Leo Babauta of the excellent ZenHabits weblog and a personal friend of mine has recently launched a new blog named WriteToDone. Here is the purpose of the site in his words:

I’ve created Write To Done as a way to share some of what I’ve learned as a writer, with new (and experienced) writers looking to improve their craft and their art.

For those of you who’ve enjoyed popular PickTheBrain writing posts like George Orwell’s Rules for Effective Writing and How to Write Something Worth Reading, this site will be right up your alley.

Check it out!

Tejvan’s article earlier this week on happiness really got me thinking:

• What does it mean to be happy?
• Am I happy?
• Is happiness really everything we expect?

The word “happiness” is used so frequently, in so many different contexts, for so many different reasons, that it’s lost all definite meaning.

Everyone wants to be happy, and this desire has been exploited to promote everything from products to politics to religious beliefs. This is sort of sad, and more than a bit confusing. It’s no wonder most people have trouble deciding if they are happy or not. Click here to continue »

One our goals for 2008 is to increase the level of conversation on PickTheBrain. To help you keep track of all the discussions going on, we’ve added a couple new community features:

1. Recent Comments - The right sidebar now contains a section near the top for recent comments. This highlights the last 5 comments made on PickTheBrain and provides a link back to the thread so you can hop right in to the discussion.
2. Threaded Comments - If you want to reply directly to a specific comment, rather than posting all the way at the bottom of the thread, you can now post directly below it with the thread comments feature. Just click the “reply” link next to the commenter’s name that you’d like to reply to and your comment will automatically be nested below it.

Any other features or content ideas that you’d like to see on PickTheBrain? Shout em out in the comments.

No, you don’t need to rent a campus, hire professors and start charging tuition. Setting up a personal university means taking your self-education as seriously as any schooling you manage pay for. While regular university is expensive and stops when you get a degree, your personal university continues indefinitely and can be run for free.

I’ve always been educating myself. From learning basic programming languages in my pre-teens through to reading about quantum physics and world religions in my spare time today. But it has only been in the last few years that I’ve gotten serious about my self-education. In that short time I went from reading a handful of books each year to over seventy.

But forming your personal university isn’t just reading a lot of books, just like getting a degree isn’t the result of taking random classes. Taking a more well-thought approach to what you learn in your spare time can give you an edge over the haphazard learner. Click here to continue »