Two weeks ago I posed the question: “are you doing what you love?” Thank you for your wonderful answers. Some notable responses included:

• “Yes!!Yes!!! I love what I am doing!!! I get up everyday and say I love this day!!”
• “I’m currently doing what I like, and working towards doing what I love.”
• “I took a risk and it paid off. I’m doing what I’ve always wanted to do.”

If you would like to read more of the responses (there were over 48), here is the post: Ask the Reader: Are You Doing What You Love?

Also, we have a number of copies of Sway: The Irrestistible Pull of Irrational Behavior by Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman to give away for our favorite responses. The recipients of the book are:

• Alex Fayle
• Mr. Smith
• Alice
• Victor Stachura
• Lee
• Sam Smith
• Jen
• Stephanie
• Simon Hill
• Ned
• Jamie

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In the past couple weeks I’ve had the privilege of doing 2 very interesting interviews on developing a passionate career.

The first is with our very own Peter, over at his personal site, The Change Blog. The site recently got a new name and a brand new design. Head over and check it out.

Career Transitions: John Wesley talks about the Social Media, Taking Risks and Chasing Your Dreams

The second is with Chris Guillebeau over at The Art of Nonconformity. The group interview includes several well known bloggers include Darren Rowse, J.D. Roth, and Leo Babauta.

Follow Your Passion? The Blogger Roundup 

In last weeks article The End of Wealth, we offered a small prize of a $20 Amazon gift certificate to one person who left a comment.

The winner we have chosen is Bruce from Brucisms. He said:

“I believe we are turning a corner. After two decades of working 80 hours per week to have the nicest house, car, clothes – a lot of people are just tired and empty.

It is my (possibly overly optimistic) belief that there is a true movement toward responsibility and values. I think we see this both in terms of increased interest in both spirituality and conservation. I think a lot of us have awakened after a couple of decades of materialism to a hangover, and realize that we aren’t kids anymore.”

But that wasn’t all. As a follow up, Bruce had the following book suggestion:

“As a follow up for your readers – I would highly recommend Jason Jennings’ wonderful book “Think Big, Act Small.” After researching the top public and private companies in the US, he and his team narrowed the field to 10 companies that had achieved 10% increases in profit every year for 10 or more consecutive years. The extraordinary thing is that the common factor in all these companies were exceptionally high values!

It seems that doing the right thing pays the best over the long term…”

Thank you to every one who left a comment. You had some very interesting things to say, and it certainly wasn’t easy to pick just one winner.

You’ve probably noticed some subtle improvements on PickTheBrain over the past month. Stuff like better images in posts, competitions, and book giveaways.

The explanation for this is that I’ve started doing less, and Peter from IWillChangeYourLife has come on board as the primary editor!

I’ll still be around, writing posts, taking part in discussions, and managing the site in general, but having Peter around to help out will allow me to spend time on other projects while continuing to improve the site.

If you’d like to know a bit more about Peter, check out his interview at the TheNext45Years or head over to his personal blog, which is a great read. Also, feel free to contact him at Peter@pickthebrain.com.

New EBooks from Scott and Leo

Two good friends of PickTheBrain, Scott Young and Leo Babauta, have recently published ebooks that are definitely worth checking out.

Scott’s book is about holistic learning, and provides some great tips for how to learn more while studying less. You can check out a preview copy of the book here.

Leo’s new book is called The Zen Habits Handbook for Life. It’s basically a well organized and nicely designed compilation of all the best ZenHabits posts.

I was fortunate enough to receive free review copies of each book, and both of them are well worth the investment.

Also, I’ve just launched a new blog, totally unrelated to PTB, about media and technology. If you’re interested in that type of stuff head over and check it out or just grab the RSS feed.

Well February has come and gone for another year. Here at PickTheBrain we wish to thank you for your continued support. We particularly appreciate those readers who subscribe to our RSS feed, take the time to leave thoughtful comments and/ or vote for our articles on the social media.

In case you missed them, the following articles were the most popular in February:

• 5 Ways To Help Your Children Turn Their Dreams Into Reality
• Embracing the Beauty of Sadness
• 10 Effective Productivity Tips for Writers
• Seeking Solitude: 17 Ways to Find Time for Yourself
• Why Intelligent People Tend to Be Unhappy
• The #1 Way To Shake Up Your Life

Here are a few other links I recommend checking out:

• Epictetus’ Top 7 Timeless Pearls of Wisdom – The Positivity Blog
• Learn More, Study Less Released – Scott H Young
• Punk Rock Your Life: The Simple Six-Letter Word That Determines Success – Zen Habits
• Learning to Dream…. Again – Iwillchangeyourlife
• What Makes You Come Alive? – Awake At The Wheel

Competition Winners

The winners of the 15 copies of No More Mondays by Dan Miller (see Monday’s article The #1 Way to Shake Up Your Life) are: Jack, Amir, Terhi, Smith, Joanna, Shawn Williamson, Evan Pederson, Lola Broadus, Adam Chamness, Julie, Erin Marie, David Fromoz, Erin, D, Carole.

If you missed out on a copy of this book, stay tuned as we have another great book to give away this coming Monday.

This week I was fortunate enough to be interviewed by 2 insightful bloggers.

• Over at Adversity University, Stephen Hopson posed some questions about the origins of PickTheBrain and my personal experiences online.
• At The Next 45 Years, Alex Blackwell included me in the Blogging Heroes Series where I answered his questions about building a successful blog.

If that sounds interesting, go check it out. Hopefully you’ll enjoy reading the interviews as much as I did participating in them.

Also, for the Twitter users out there and those of you thinking about trying it, PickTheBrain is now officially on Twitter via the badge in the right sidebar.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Twitter, it’s a microblogging platform that allows people to send short messages back and forth. I’ll use it to post links to all the great articles I come across online but don’t have time to blog about.

So go ahead and start following us! And if you’re active on Twitter, my personal account is jwesley, where I post all the non-PTB stuff I find interesting. Start following me and I’ll do the same, or just leave your Twitter handle in the comments.

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.

PickTheBrain has two new sponsors for the month of November that we’d like to briefly thank and introduce.

Lumosity is a brain fitness program, comprised of games and exercises, scientifically designed to improve your memory, attention, and processing speed. I first discovered them in PC Magazine’s list of the Top 100 Undiscovered Sites. They offer a free trial of the brain games — I’ve tried it myself — the games are fun and high quality.

ChargedAudio specializes in unlocking the power of the subconscious mind through subliminal messaging. They offer a free trial CD and ebook, so you can test their products at minimal cost.

There are still sponsorship spots available for November. If you have a product or service that you’d like to share with the PickTheBrain community, check out the advertising page for more information or send us a message.

After 7 months as the sole content creator for PickTheBrain.com, I’ve decided to open up the site to other writers. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time (it wasn’t an easy decision), but I’m confident it’s the right one and I’m excited to move forward.

Here are my primary reasons.

1. Diversity

Based on the quality of the comments, I know there are intelligent people interested in contributing to the discussion. Having multiple voices will bring diversity to the site’s content and style. It will allow the site to cover topics that I know little about and will help readers discover other talented writers.

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Readers who’ve been following PickTheBrain for the past few months may have noticed my inability to pick a tagline and stick with it. Each one I chose felt wrong after a couple weeks because the purpose of the site continued to evolve. I started writing without a plan and followed my inspiration. After more than 6 months of experimentation and feedback, I’ve finally found a purpose and a tagline that I’d like to explain.

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