200 views - aw yeah!

Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed it!

My previous work online got moderate responses (see my writing.com account or my youtube channel,) but I feel like my blog is a different ball game.

I really enjoyed writing and I hope keep reading.

Dan

Going Vegan

Welcome one and all to this wonderful event where I officially declare my (temporary? strict?) veganism (again).

This comes as a direct result of watching too many TED talks on plant based diets and the benefits for obesity and diabetes etc. I just want to be healthy and I feel that this is the direction the world will take in the future (probably won't but I can hope).

Aside from the obvious benefits of not eating animals who spend most of their lives ankle deep in their own shit, it kind of just doesn't make sense to eat meat. It's pretty expensive for the individual and it's also unsustainable globally.

The evidence is clear that the sheer quantity of meat and dairy that we eat is problematic. This video highlights the fact that the most long-lived cultures in the world have plant based diets (and an active lifestyle etc) and these videos (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) talk about what is so good about plants and bad about animal products (no word on honey... I really hope I don't have to give up honey!)

In conclusion - cows are cool, don't eat them!

I'm a poet, I know it, hope I don't blow it.

Quick post to give a shout out to my writing.com profile Yertle on Writing.com and my newest poem I can and I will, but when?

True beauty is found in hardship.

 There are very rarely occasions when I find myself listening to or watching something of such heart-wrenching beauty as this video. Please take some time to watch it.

Shane Koyczan's heartchild - learn more here

I don't know if everybody can really relate to this kind of content - but I do know that everybody can hear the amazing skill and passion in Shane's voice.

Real men fail.

This is my first blog post! Yay! I might be about 8 years late onto the blogging scene but I'm sure happy to be here. My first blog post is about failure. Well it's about the word to fail. Fail has become a bit of a dirty word on the Internet. It's something you yell at people to mock them or floating text you put over the head of the guy who just faceplanted a tree. But when you step into the entrepreneurship scene (and it is as much of a scene as hipsterism or emo culture or whatever in that it's a lifestyle choice with which people identify themselves) you hear time and time again that you need to fail as many times as possible and as quickly as possible in order to succeed. Now perhaps the guy with a face full of bark and very few remaining teeth hasn't returned to the slopes in a hurry, but when he did, he probably gave the trees a wide berth.

Don't worry, I'll get it right next time.

I'm not arguing about the virtues of failing with dignity or whatever, I'm here to talk about psychology. We all know that the people around us have a profound influence on our emotional state, and we all know that the internet is so pervasive as to be unavoidable. Ergo, the internet has a profound influence on our emotional state. Using the word 'fail', which the internet has shamelessly stripped of all its glory, to describe your route to success is just inviting those negative emotions into your life. Life is hard enough without, thanks. I say it's better to focus on the minutia of your unsuccesses that give you cause for hope and seeds for learning, rather than branding the whole endeavor a failure.