Terry A. Hull

Three weeks ago I was 75 pounds overweight. I have lost 10 of those pounds in the last three weeks. After I lose another 10, I’ll tell you how I’m doing it. I am 5-foot-11 and weigh 255 pounds. I want to get back down to 190, so I have another 65 pounds to go.

When I was a kid, I never had to give a thought to my weight. I am amazed when I think about how much candy and other treats I devoured back then — and never gained an ounce. I had an after-school paper route, which meant I always had money burning in my pocket, and I would spend at least a couple of bucks a day on snacks (back when a couple of bucks bought a lot more than it does now). I guess I burned off a lot of it pedaling that 10-speed, hauling all those newspapers around town.

In my early 20s, I started packing on some pounds, and that was the start of my lifelong battle with the bathroom scale. I remember, when I was 30 and Norma and I were engaged, I went on a diet and got down to 175. That was my marrying weight (24 years ago). During the first years of our marriage, I creeped back up to the 190s, but I never passed the dreaded 200 mark. Then, two things happened.

First, I stopped smoking. Yes, that’s right, I was a smoker. From about age 25 to 35, I smoked two packs a day. Then I finally kicked that pitiful habit. However, smoking evidently does something to your metabolism, because when I stopped, I began to put on about one pound every other month. That is deceptively gradual weight loss. By the time I was 45, my weight was hovering at 250 to 260.

Then my doctor diagnosed me as hypothyroid and put me on medication. My weight has pretty much stabilized since then, and as I said, today, at age 55, I weigh 255. If you have a weight problem and haven’t been tested for hypothyroidism, you may be missing a good bet. I suspect I could have stopped my weight gain several years early if I had been diagnosed sooner.

There are other factors at work. Over the years I have developed some weight-conscious habits. Plus, my wife is very health-conscious and prepares healthy meals for us. I have picked up many of her habits — some voluntarily, some mandated. I rarely eat fried foods. Even fried chicken (a former passion) is too greasy to suit my taste these days. I eat a lot of baked and grilled chicken. I love a good salad. If I drink soda pop, it is sugar free, and I use sweeteners in place of sugar. I don’t eat much junk food, but occasional pastries and ice cream and candy are my downfall.

So, between picking up some healthy habits and treating my hypothyroidism, I stopped gaining weight several years ago. Problem is, I’m still carrying all this excess baggage I picked up during my 30s and 40s. I’ve been trying for several years, with little success, to get rid of it.

I peaked at 272 pounds back in March 2007. I couldn’t believe I had actually passed the 270 mark. Of course, I should have shuddered when I passed the 200 mark, the 225 mark, and the 250 mark. But over the years I had grown used to those numbers, but in my mind, 270+ put me in a whole new league.

I got strict with myself and managed to bring that down to 252 by April of this year. But then I lost my focus, and I was back up to 265 last month. Now I’m three weeks into a new weight-loss regimen. I’m feeling pretty good, and I’m very happy to be rid of 10 unwanted pounds. I can’t wait to get below the 250 mark, which will be the first time in more than 10 years that I have been that low. When I hit 245, I’ll check back in to tell you about it.

I unintentionally stumbled upon a simple hack to get a boost in your Sitemeter stats. Mind you, I wasn’t looking for this — and I won’t repeat it. I don’t want to artificially inflate my Sitemeter numbers. Nevertheless, some of you will find this interesting.

I came across Test Your Website, which shows what your site looks like in a variety of browsers. It’s a helpful site. It’s important for web designers and bloggers to make sure that what looks good on your home computer screen is looking just as good to the visitor using another browser, such as Firefox, Opera, Mozilla, Flock, Safari, etc. Interestingly, the one browser Test Your Website doesn’t test for is Internet Explorer, which is used in 54% of page views.

Anyway, I entered the URL of this blog and clicked the “submit” button. After a couple of minutes of processing, the site returned thumbnails of how this blog looks in all of those different browsers. Great.

A few minutes later, I happened to stop by to check my Sitemeter report. TerryHull.net is a new blog, and I am still a little obsessive about seeing if I’ve attracted any new readers. I was surprised to see that my traffic had jumped by about 40 hits in less than an hour! The hits were coming in from all around the world: Brazil, France, Germany, Netherlands, Finland, Poland, the UK.

