I cleaned up a bunch of stuff around the site today!

• I put all the relevant information about me on the About Jon page above, instead of spamming it all over every page. You’re here for the content, not to listen to me ramble on about my stupid ass. :)
• I created a Contact Jon page after realizing that I don’t have my email address listed anywhere. Oops.
• All sorts of social bookmarking links on the bottom of each post. If you like a post of mine, you can submit it to del.icio.us, Digg, Fark, Blogmarks or Yahoo with a single click!
• I created a MUCH more friendly Archives page. Now you can go back and look at my old posts in reverse chronological order, listing the title of each post. The old way was stupid and took up a lot of space.
• Added a new book to the smArtist Reading page, added a few more favorite smArticles to the Most Popular smArticles page, slightly rewrote the explanation of a smArtist, turned that text into a part of the header graphic to clear up annoying formatting problems, shortened the excerpt text on the Recent Comments, and cleaned up a bunch of other little things.

Is there anything else I might be missing that would make the site more user-friendly?

I added a link up at the top of the page to a current list of my favorite books, and a quick description of why I love it and why I recommend it. I’ve had A LOT of people ask me over time what my favorite books are, and I figured that it was time to get them all down in one place. So there it is!

I also renamed “Jon’s most popular articles” to “Most Popular smArticles” because I am a douchebag and love the smArtist name. Enjoy my megalomania!

Photographic evidence of Jon Jones in full Retard Regalia

Okay, so here’s the full story…

For Halloween at NCsoft we had a company-wide costume contest. I wasn’t going to participate but at the last minute I had a stroke of genius and decided that I was going to be “retarded.”

I wore this at work all day. That’s a too-small kids’ Spongebob Squarepants shirt stained in juice and coffee and smeared in guacamole, a pair of red boxers with a drawstring, kneehigh olive green and blood red socks, snow boots, a Spongebob bib turned around backwards to be a cape, a giant stupid wig, an 8-ball bicycle helmet and (thanks Josh!) a pair of mittens safety-pinned to my shirt.

I was in character for a good deal of the day. I attended our team meeting dressed like that, laughing at everything everybody said, headbutting walls, trying to eat my hair and, when called upon to give a status report, I started to give it, then paused halfway, squinted my eyes through, said “UUUUHHHH OHHHHHHHHH” really loud, as though I’d just shat myself. I’d run up and down the halls, waving at people I knew, engaging in ‘tardspeak (”HIIII TAAYYLOOORRR!!! DUHUHUHHHUHUHUH!! *snort*”), etc. Everyone loved it, I didn’t seem to offend anyone and it was all in good fun.

Until I discovered that NCsoft’s Global Art Director from Korea — apparently the #2 man in ALL of NCsoft worldwide — was in town, that day, and wanted to meet with me for my very first project art review. With ten minutes’ notice. With no way to reschedule. And best of all, without a change of clothes.

To my credit, I went to the meeting in full retard regalia without trying to cover up what I was. I claimed I always dressed like that. :)

At the end of the meeting, he asked what I was actually supposed to be through the translator, and I told him “mentally retarded.” And he said “Ah, okay!” then turned to the Art Director and spoke a bunch of Korean, then did the back-of-your-hand-slapping-the-chest motion and went “DUURRR!!!” then finished the sentence in Korean, and the AD started laughing. Truly, some things do transcend language barriers.

It was still pretty fucking humiliating though. :)

I’m stuck at home sick and have been for the last six days, so I’ve been super bored, and tweaking on my blog a little. On my About Page, I added a link to my MySpace page and my YouTube channel and my Amazon wishlist and My LinkedIn page.

I love expanding my web presence in little ways like that. :) We’ll see how well it works out. It’s mostly interesting to me because I used to be a very shy, quiet, introverted person that didn’t like doing this sort of thing. In fact, I’d have been terrified of doing this at one point. But I think that isn’t healthy for me, so this is a fun way to experiment with living my life openly and without any inhibitions, posturing or self-consciousness. So anyone that wants to can see essentially everything there is to know about me, good and bad. Exactly the same things the people that are close to me know and see.

