Artists that make your toes curl

The book Cutter, been all over the sites, but it’s such a unique style he still deserves a mention.
Running from the Camera – 2 sec Auto-Shutter trying to get away
imbueUK – Most interesting project is smash for cash, but the other work of this street artist is cool too.
Evan Roth – bad ass mother fucker SEO artist
Teun Hocks – Insane Photographer
handmade typography – 35 photos of individual typography
Eric Tabuchi – great concepts and photos
Rath Photographie – very slick photography blog/portfolio
Stefan Strumbel – Blog by a german artist. Extremely stylish works
Dave the Chimp – Sweet Exhebition
Gorgeous Painting – I love art when it does something new, and those painting come with a “really fresh” tag attached.
Kasper Sonne – concepts, words and images.

the interwebs & digital world

Spizak – sick digital works, and even better: see a step by step process in this post
box doodles – Make the most out of a simple box. Great conceptual website with loads of participants
Why athletes go broke – Personal finance for Sport Stars
Stick2target – Saying no to twitter, cool series of twitter throw ups

The historic web, ideas don’t get old

retirement plan for artists – secure your future as an artist, future planning for people who do not need bungee jumping for the kicks
living on 30$ for a month – This took place in 2006 and I rediscovered it as I intend to spend 31€ on food the next month.
Too much interst in everything – Nathan Myhrvold has a dug out T-Rex standing in his home
Your Velociraptor – You might not be able to get a T-Rex standing in your living room, but you can at least create your own Velociraptor huntring trophy

all about photography

Ghost Streets in Detroit great panoramic Photos
build your own super dupa makro lense – the cheapskates guide to professional makro lenses
Steven Lippman – huge portfolio

Motivational Entrepreneur Videos

This month I discovered Tim Ferris and have to admit I became a follower. His lifestlye is pretty amazing, and it was always something I was striving for, he hit the top10 people I’d like to meet list. This interview is great and teaches people how to leverage your offline business with an online community.

Great thoughts on entrepreneurship, making money, blogging and marketing yourself. There are some real gems of insight in this webcast.

Did you ever wonder how to get things done? For me there is always one point when I start to lack motivation and I have to find some anchor point to get through that valley. Either I find that point or start to slack it off. You probably know what I am talking about. It’s all about this tiny spot where you have achieved something, but not enough to really matter. At those moments it’s obvious that the real breakthrough is just a matter of time when you stick to your plan. Strangely this does not matter and our mind tricks us saying that our efforts are not worth what we are doing! Quitting seems like the real deal.

Society trains us towards bad behavoir, we want instant gratification, which actually rarely happens besides learning for school tests and passing them.What did you learn from those tests? Most noteably that forgetting the information you soaked up does not matter much afterwards. Simply forget it and start learning for the new test. Instant gratification sucks, value comes from effort and wanting to do something. Getting things easy or for free devalues them.

Have you lost weight but did not stick to it? Did you want to do something exeptional, but failed miserably and quit a few weeks into it when you saw no results? Here is one of the well hidden ways on how to achieve what you want to! Make bets about your goals with your friends. Make a tiny bet about something that would really annoy you, this makes sure that you are going to put in your best efforts, or be at least punished a bit if you let it drop again.

The size of a bet

A bet has to be the right size, it can be done for honour, but some people need a bit more motivation than that.

• No humilation bets, don’t bet about stuff that will put you down in front of others. I am not a big fan of negative feedback, on the one hand it can excell your efforts tremendously, on the other hand you should only do things that you will not regret. It’s fine to have hard/tough/uneasy/uncomfortable/annoying bets, just make sure you can live with it in case you have to do it.
• The bet sizes should be things you care about, otherwise you will not make an effort. On the other hand, even though a bet should not be humilitating it should not be easy to brush off. Your ego has to step in to make this technique fully effective.
• Make your bets public, share them with other friends, commit yourself to your cause. The more people know about it, there more you will probably care, and the more you will want to get it done due to all those people who are on the sidelines.
• Make those bets to improve, not to put each other down. Those bets should always be a motivation and nothing to make you hate each other.

I truely believe in Parkinson’s Law “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” So the shorter amount of time you have left, the more effort you will put into something. It also goes hand in hand with point 10 of the The cult of Done Manifesto “10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.”