At first I had no idea what was going on. Had some big-time blogger mentioned one of my articles? My heart began beating a little faster. Then it occurred to me. This is just the result of that website test.

TerryHull.net is only a few weeks old and I have only begun to build my traffic. Before today I have never had 20+ visitors on a single day. Today, I doubled that amount. And it doesn’t mean a thing.

First it gets good.
Then it gets bad.
Then it gets good again.
Then it gets bad again.
Repeat.

The secret:

(1) During the good times, prepare for the bad times.

(2) During the bad times, persevere until the good times return.

(3) During good and bad times, remember that there is much more to life than outward circumstances.

(4) Know that all of the most important things — God, Christ, the Church, love of family and friends, joy, wisdom, nature, art, eternal life — are ever-present and unchanging.

(5) Humble yourself in the sight of the Lord, and He will lift you up.

Jim Rohn:

* “Action is the ingredient that ensures results. Only action can cause reaction. Further, only positive action can cause positive reaction.”

* “To make progress you must actually get started.”

Thanks to Jonathan Wells.

Jonathan Wells at Advanced Life Skills has an excellent excerpt from legendary success teacher Jim Rohn: “Personal Philosophy is Like the Set of the Sail.”

In the final analysis, it is not what happens that determines the quality of our lives, it is what we choose to do when we have struggled to set the sail and then discover, after all of our efforts, that the wind has changed directions. When the winds change, we must change. We must struggle to our feet once more and reset the sail in the manner that will steer us toward the destination of our own deliberate choosing.

Read the whole thing: “Sailing on the Sea of Life.”

The McCain-Obama election will very possibly be decided at the presidential debates. Many voters are still just getting acquainted with the two candidates, and many will get their first in-depth look at the nominees during the debates.

Will Barack Obama live up to his reputation for eloquence? Will the voters find substance behind his oratory? Will John McCain be able to defuse concerns about his age? Will he succeed in presenting himself as the most experienced candidate? 62.5 million people watched the first Bush-Kerry debate in 2004, and 126 million voted in the election. I expect the 2008 debates to surpass that viewership.

Here is the debate schedule:
• First debate: Sep. 26 (Fri). Moderator: Jim Lehrer (PBS). Focus: Domestic issues.
• Second debate: Oct. 7 (Tue). Moderator: Tom Brokaw (NBC). Town hall format.
• Third debate: Oct. 15 (Wed). Moderator: Bob Schieffer (CBS). Focus: Foreign issues.
• Vice presidential debate: Oct. 2 (Thu). Moderator: Gwen Ifill (PBS).

Each debate will begin at 9:00 p.m. (EST) and will be 90 minutes long. Questions for the town hall debate will be presented by undecided voters from the Nashville, Tenn., area chosen by the Gallup Organization, with additional questions being submitted online by the public. The process is organized by the Commission on Presidential Debates, headed by the former chairs of the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee.

Since modern presidential debates began in 1960 and were resumed in 1976, they have usually played a pivotal role in the outcome. In 1960, Richard Nixon’s 5 o’clock shadow and awkwardness on camera hurt him in a razor-close election. In 1976, Ford lost his edge when he said Poland was not under Soviet domination. In 1980, Carter lost face when he said he conferred with his teenage daughter over nuclear arms policy. In 1984, Reagan managed to deflect questions about his age when he quipped, “I will not make age an issue in this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” (Bet McCain wishes that line was not already taken). In 1988, Dukakis blundered in a question about capital punishment. In 2000, George W. Bush surprised many when he held his own against Al Gore.

One pundit writes:

The perceived winners of presidential debates, in every case since the first one held forty-four years ago, have always gone on to win the presidency.

That’s Rick Shenkman of George Mason University’s History News Network, who wrote an excellent 2004 article: “History Proves that Presidential Debates Matter.”