It’s an interesting way to live, having nothing to hide.

One of my core beliefs is that if you do something enough, you can make it a habit. Usually people think of bad habits like eating bad food, or smoking, or picking your nose. But there are also good habits like going to the gym, getting up early and washing behind your ears. The more you consciously act to do these things, the more UNCONSCIOUS it becomes. Then you’re doing them without even thinking because, hey, you’re used to it, and that’s just the way things go.

That’s a powerful tool. That’s how the mind works. If you can set out a roadplan of good habits to adopt, and start consciously doing them one by one until they’re automatic behavior, eventually you’ll have a pretty awesome portfolio of good habits.

One of those habits I’ve started adopting is Incremental Progress. If you do a little bit of something good whenever you can, you’ll end up with something great, and you’ll be surprised how easy it was to get there.

Here’s an example:

If every time you go into your kitchen, you wash a couple dishes and put them in the dishwasher, eventually you’ll have a full load you can wash. You won’t have to sit down for 20 or 30 minutes and clear out two sinks full of dishes and make a huge ordeal out of it. By just doing a little bit at a time, you accomplish a big job, in small increments. You never really noticed doing it, but there it is, all done. It’s a nice feeling.

I think getting into the habit of doing that with EVERYTHING can be a huge boost to being successful.

Here’s some ideas:

• Spend a little extra time thinking about a gift for a loved one, to make it special.
• Spend another fifteen minutes on a piece of artwork, to make it shine.
• Put a little bit more effort into cooking yourself dinner, to make it that much tastier.
• Do a few more pushups before you rest, to see how far you can push it.
• Stay a little longer at a party and try to make a new friend before you leave, for the sheer pleasure of it.

There are all sorts of little things like that you can do. A little bit more effort applied over time, consistently, can make a huge difference. Case in point: Grand Canyon! Not everything good has to be some huge damn ordeal, or an EVENT. Take something you normally do, sit back for a second, then add an extra little bit of love to make it special. It never takes that long, it doesn’t need to be hard, and a little bit of something is better than nothing at all.

The more you do it, the more it’ll become a habit, and one day you’ll wake up and realize:

• You give truly thoughtful gifts to people you care about, and they appreciate it.
• You’re a better artist, and you’re respected for it.
• You’re a great cook, and you love doing it even more.
• You can do a lot of pushups, and you’re a lot stronger than you thought.
• You get along with anyone anywhere, and you make friends everywhere you go.

Substitute anything you do normally with this. When you look at a dirty countertop at home, just clean it while you’re thinking of it. If you’re emptying a litterbox and see a persistently sticky clump, give it a good scrape instead of leaving it. If you’re making a pot of coffee, spend an extra few seconds measuring out the best amount of coffee grounds to use.See, I don’t think anyone famous or great is great because of any one thing they did. Sure, they may have done amazing things at one point or another, but you never hear about all the buildup to it. I think success in all its forms comes from a LOT of little things, little incremental achievements.

The way I think about it is this:

It’s all a game of odds. Every time you put a little bit more effort into something, you increase your chances of a favorable outcome. If you do a LOT of little things, you increase your chances of a favorable outcome by a LOT. Never overlook small things just because you’re too focused on making big, earth-moving events. Everything counts, even if it’s just a little. And if you can reach a critical mass of little things, big things will happen. Most people just don’t think of it like that… and you can use that to your advantage.

If you can make things like incremental progress a habit, you’ll get in the habit of simply automatically kicking ass and not even realize you’re doing it.

Wouldn’t that be nice?

Recently I started curbing my impulse buying by stopping just short of purchasing it, look at how much I would have spent, then go spend twice that amount paying down my credit card or depositing it into a high-interest-bearing savings account.

It’s been quite helpful. If I can turn that into a consistent habit, I can turn my urge to impulsively buy things I don’t need into a way to pay off my debt even faster or start saving money. :)

If you’re gonna spend money, why not do it on something that’ll save you money, or even generate money?