It does no matter if you win or lose, such a bet will simply help you to finally get done what you want to do, don’t hesitate start challenging your friends. You don’t have to gamble for money to enjoy yourself. Money is just colored paper! Always remember that there are far better motivators than money. Imagine how you want your life to be instead of some abstract bullshit “I want to be a millionair” mantra.

Make it three in the tree

At the moment of writing this article I have 3 small prop bets running where no money is involved, as don’t think of money as a good incentive.

1. The first bet will be due next month where I try to live off 31€ for food the whole month. I blogged about this idea last month and refined the rules for it. It’s time to make that step and try what’s possible for someone who did not have to save his money on food yet. Not that I am a big spender, but food is the single biggest money chunk that leaves my wallet besides the rent.

2. The next bet is with another friend on who will get a scholarship that will be given away next February. Perfect motivation, we will both get our butts up and do something about our situation.

3. And the last bet is with the same friend, who bet me that I would not be able to do 10 wide grip pull up’s with a lock-down after each repetion by next February. Right now I can perform one pull-up… this happens when you say you want to master the pull-up… you are instantly challenged by non-believers.

…fuck twitter memes… that’s it. That’s the ultimate twitter meme. Enjoy twitter, stop thinking of it as some sort of tool that you can control. You can’t fake it. I really have to rant a bit about this whole “How do you succeed at twitter” party group. How do you succeed at twitter? You succeed in the real world or outside of twitter! That’s how you will get it working for you!
You should twitter for the sake of twitter, there is no right or wrong just useful, unique and memorable or boring and forgettable.
It does not matter how many people you follow, it does not matter how many people follow you. New twitter clients help you to add plenty of people and pretty much ignore them afterwards. The noise twitter creates is obvious, and adding people beyond good and evil is just bad. There are people out there with thousands of mutual friends, they are not even interacting with a quarter of those people on a regular basis. Twitter recently reduced the amount of people you can befriend, and that is a really good thing.

Time to get real

Why on earth would you need 12.000 mutual friends? Easy answer, there is no reason for it. You don’t need a group of 12.000 mutual friends, you will neither keep up with them nor know them all! Do you want to tell us that you read all those messages or actually care about them? Do you think those people care about you? OK you made us laugh there if you meant that seriously.
Let’s assume that you spend 1 minute on a conversation with all of your mutual friends, one minute is not a lot time, it’s pretty reasonable. That would be 12.000 minutes if you treat them all equal… 1 hour has 60 Minutes, 1 day has 1440 Minutes…. 12.000 minutes are roughly 8.5 days. And you seriously would spend 8.5 days to communicate with each of your friends for just ONE single minute? But they are all your friends… yeah right…it’s really time to get real.

The stalker effect

Twitter has some weird stalker effect, people love to follow people who they are interested in. That’s the reason why celebrities have thousands of followers! Do you see them following back everyone? NOPE! You will not benefit if you add more and more people, they will simply ignore you and your bullshit marketing efforts. Add who you like, who seriously interests you and start to interact with them. Start to actually be social and use this tool!
This whole collecting habit is all about marketing yourself Think of a pissing contest or some sick collectors anankastia(yes I did look that word up and there is probably some therapist to fix this addiction).
You will not have more friends if you befriend others. This behavior is like a miserable guy who walks around, meets people and starts to talk to them in a “I have no friends I need a friend” tone. Without knowing them, clinging, afraid to let people go, wanting to please everyone. It’s neither powerful nor useful. Do some character building exercises and come back when you have developed some self confidence. Or stick to this ego brushing twitter behavior. To make thing clear, those needy people might have many people following them, but they have very little influence compared to the real big players.

What to do?

As I mentioned in the first sentence, fuck twitter memes. Use it and have fun. If you really want to leverage yourself start to work on something outside of twitter and watch your followers grow. Twitter is great, but you should not force yourself into another rat race on who has the most followers or friends. It does not matter.

Today is the last and final day of the wonderful week of textures, it happens to be the exact same day as the Sunday Freebie. This time you can download 6 different high resolution [4288*2856 px] textures!

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Welcome to the wonderful week of textures here at smashill. The working week is over, but we are going the extra round! Today you can download four 4288*2856 px photos of the ground we are walking on.

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