The nominees will get a bit of a dress rehearsal later this week at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, in Lake Forest, CA. McCain and Obama will both appear at the church for a two-hour event (5:00-7:00 pm, PDT) this Saturday. It will not be a debate. Warren will be on stage with each candidate for an hour. Warren has said he will include questions on four topics important to him: poverty, HIV/AIDS, climate and human rights.

I was recently asked: What are three pieces of advice you would give another person? One could think about that question for some time, but I had to give an immediate answer. These were my responses:

(1) Draw near to the God who created you.

(2) Take some time each day to know yourself.

(3) Always be ambitious about the future, but content with the present.

How would you answer the question?

Send yourself — or anyone else — email in the future: EmailFuture.com.

Now what I would really love to do is to email myself in the past. I have quite a few things I’d like to tell myself 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago.

“ProBlogger” Darren Rowse is the hero of every would-be blogging superstar, including me. Rowse is an amazing fellow: a full-time six-figure blogger, media business owner, photographer and photography guru, author and pastor.

Rowse, 36, lives in Melbourne, Australia, with his wife and two sons. He has been making a six-figure income from his numerous blogging activities since 2005. ProBlogger, his blog on blogging since 2004, gets more than 13,000 visitors a day, and Digital Photography School, begun in 2006, just received its 1 millionth reader. Amazing.

Rowse also writes: Digital Photography Blog (begun Sep. 2003; more than 4,000 readers/day), Camera Phone Zone (begun Sep. 2004; more than 2,000 daily readers); and LivingRoom, Rowse’s first blog, begun in 2002. At one time, Rowse was writing 20 or so different blogs simultaneously.

GETTING STARTED
How did Rowse get started in blogging? He says he read an article about blogging and began blogging the very next day. Simple as that. He put up 74 posts on LivingRoom in his first full month, and averaged 66 posts/month during his first year of blogging.

LivingRoom is where I first stumbled across Rowse a few years ago. LivingRoom is a blog about faith, fellowship and blogging. To fully appreciate the Darren Rowse story, you have to consider his personal situation back then, at the end of 2002. He was 31 years old, engaged to be married, and working three jobs: as the part-time minister of a church, working in a warehouse, and taking temp work. When Rowse first plugged blogging into that mix, it was little more than a new hobby for a very busy man.

You can tell from some of Rowse’s first LivingRoom posts that he was unfamiliar with this new medium and trying to figure out how seriously to take it: “This blogging thing is fun” (12/09/02). “Just tweaked my template and learnt some new html code in the process. I’m not expert as anyone will be able to tell…” (12/16/02). On Dec. 18, 2002, after less than a month of blogging, Rowse wrote:

21 days ago I decided to [start blogging] … I’d not really seen any blogs before and knew nothing about how or why people kept them. … Since that time many strange and wonderful emails have filtered into my humble inbox … from most states in Australia, from New Zealand, Germany, Singapore, the U.S., Canada and more. Many of them call themselves “bloggers” …
I’m not sure why people are here … I don’t feel I’ve done enough, know enough or am the kind of guy people would log onto to read the words of. … All I can say is … thanks for the generous welcome to the “community” that you (we?) bloggers seem to have.

Today, that young man who six years ago wasn’t sure about calling himself a “blogger” publishes some of the most widely read blogs in the world (three of them listed in Technorati’s top 500 trafficked sites).

CHANGE IN MINISTRIES
When Rowse began writing LivingRoom, he was the young adults pastor of a Church of Christ church (a branch of the same worldwide fellowship of Restoration Movement churches of which I am a part). He was laying the groundwork to leave that ministry to launch a new Baptist-sponsored emerging movement church called LivingRoom. Rowse began writing LivingRoom the blog as one way to promote LivingRoom the Christian community, which began meeting in people’s homes in February 2003.

However, while Rowse was leading his new church, which never attracted more than a few dozen people at a time, he was becoming increasingly more excited about blogging, through which he found himself interacting with thousands of people around the world. In his tenth month as a blogger, in September 2003, Rowse launched Digital Photography Blog. He started using Google AdSense on that blog and was surprised when his blog actually began to make some money — a few pennies a day, and then a few dollars a day. By 2005, Rowse was making more than $100,000 a year from his blogging.