One of the things I’ve found to be the biggest hindrance of concentration and productivity at work is distracting stuff in my field of view.

It could be a lot of things… action figures, art books, notebooks, meeting notes, any gewgaw or knick-knack the mind can conjure. But every single item in direct or peripheral view of your workspace is a potential distraction.

I’m not saying you should get rid of everything on your desk. I’m saying you should move it all out of your immediate field of view while you work. If you’re supposed to be focusing on your monitor, move anything that can draw your eyes away from it.

Ideally, when you’re looking at what you’re supposed to be looking at, you’ll see two hands, a keyboard and a monitor and nothing more. You’ll have to turn completely and inconveniently around to start distracting yourself from the job at hand.

Identify the things you’re supposed to do that are important to you, and identify the things that distract you from that. Don’t mix them. Put them in to separate places and make it a discouraging amount of work to switch between those two classes of activity (productive and unproductive).  If you can raise the level of difficulty in engaging in unproductive work, you’ll be more likely to maintain productivity.

Harness your natural talents and don’t rely too much on your simple will to succeed and be productive, because that can falter. Make it idiot-proof. Imagine yourself at your worst and laziest, and erect barriers to unproductivity for THAT guy. Then be your best. That’ll ensure that even at your worst, you can’t help but do your best. Don’t leave that idiot a way out, and stack the odds in favor of making yourself proud. :)

Something useful I’ve learned in the last few months is that you should learn to be strategically irrational. This has benefited me in two particularly helpful ways and I’ve incorporated these into absolutes in my life:

1) You should never have a reason to be happy.

2) You should never have a reason to be confident.

It’s useful for a person to be happy, right? People should be happy. They shouldn’t have to live in misery or be unhappy, ever. People function better when they’re happy and they get more done.

Likewise, it’s beneficial to be confident in yourself. If you doubt yourself, you don’t try as hard and you can’t get nearly as much done. It’s also harder to be a leader if you’re not confident in yourself, because people can’t see the ideal in you that makes them want to follow you. Who would follow someone that doesn’t know where they’re going?

You don’t need a reason to breathe to keep doing it, do you? So why do you need a reason to be happy or confident? If they’re critical to your survival, why do you need a reason to do them?

If you can accept those two ideas, then you’ll agree that being happy and being confident are pretty instrumental to success. So it’s pretty simple when you get down to it and accept the possiblity of suspending logic and reason. :)
Now that leads to the question: What can you do to safeguard those ideas and ensure that you’ll always be happy and confident?

Don’t have a reason for being that way.

Sure, it’d be nice if you could know objectively that you are a big freakin’ badass, that you have 1.5 billion compelling reasons to be happy and every reason in the universe to be confident in your abilities. But that makes them fallible.

The root of it is the fact that for every REASON for being that you can comprehend, there is an objection that can arise that will counter it.

It’s easier not being happy and not being confident, and your mind will conjure up whatever reason it can to subvert you and make you doubt yourself. For every reason you have, you will find one more objection to squash it.

If you can accept the freaky ideal of not having a reason for being happy, you can stop those objections dead in their tracks.

Think about it — if you’re happy and confident, and you have absolutely no reason for it, and it’s not based in reality at all, but you cling to it nevertheless — what on earth could possibly dislodge that belief? What could make you stop being happy? What outer or inner force could convince you to stop being confident? You can be impervious to reasoning yourself out of good habits.

It’s a vitally useful stronghold of the mind to

1) Define what qualities are important to you in order to succeed, and

2) Adopt what measures are necessary to safeguard those against any potential adversary, including yourself.

I’m the biggest fan of logic and reason that you could possibly imagine, and coming to understand this entire message that I’ve given involved turning my entire world upside down and doubting everything I’d come to know in my whole life… but it was one of the most important things I’ve ever done, and it’s so goddamned important that I needed to tell other people about it.

I’ll leave you with this thought:

If you need a reason to be happy or confident, YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG.