored to receive an advance copy of Steve Pavlina’s book Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth for review. It took me a couple of weeks to read it, because I was just reading a little bit each evening, filling the pages with little PostIt flags, because every page is crammed with great information and I wanted to process and remember it all! This book is not fluff or platitudes. Steve is an extremely intelligent man who started programming computers at age 10 and is a very analytical thinker, and he examines personal development as a field that must obey universal laws just like physics does! After two and a half years of research, he found three core principles, truth, love, and power, and four secondary principles which are combinations of the first three (think of three primary colors then the colors which are made by mixing two or more of them). The secondary principles are oneness (truth + love), authority (truth + power), courage (love + power), and intelligence (truth + love + power). The book devotes one chapter to each of these principles, explaining it fully with many examples, then there are six excellent chapters on how you can apply the principles to your life: “Habits,” “Career,” “Money,” “Health,” “Relationships,” and “Sprirituality.”

I obviously can’t condense or summarize this book, and will not attempt to do that. You really must read this book at least once. I will tell you about a few of the things I marked with my PostIts:

In one part of the Truth chapter, Steve urges us to admit to ourselves things we have been trying to bury and deny. Did we take a wrong career path, or did we marry the wrong person? Since we may feel there is no choice left for us, we may not want to admit those things to ourselves. Steve assures us it is better to admit those things to ourselves, even if we don’t intend to do anything about them. “Whenever you’re faced with a part of reality you don’t like, and you feel powerless to change it, the first step is to accept the truth of your situation. Say to yourself: ‘This situation is wrong for me, yet I lack the strength to change it right now.’” He examines the reasons we might continue to live in situations we know are wrong for us, and he offers suggestions we can try in order to figure out what the right choices are for us. Somewhere in there we know the answers all along, but we manage to obscure them with denial and distractions.

In part of the Love chapter, Steve states, “Every day you’re compelled to make connection decisions…..If you want to grow consciously, you must decide which connections you’ll strengthen and which you’ll allow to weaken. Such choices ultimately determine the shape of your life.” He talks about connections in this world and how to consciously connect and communicate more deeply.

In part of the Power chapter, Steve talks to us about our ability to consciously create the world around us. He states, “If you want different results, you must go out and create them yourself……You must actively make your life happen instead of passively letting it play out.” He talks about setting goals and when to know if a goal is not right for you. A goal should start improving your present reality, not just be a reward you hope will be at the end of a miserable time of suffering and sacrifice. He also gives many suggestions on how to make sure you start achieving something toward your goal once you know what it is. He shares with us how he launched StevePavlina.com in October 2004, with the goal of having it be the best personal development website on the internet. He knew he felt tremendously motivated whenever he thought of the goal, even though for the first four months the site didn’t have much traffic and the fifth month only earned him $53. Wouldn’t most of us “realized” that is was long past time to give up on that “empty dream?” Instead, he kept going, and over the next three years, the site grew to include hundreds of free articles, and traffic grew to two million visitors per month! The site began to earn tens of thousands of dollars per month. His goal was achieved when StevePavlina.com became acknowledged by many to be the most popular, practical, and down-to-earth personal development website.

In the Oneness chapter, Steve talks to us about many things, among them empathy, honesty, and contribution. He actually had had a very successful computer games business before launching StevePavlina.com and was helping game developers, but he saw he could make an even bigger contribution to the world by going full time on personal development.

In the Authority chapter, we learn that each of us is the one true authority in our own life. We make the decisions and we take the actions. He talks to us about effectiveness and persistence, pointing out that when you fail, the failure wasn’t a “waste.” Instead, you have learned some valuable things that will allow you to choose more wisely and do better as you go along. In this chapter he urges us to focus on what really matters to us and realize what things are a total waste of our time. He shows us how to “triage” projects and tasks so that we spend our time on the important things that need our time in order to succeed. We are also urged to run some experiments so that we can learn how to make ourselves more effective. Why sit and wonder how things would go if we got up earlier each day? Why not try it and see?

In the Courage chapter, Steve starts to give us the secrets to getting off that incorrect path we may know we’re on but feel helpless to remedy. He tells us ways to prepare ourselves to get on the correct path, whether that means educating ourselves a bit, progressively training ourselves to overcome fears, or just making commitments in advance to do things we’d like to be able to do but are afraid of.

