On Words and Business

“Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.”

W. Somerset Maugham

For many freelancers, the dream is to have the freedom to work from far off, exotic locations.

While my travel life routinely find me working on the west coast instead of my home base here in the east coast, here’s a freelancer taking it to the next level. He’s been working remotely, traveling around the world for months now. And it’s working for him, so he shares some tips to help the rest of us make it work.

So…if you ever read an entry I posted at 4:00 a.m., stop to think: Am I in Boston and actually awake at 4:00 a.m. or am I in another time zone, living the dream.

Lev Grossman’s column in this week’s Time magazine is all about commenting on blogs and giving people a voice. It applies less to business blogs than personal ones, but it’s still a great read. Especially for those of us who grew up in a world where there were no blogs, and for whom this commenting thing is a late-learned art.

“Maybe commenters are just on one side of a cultural disconnect between two incompatible ideas of what the social conventions of the Internet should be. One is based on the standards of real-world, offline politeness. The other is a kind of communal game in which whoever is cleverest and pushes the most buttons wins.”

In honor of the anniversary of our country’s founding…

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Read the entire transcript of the Declaration of Independence, and the “…Facts submitted to a candid world.” It’s thought-provoking, especially in this age, to read the “…history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. “