Guest posting spots for October are now open and I’d like to invite you to participate. The theme will be Winning Attitude which covers the attitudes we need to have to grow and overcome challenges in life. Three examples are patience, persistence, and resilience, but there are still many other attitudes that can be covered.

Please read Guest Posting Guidelines for more information.

At September 7, 2006, the first post here was published. So it’s now the second anniversary of Life Optimizer!

It’s been one year since I wrote the first anniversary post and I’ve learned a lot since then. I learned not only about blogging but also about personal growth and life in general. That’s what I love about blogging: it speeds up my learning process.

This blog has also experienced healthy growth in the past year. The number of subscribers grew from about 1200 one year ago to about 5400 now. The traffic level, especially organic traffic from search engines, has also increased steadily.

Of course, all these are possible because of you, the reader. Without your support and participation, this blog wouldn’t come anywhere near where it is now. It’s you who motivate me to keep learning and writing.

So let me say this to you:

Thank you!

Guest posting spots for September are now open and I’d like to invite you to participate. The theme will be Fulfilling Career. It covers topics such as career planning, how to find and follow our calling, and how to get the most out of our work.

Please read Guest Posting Guidelines for more information.

Update: All spots are now filled. Thanks!

There are some guest posting spots available in August and I’d like to invite you to participate. The theme will be Relationships and there are up to six spots available.

If you’re interested, please see Guest Posting Guidelines.

Now we come to the first day of July and the theme for this month is Happiness. Here we will discuss topics such as:

1. The essence of happiness
2. Life principles necessary for happiness
3. Tips to be and stay happy

Happiness is a broad topic and different people may have different perspectives. That’s why I’m glad to announce that we will have four guest posts this month. They have all been submitted to me and – after reading them – I’m sure they will enrich all of us. They certainly enrich me. Thanks to four of you who have submitted guest posts (you know who you are :) )!

Of course, we will learn much more through discussions, so feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section throughout the month.

By the way, you can see roundup of last month’s theme on June 2008 theme page.

We have now been in the last week of June and soon we will enter July. In July, I will accept guest posts here on Life Optimizer. So, if you are a blogger, you may consider participating.

You may notice that recently there are two guest posts here. The first one is How to Boost Your Productivity with Serial Multi-tasking by Mary Jaksch and the second one is 7 Can’t-Miss Ways to Defeat the Procrastination Habit by Arjun Muralidharan. I love these posts and I think guest posting is a good idea. It gives the readers fresh perspectives that can enrich them. So here I publicly announce the guest posting opportunity to all of you.

Here are two reasons why you may want to write guest posts:

1. You will help people through your writing
   This is always a good thing. While you already help people through your blog, by writing here you can help even more people since you reach a new audience.
2. You will get exposure for your work
   There are about 4500 subscribers here who will see your guest posts. Since your guest posts include links to your work (such as your blog), it means your work will get exposure to thousands of people. This is not to mention potentially thousand others who come to your posts through social media sites or search engines.

Of course, there are some guidelines for the post. The post must be:

1. Original
   It can’t be a post that has been posted on your own blog or anywhere else before.
2. At least 600 words long
   This is for the content part, not counting the title and byline.
3. At most 50 words byline
   You may include links to your work here. Please put the byline at the end of the post. I will write my introduction at the beginning.
4. No affiliate links
5. Match the monthly theme
   Exceptions can be made, but I strongly prefer posts that match the monthly theme. As you can see, the two guest posts in May match the monthly theme of Productivity. The monthly theme for July will be Happiness. I think this is a theme that can relate to everybody.

I reserve the right to edit the posts as needed (for example, to fix spelling or grammar errors) and to reject posts that I feel are not appropriate for this web site.

Feel free to tell me about your idea before you start writing. I don’t want to waste your time.

There are four slots available in July. Please send your submissions or ideas to donald (at) lifeoptimizer.org.

May has passed, and now we come to June. As you may know, last month was the first month here where I set monthly theme and the theme was mind. In my opinion, the theme went well. Having a monthly theme gave me more focus on writing and improving my life. I became more observant of whatever things related to mind I came across, and it was easier for me to find topics to write.