The Intelligence chapter talks about being authentic and actively seeking growth, and Steve gives us a lot of concrete small questions we can ask ourselves as a self-assessment of where we are on the seven principles, plus seven sets (one set for each principle) of “Growth Blitzing” exercises we can do to increase our alignment with every principle.

The six final chapters are each crammed with great information about applying the principles to your own life. Since I have run on so long here, I will not try to tell you about the things I marked. I will say that to me the Career chapter alone would be worth the price of the book. For you, it may be the Relationships chapter. Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth can replace dozens of books you might have bought about one small area of personal development (like a book on marriage or how to eat in a healthy manner).

The last sentence, which really sums it up, after you’ve read it, is this: “Live consciously.”

This month’s niche of the month is 9 mm SFX , a custom contact lens company which specializes in theatrical and special effects contact lenses. Their contact lenses are responsible for a lot of the cool ocular special effects we see in many, many movies, commercials and music videos, and in fact 9 mm Special Effects is the worldwide leader in custom theatrical contact lenses. Enough of this boring talk! I know you want to see some pictures. Here are just a few of the lenses which I think we could use in our everyday lives.

Imagine it’s Friday and you want to leave the office early. Extra early. How about wearing the Ebola or Virus B or perhaps Jaundice lenses? I know if I’m your boss I’ll insist you go home immediately if you look like one of these!

You’re going to the prom and want to have something extra fancy for the evening. I’m sure your date would really be impressed if your eyes look like one of these!  Or maybe you have a blind date you really want to impress.  I’m sure if you show up wearing Jaws lenses he/she will never forget you! 

A contact lens prescription is required if you’d like to order lenses from 9mm SFX.  The prescription will give your base curve and diameter, so a contact lens prescription is needed for that purpose whether or not there is a vision correction prescription associated with the lenses.   A few of the lenses are totally opaque, but those are noted as “No Vision” on the web page.  These lenses currently range from about $150-450, and with proper care they can last for years.  Why not grab some before that next class reunion?

I saw FLATLAND: THE MOVIE a few weeks ago, and as a math lover I found it very geeky cool and wanted to share.  Apparently I am not supposed to buy the personal copy of the movie then display it for the rest of the world here, go figure.   So I’m going to embed the trailer from YouTube. 

In the full length movie, our main folks are in a two-dimensional world, Flatland, and as far as they know, that is the ultimate all-there-is world. They can’t conceive of three dimensions, but then comes the Sphere… We also see a guy whose world is only a single point, and he thinks his world is all there is.   How would he know otherwise? Then there are the ones who live in a one-dimensional world, a line, and they get “freaked out” when they hear someone speaking from outside the line.  Of course as a math/science girl, I couldn’t care less about any political or social crap to do with this movie. I simply loved enjoying the fun with the shapes and thinking about dimensions and how amazing and cool it would be to start to perceive a dimension that is not present in one’s current world. My favorite line in the movie, which soon became my tag line for instant messenger for the following month: “Configuration makes the man!” So true, don’t you think?

Once again, I’m sorry this trailer is all I have. I’d love to grab my favorite mind-altering beverage, Mountain Dew, and see the whole movie again on a nice big screen.

Flatland Trailer

Google has granted me access to the Google Wave Sandbox now, and I started exploring it late last night. I’ll be doing more posts on Google Wave as I learn about it.

I just wanted to share with you the little I’ve done so far so you could see the screen shots for yourself! By the way, don’t try getting into Google Wave with Internet Explorer; it will tell you immediately to head for Firefox, Safari, or Chrome!

Creating a Test Wave

I don’t have any real contacts on there to talk to yet, so when I was playing with it I added a contact just for testing and called him Klaus, since Klaus @ Techpatio is my #1 commentator right now. I created a new wave and typed a little message. Then I added Klaus and typed a little more, which he would have been able to see if he had an account. If he had wanted to see what happened before I added him, he could have clicked the Playback button. Here’s the wave after I have done all that:

Google Wave Playback feature

In the following screenshots, I’ll show you what happens when I click Playback now, and click the Play button each time after that.

Embedding Waves

Below I have embedded a public Welcome Wave  from the Sandbox into this post using the Wavr WordPress plugin.  Unfortunately you have to have a login at Google Wave Sandbox in order to see it.  So what are you waiting for!?

