Find the Courage to Be Yourself

Be yourself.

It’s not impossible, but it takes courage. It takes courage to be and to think differently. But the act of being and thinking differently is only different to those looking at you from the outside.

If you make up your mind that you're fully in control of your destiny -- if you decide to choose what you want to believe in -- then you're not being different. You're being you.

Recognize that those who say you're crazy, or those who try to stop you from being or thinking differently, are only confronting their own demons; they're trying to reaffirm their own beliefs.

If others give you advice, listen. If they tell you what you should or should not do, listen. But decide for yourself. Believe in yourself. Be yourself. Continue reading →

Searching For My Blogging Focus

This isn't a post about my currently-in-progress lifestyle transition. It could be, but it isn't.

This is a post about how I'm making decisions to reorganize my online presence. One of my goals for this year is to revamp this website and turn it into what personal branding gurus like to call my "home base".

Over the next few years, I will be doing a lot more writing and networking as I travel around the world with only the stuff on my back (there I go; talking about my lifestyle transition again) and I've been trying to decide where I should blog about all this stuff: here on raamdev.com or somewhere else -- an entirely new blog. Continue reading →

Developing my Personal Brand

This past weekend I read Colin Wright's free eBook on Personal Branding. While I had a general idea what personal branding was before I read the ebook, what I didn't have was a good answer to the ever important question, "Why?".

Here's what Colin says about why you need a personal brand:

Why Do You Need a Personal Brand?

There are many reasons you should want to develop a personal brand. Building a positive reputation (whatever that might mean in your field) can lead to increased word-of-mouth advertising for you and your services. When your reputation spreads and precedes you, it also makes interactions with potential clients that much easier, allowing you to spend less time convincing them to hire you, and more time negotiating the scope of services and payment (and actually working on the project).

Managing a personal brand helps you build a kind of brand equity, which will grant your name and products a certain star power. This associative celebrity can aid you in future projects you may wish to undertake, allow you to easily segue into alternate-but-related fields and will grant you expert status within your current field.

By recognizing and optimizing your personal brand, you will become part of and associated with specific ideas, movements, aesthetics, cultural attitudes and people. The more you refine your brand, the more targeted your message becomes and the more you will be doing the work you want to do, with the people you want to be working with, and at a price point that everyone can agree on.

And those are just the short-term benefits! In the long run, taking the time to filter out the rough and think through what kind of professional you want to be and how you want the rest of the world to see you can actually make you a much more skilled, fulfilled and happy person. It was Abe Lincoln who said, “I don’t think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.” Don’t be looked down on by Abe: improve yourself today.

Colin's ebook is a must-read for anyone who works as a consultant or freelancer, who does business or communicates on the web, or who just plain cares about themselves. Everyone has a personal brand. However, you need to take charge of defining that brand; you need to take charge of owning it. Your personal brand is like your health: you are the only person who can maintain it.

To begin developing my personal brand I need to figure out where my personal brand stands now. However, figuring that out on my own would be a bit difficult: I’m bound to be biased. So to help me get started I’ve created an online form with three simple questions that I will personally pass around to friends and family:

When you hear or see the name "Raam Dev", what's the first thing that comes to mind?
Describe something you like about Raam
Describe something you don't like about Raam

If you have a minute to fill out the form (it’s only three questions!), I would greatly appreciate it:

Help Raam Improve Himself!

Anyone who knows me can help, even if you've never met me in person! In fact, I'm very interested in the current state of my online brand, so if you only know me online I'd really be grateful for your submission.

In a few weeks, or whenever I’ve collected enough answers, I will announce the results here on my blog. This will be my current personal brand; the starting point from which I will work to consciously improve myself and my personal brand.

Redefining the Purpose of my Technology Blog

A little over nine months ago, I announced Solid State Raam, a technology blog dedicated to my explorations of the digital world. It was originally set up to give myself a place to write about technology and document my discoveries without feeling like I was alienating visitors on my personal blog. The new blog was, however, lacking a vision; it mostly existed “just in case” I wrote something that I felt was too long or complex for my personal blog. In short, the motivation for writing new content just wasn’t there.

In the past, I had spent enormous amounts of time searching for a “perfect” theme, so when I put up my technology blog I decided to use a default WordPress theme and be done with it, however, last month Cody McKibben of ThrillingHeroics.com released his awesome (and free!) custom WordPress theme. Solid State Raam was in terrible need of a facelift, so I installed Cody’s theme and spent a little time tweaking it. The new theme seemed to breathe some motivation into writing for the blog, but there was still something missing: a vision.

Incidentally, the installation of the new theme coincided with another event. After explaining the WHOIS system to my dad one evening, I realized that I have a passion for helping others understand the digital world. The WHOIS system is a rather boring subject, even for a geek like me, but I nevertheless found myself explaining it to my dad with great enthusiasm. When I thought back to the other times where I had explained technology to people, I realized that I’ve always been enthusiastic and excited about it, no matter how boring or simple the subject was to me.

With this new understanding of my passion for helping others understand technology, a more clearly defined vision for my technology blog has emerged: A place to not only document my discoveries but to also help others understand the world of technology with which I am so familiar.

The world is filled with evildoers looking to take advantage of those who know very little about technology: identities are stolen, wallets are emptied, and valueless electronic goods are willingly purchased as a result of pure ignorance. Many people are fully aware of their ignorance to technology and, as a result, using technology creates intense frustration. I have often wondered how much more enjoyable the web would be for people if they knew how they could find anything with Google, or if understanding the simple difference between a web browser and an operating system would help prevent them from becoming victims to identity theft.

If I can help alleviate fear, frustration, and ignorance towards technology by simply providing a resource for people to educate themselves, then I will be helping to make the world a better place.

Edit: After about a year of having my tech posts published separately from my personal site, I decided to move them back here and shut down SolidStateRaam.com. You can find tech posts in the Technology category.