In total, there were 8 articles related to mind last month. Here they are:

• Mind Development: Why It’s Important and What to Develop
• Top 10 Interesting Facts About the Brain
• Review: How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
• How to Create Ideas: 11 Proven Lessons from Idea Generators
• Warning: 9 Dangerous Mind Development Killers You Should Avoid
• Murray Gell-Man’s Top Lessons on Developing Creative Thinking Skills
• Mind Exercise: 8 Can’t-Miss Ways to Train Your Mind
• Video: The Miracle of the Brain

And now, for the month of June, the theme is productivity. Here I will look for ways to increase our productivity in whatever we do. It will cover topics such as:

1. The mindset we need to be productive
2. The pitfalls of productivity
3. Techniques and tools to boost productivity

Of course, I will also write general articles so that those of you who are not interested in the theme can still get value out of this site.

Stay tuned!

Leo Babauta from Zen Habits recently emailed me about his new venture with Glen Stansberry from LifeDev. It’s an e-book  publishing site called Web Warrior Tools that features e-books written by bloggers and writers from around the Web.

This site helps people find the e-books they need. Even now when it just launched, there are already four interesting e-books there:

1. Email Zen by Scott Young
   I reviewed Scott’s Learn More, Study Less e-book a few months ago. In this new e-book, Scott provides tips on how to keep email from ruling your life.
2. Secrets to a Healthy Life by K. Stone
   This guide to being healthy covers topics such as nutrition, exercise, stress-reduction, and more.
3. Get Rich Slowly Guide to Roth IRAs by J.D. Roth
   This e-book helps you get started with Roth IRAs which is “one of the best money secrets on the market”.
4. Getting Started with Podcasting by Doug Heacock
   If you ever want to create your own podcast, this e-book guides you through the process of planning, producing, and promoting your podcast.

One nice thing about these e-books is their affordable prices ($6 to $9). Even better, you can read 6-11 pages previews of each e-book on the site.

Since Leo himself has had the experience of publishing two popular e-books (Zen To Done and Zen Habits Handbook for Life), I think there is a good chance that this site will be successful.

I’m thinking of setting monthly theme here on Life Optimizer. There are three reasons for this:

1. I want to give you deeper coverage of certain topic so that you can better focus on optimizing that aspect of your life.

2. Personally I also want to focus my life optimization effort on certain aspect of my life. I believe it will give me better results than just trying to optimize my life in general. One month is a long enough period to get results from focused effort.

3. I’d like to have higher-quality discussions here that will enrich everyone. Since there is theme continuity during the month, everyone will have the chance to dig deeper into the topic so that there can be more lively discussions.

Of course, it means that I will write articles with that theme during the month. But don’t worry if the theme is not interesting to you: I will still write general articles. I’m not sure about the proportion between themed and general articles since this is something new for me. But one thing for sure, I want to accommodate both the people who are interested and not interested to the monthly theme.

May 2008 will be the first month with monthly theme on Life Optimizer and the theme will be mind. It will cover topics such as:

1. Understanding how brain works
2. Increasing our brain fitness
3. Increasing our mind performance
4. Learning from the bright minds’ in history

I’m not saying that I’m an expert in this area. To the contrary, having a monthly theme is actually a way for me to push myself to learn more about the topic. I will share what I learn with you and I believe I will also learn a lot from you.

What do you think?

Steven Aitchison – my blogging friend at Positive Blog Network – just launched a membership program called Binaural Heaven which aims to foster your personal development through binaural beats.

Here is how Wikipedia explains binaural beats:

Binaural beats or binaural tones are auditory processing artifacts, that is, apparent sounds, the perception of which arises in the brain independent of physical stimuli… binaural beats may influence the brain in more subtle ways through the entrainment of brainwaves and can be used to produce relaxation and other health benefits.
…
Binaural beat stimulation has been used fairly extensively to induce a variety of states of consciousness, there has been some work done in regards to the effects of these stimuli on relaxation, focus, attention, and states of consciousness.

Steve also explains it on his blog:

The theory behind binaural beats is that if you apply slightly different frequency sine waves to each ear, a beating affect is created in the brain itself, due to the brain’s internal wiring. If, in the presence of these tones, you relax and let your mind go, your mind will naturally synchronize with the beat frequency. In this way it is possible to tune the frequency of your brain waves to particular frequencies that you have selected, using of the four bands: Delta: deep sleep, Theta: dreaming and intuitive stuff, Alpha: awake, focused inside, and Beta: awake, focused outside.

To be honest, binaural beats is something new to me, but there are numerous studies about it.

In Steve’s program, every month the members will get:

• 3 binaural beat audios, around 30 minutes in length
• 1 e-book related to improving the quality of life
• 1 guided meditation audio, interlaced with binaural beats

All of them will be mailed directly to the inbox.

The program currently costs $15 a month. You can read more about it on its site.