[wave id="wavesandbox.com!w+sQGsppxC%B"]

OK, to satisfy your curiosity if you don’t yet have a login, below is a picture of the Wave that is embedded here. It is a scrolling window though, so this is just a peek. If this were a Wave we were actually participating in, it would be our conversation. This particular Wave is a wiki of instructions for new Wave users.

I’ve already told you I really love to see and hear about peoples’ niches, whether an occupation or hobby, and sometimes a niche is so unusual it makes me want to tell others about it. I’m not one who likes to commit to stuff too far in advance but I’m going to go on and commit to starting a monthly post on niches. Each month I’ll bring you a niche that is unusual (to me). It will usually be a human niche, but sometimes it may be another creature of land, sea, or sky. Anyway, here is August’s MiscBytes unusual niche of the month!

Have you ever wondered what you would do if your next door neighbor and his wife actually did kill each other in one of those raging arguments and did it on your property? Or what if you run over your ex-wife on the way home from a party – maybe run her over more than once just for good measure? Well there is a niche to help get your house or car or street back into tip top shape after an incident like that. It’s the crime scene cleanup niche! There are some crime scene cleanup companies with websites that actually have lurid pictures, but I found a tasteful one to share with you. See – you’d just click on Contact Us, use the dropdown to select the type of incident you’d just caused/witnessed, and you’re ready to rock and roll!

The above is the contact form from BioSolutionsArizona.com. (Actually they have 24 hour phone number for you to use, but I had to show you the contact form).

I understand that anyone really in need of these services would not find this at all amusing, and the niche is certainly needed, but I do wonder why all the websites exist. I don’t know much about it, of course, but I would have thought this would be more of a discreet thing where law enforcement or even homeowners insurance would know and recommend a company but you wouldn’t be Googling for it at 3 in the morning. Anyway, that’s our unusual niche for August!

Note: One guy has already asked me – I’m sure these crime scene cleanup companies will only come and do the work after the area has been processed by police.  They will not help you to sanitize your house to avoid the CSI guys detection after you lose your temper with your mother-in-law .  

Photo credit: ttstam

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has a new web site that will provide a central resource where we can see information on near-Earth objects  - asteroids and comets that may approach Earth. The Asteroid Watch site also contains links where we can subscribe to the asteroid RSS feed, sign up for an email newsletter for select asteroids, and even track flybys with the Asteroid Watch Widget! The widget is available for Mac OS X Dashboard and Yahoo! Widgets. There’s plenty of audio and video on the site plus information about missions, so if you’re interested in asteroids, be sure to check it out!

Photo Credit: NASA/JPL

My sister and I got our mother a Tivo for her birthday, because every time she tries to watch one of her favorite shows, one of her friends is sure to call on the phone and talk and talk and talk. We told her a Tivo will change your life! This video apparently came out last Halloween, but if you haven’t seen it, it is hilarious. This Tivo wants no competition for his owner’s attention!

My youngest son is in his high school’s marching band, and during the holiday season they had the opportunity to march in a parade that was widely televised. Apparently the process for getting invited to perform in a big parade or bowl game is to send in an application. The application may include recommendations, information about the band and what it does, and of course a video showing the band performing. Obviously when this video is made, it will be a well-rehearsed band that is playing and marching its very best! And if something happens that is not its best, I assume they then make Take 2! and perhaps Take 3! It’s such a nice luxury to be able to do things that way rather than a nervously performed audition, isn’t it? This band has been to many, many parades both in the U.S. and in other countries over the years, and they have a wonderful (well-deserved) reputation.

But times have changed, and things may not be as comfy these days anymore. Just like Britney Spears could tell you, we are not always in control of which of our images get circulated to the public. Right before the band’s trip last year, the band director called a meeting to scold students who had not been rehearsing regularly or seriously enough. He said practice had been sloppy because some of the students didn’t know the music or the marching well enough yet! Then he pointed out, “It would take just one bad YouTube video to ruin the great reputation we’ve enjoyed for 35 years.” Wow. Of course parents make videos at every football game and even at some of these practices, and of course a fraction of those parents put the videos on YouTube. It never occurred to us that someday the people in charge of a parade or bowl game would say, “The _____ band wants to come here? Well let me look at some of these YouTube videos….nah, don’t think so…” The wonderful convenience we find on the interwebs can also turn around and bite us, so be aware of what fragments of your life are finding their way out there!

Photo credit: rochelle, et. al.