Tue 19 Apr 2011
Focusing on scuba diving cupcakes
Posted by Mark Dawson under Grad school
1 Comment
A recent speaker was giving a talk about SEO and how important blogs are to improving it. Made me think “I wonder if my blog shows up in search results at all (i.e., is it even being indexed)?” I decided to Google two words that came to mind which would be on my blog and, I erroneously thought, not elsewhere. The first two words I thought of from my recent posts were “scuba cupcake”.
Here’s the top result.
The speaker also repeatedly drove home his conviction that whatever you do, do NOT be a generalist. Find your niche, find what you are passionate about and can focus on for five years, and DO IT.
Ok, guess I’d better get right on changing my complete personality – what has made me me for 37 years. Everyone is telling me the same thing, so I must be wrong. Anyone have any suggestions for which of my various interests I should focus on?
April 21st, 2011 at 17:44
My friend Norm tried to post this comment, but couldn’t, for some reason:
Thanks for the post! If you asked me to list all the things I might see today, “scuba diving cupcake” wouldn’t show up in a million years. I was wondering if it was a man or woman, and clicked through the link. It was amusing to see both the caption, “right next to my ‘disco stick’” and the critique in the comments: “I think it’s more of a snorkeling cupcake.”
It may not be the best strategy for SEO, but as career advice I’ve always thought highly of a post Scott Adams did in 2007:
If you want an average successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something
extraordinary, you have two paths:
1. Become the best at one specific thing.
2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.
My interpretation is that the learning curves for a skill make it relatively easy to improve to the 25th percentile or higher, but very difficult to advance to the 99th without extraordinary skill or practice. By achieving the 25th percentile in two or more skills, though, the combination becomes a rare and valuable resource.
The original post is here:
http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/career-advice.html
So maybe your speaker wouldn’t disagree with this, but I think focusing on option 1 as the only route to success is a mistake.