Meanwhile, Rowse continued to lead the LivingRoom fellowship, stepping away from that ministry only at the end of last year. Rowse, who is the son of a preacher, wrestled with his decision to leave the traditional ministry. He wrote about that struggle in “Thinking About Ministry” (July 2006). Although Rowse never put it this way, my sense of what he has written is that he believes it is God who opened the doors that have resulted in him becoming a world-reknown leader of the blogosphere. In other words, Rowse never left the ministry, he simply changed ministries, from leading a small local community of believers to interacting with a large international community of bloggers. To that, I say, praise the Lord.

OTHER PROJECTS
In September 2005, Rowse and a group of fellow bloggers launched b5media, a network of more than 350 blogs which receive a combined total of about 10 million visitors a month. Rowse is a vice president.

In April of this year, Rowse’s book, ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income, was released. The book, co-authored by Chris Garrett, is a top-ranked selection on Amazon.com.

THE MONEY
How does Rowse make a six-figure income from blogging? One key to Rowse’s success is creating multiple income streams. The blogs themselves generate revenue in several ways, including paid sponsorship, click-through ads (such as Google AdSense and Chitika), affiliate programs (such as Amazon), and classified advertising (such as his ProBlogger Job Board). In addition, of course, Rowse has earnings through b5media. Beyond that, Rowse earns income as a consultant, and through the “Six-Figure Blogging” course he began offering in 2005, and sales of his new ProBlogger book.

Rowse is obviously a natural-born entrepreneur. But he is no big shot or wheeler-dealer. I have never met him personally, but I have read a lot of what he has written. His humility comes through in his simple straightforward writing style and the complete absence of what he would call “snark” (snide remarks). The Bible says, “God gives grace to the humble.” ProBlogger and blogging superstar Darren Rowse is one amazing example of that.

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Thanks very much to Michael Bates of BatesLine for linking to this article.

I came across this very helpful list for writers: Writer’s Digest’s 101 Best Websites for writers. 101 great websites chosen from 2,100 nominations. It is WD’s 10th annual list.

The websites are categorized under 9 headings: agent blogs, challenges/creativity, general resources, genre/niche, jobs, just for fun, protect yourself, publishing resources, and writing communities. WD’s list provides a brief description of each site.

I read through the list and studied several of the sites and noted these 9 sites that I want to look at more closely (the blurbs are from WD):

* Absolute Write
No matter which branch of writing interests you, you’ll be able to find helpful tips at Absolute Write. Just signing up for its e-newsletter will net you a free list of agents.

* Author MBA
Check out the 20-plus articles provided by Author MBA to improve your writing, marketing and career. Joanne Rock’s “A writer’s guide to managing work & the holidays” is an especially good read.

* Funds for Writers
Freelancers on the prowl for jobs and cash need to look no further. This site offers up the big four—grants, contests, fellowships and markets—that pay. Plus, C. Hope Clark’s free e-newsletter is a must read for all who freelance.

* Duotrope’s Digest
Enjoy a free submissions tracker with this database of more than 2,000 markets for short fiction, poetry and novels/collections. Search functions include medium, payscale, accepts reprints and more.

* Eighteen Questions
Also known as 18Q, this site is designed to share the views and experiences of published authors for novice writers in a series of 18 questions. More than 100 authors have taken the quiz.

* The Internet Writing Workshop
If you’re not into message boards, The Internet Writing Workshop offers discussions and critiques delivered right to your e-mail inbox. There’s no fee for this service, but there’s a minimum participation time of 30 minutes a week.

* The Urban Muse
The Urban Muse is populated with excellent tips on writing, marketing and staying creative. Don’t miss the “5 Ways to Promote Your Blog” post; great advice.

* Writer Gazette
In its fourth consecutive year on the list (sixth overall), this site lives up to its tagline: “Bringing you free writer-related articles, paying call for submission and freelance job postings, contests, resources, tips, and more to help induce, improve, and promote your writing career—every week.”

Also, Writer’s Digest has begun accepting nominations for the 2009 list.

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Thanks very much to Michael Bates of BatesLine for linking to this article.