I spent today watching the corgi and Sandra run dog agility, my job is to keep the boy happy.  While pushing Jake around the agility course I listen to recorded books and podcasts on an iPod.

I listened to a talk given at the recent  SouthbySouthwest Conference in Austin by Merlin Mann and John Gruber called “HOWTO: 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility!“  The topic could have been How to Turbocharge Anything-You-Really-Want-to-Do with Credibility.   I found the podcast inspiring enough to listen to twice.  It’s good weekend listening, especially since you’ll need the time, it’s about 60 minutes.

John Gruber writes a well-read, well-written blog called Daring Fireball, certainly worth reading if you’re not already.  Merlin Mann is one of the 5 Web Folk I Admire – Something I don’t do easily. He’s interesting, funny, smart and very annoying. I once wrote to The Bloggess, who is the funniest person on Twitter, that I like reading her very much but was okay not being married to her.  I like reading Merlin Mann very much, but am okay not being married to him, either.

Listen to the podcast.

Self development meshes pretty closely with what we talk about here, namely productivity and took, okay and tech.

Jason Womack had an inspiring post over on lifehacker.com on what he called the ABC’s of Self-Development:  Accomplishments, Beliefs and Challenges.

Here are his first two suggestions for helping with your self-development.

1.) Make it easy to get new information in.
Watching a TED talk or PopTech talk each day (7-23 minutes in length) is a great way to get started. Learning about what’s happening “out in the world” will better prepare you to engage with people in conversation, get to know what’s important to them, and be someone they trust for years to come.

2.) Reach out and meet the people you can learn from in your community.
Want to meet someone? Reach out, call or write them a letter and ask for the introduction. Whenever I read a book, hear someone speaking on the radio, or am told about someone doing something incredible, I look them up, and invite them to meet over coffee. So what that not every person says yes…it works and I’ve met some amazing people!

I immediately accepted his advice and watched the talk below on TED.

Read the original article on lifehacker.

Tim Brown, CEO of Ideo, a design firm, talking about the relationship between playing and creativity from TED.

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