“The world faces a clear choice. If we invest relatively modest amounts, many more poor farmers will be able to feed their families. If we don’t, one in seven people will continue living needlessly on the edge of starvation. My annual letter this year is an argument for making the choice to keep on helping extremely poor people build self-sufficiency.” Read on…
I’ve been working on some new blogs on nonprofits & volunteering, so stay tuned for that.
Life, has been crazy busy. If you care to read, hop on over to my personal blog Gracie’s Empty World, where I blog about food, farmer’s markets, fitness, travel, and other random things.
I can’t wait to see this. One young student summed it up quite nicely, “There is no appreciation for women intellectuals in the media.” And it’s true. There isn’t. In the media, we see women valued for their beauty & their youth, which is fleeting. We get reality TV shows like The Real Housewives.. (of whatever) & Keeping Up with the Kardashians, and the women on these shows are narcissistic, and quite frankly, not that smart. They are preoccupied with shopping, socializing, instigating drama, and a whole lot of nothing. We can do better than that. Much better.
“MissRepresentation.org believes that all people should be equally represented in our media, that our voices should be heard and that we should all be valued for our talents, capacity as leaders, and ability to contribute to the world at large.” Hop on over to MissRepresentation.org for more info!
One thing I love about working in the marketing world is that there’s never a shortage of things to learn or a shortage of content to learn from. The real difficulty comes from figuring out the useful stuff, from the not-so-useful stuff. With a bajillion blogs out there, which ones are a must-add to your Google Reader?
Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik – You cannot work in online marketing without understanding Web Analytics. Avinash, the king of all analysis ninjas, writes what I consider the most practical blog in the world of digital marketing. Whether you specialize in email marketing or social media or search (or all of them), Avinash explains how to set up web analytics, create reports that are actually useful (yes, “visitors” to your website & “pageviews” are actually useless metrics, reporting squirrels), how to figure out which KPIs matter to your business & the metrics with which to measure success. So for example, if you do “social media” stuff for your job, and one of your strategies is to “engage with influencers,” and you’ve managed to get your webinar mentioned in a few blogs, you’d probably want to know which of those blogs was successful in driving not just traffic, but conversions. You can do that easily if you’ve properly set up your tracking & goals, and next time, you’ll know which bloggers to reach out to again. Also, you will never again report numbers in aggregate & you will fall asleep thinking about segmenting data.
Web Strategist by Jeremiah Owyang – Jeremiah is an industry analyst and according to his blog, he strives to “deliver insight on disruptive technologies and their impact on how companies communicate with their customers.” This is a great blog for anyone looking for research and insight into the digital marketing industry. He mostly writes about social media. I found some of the research he conducted particularly useful when I was helping my company develop a corporate social media strategy (see: How Corporations Should Prioritize Social Business Budgets) or when I was evaluating social media management systems (see: The State and Future of the Social Media Management Space) I like reading research about the industry, because it provides benchmarks for my own work
The SEOmoz Blog – Just like you can’t work in online marketing without understanding web analytics, you REALLY cannot work in online marketing without understanding search engines, how to optimize your website for quality search traffic, etc. SEOmoz provides practical information (e.g. “how-to” not just “what-to-do”) for search marketing pros. One of my favorite things about Rand Fishkin and his team at SEOmoz is that they conduct experiments and tests ALL THE TIME. We all know that Google’s algorithm is top secret, but thanks to SEOmoz’s Search Engine Ranking Factors Survey results, we have a pretty good idea of what the Google bots like to crawl and spit up in the SERPs. Also, did you know that social media impacts search?
I am also in the process of creating a book list, which will come out at the end of the year, since I still have a few books that I started but have not finished reading.
Add your favorite blogs or websites in the comments below.
A word so easy to understand, and yet, so difficult to achieve in practice.
Today, the New York legislature voted to legalize gay marriage, a big victory in the road to marriage equality. A small victory on the road to achieving equality for all.
In 1776, the United States declared independence from Great Britain. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The “truths” he refers to are our natural and legal rights, our human rights (defined as “basic rights and freedoms that all people are entitled to regardless of nationality, sex, national or ethnic origin, race, religion, language”).
Maybe he should have written, “all those in the human race are created equal.” Maybe he shouldn’t have left so much up to interpretation. Maybe, just maybe, we would be living in a different world today.
That was 1776.
In the last 235 years of American history when was there ever a period where we WEREN’T fighting for equality?
If our leaders followed the constitution, we never should have needed to vote for these rights. The constitution makes it clear that rights cannot be taken away from a minority by a majority.
Some have called the fight for marriage equality the “civil rights test of our generation.” I would have to agree with this statement. There are lots of things I know we will accomplish during my lifetime, and I know that achieving marriage equality will be one of them. Maybe next, we can tackle gender equality and then racial equality. The latter two probably will not happen in my lifetime.
One day, I would like to get married. And one day, I would like to have children. I don’t ever want to have that difficult conversation with my children on why, because of some inherent difference, they don’t have the same rights or opportunities as other children. I don’t want them to grow up in a world where they don’t have the freedom to pursue happiness, whatever that might mean to them.
Will there ever be a day where we won’t need to fight for equal rights?
It’s been a few months since I last posted. Realizing that “writing more” was one of my New Year’s resolutions, I clearly failed on that resolution. I’m currently working on new content, so be on the lookout for more posts!
“When I was a little boy, your grandmother gave me five cents every day to buy lunch. But I didn’t buy lunch with the money she gave me. Instead, I saved the money to buy chickens. And then I kept the chickens under my bed until they grew big enough to eat.”
This was just one of the many stories my dad recounted to me of his childhood. A small wave of sadness came over me at the thought of slaughtering family pets for meals. Well, I guess they weren’t really family pets. But still. My dad taught me a valuable lesson with this story. Even as a 12 year old kid listening to this story, I could see the huge disparity between the conditions my dad grew up with in rural China and the conditions I live with in suburban America. He didn’t have much growing up.
Millions of people in the world live without things I take for granted every single day: a home, clothing & shoes, fresh food, clean water. These are what we in America consider basic needs. Yet, there are millions of people in the world that would consider these luxuries.
So this year, I’m giving my birthday to Charity:Water, a nonprofit organization that works to bring clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations. Why Water? Learn more here.
Celebrate my 25th birthday with me by donating on my campaign page: http://mycharitywater.org/gracecheung. 100% of your donation will go to fund clean water projects in developing nations.
Thank you =)
…I wake up and wonder what my life would have been like had I been born in another country under very different circumstances.
Because of that, I’m eternally grateful to live in a country where I have access to an education, where women are valued almost as much as men, and where I have the freedoms that most people in this world only dream of.
Stay humble.
Most of my friends know that I generally don’t accept gifts on my birthday or on Christmas, unless it’s just a book or something homemade. It’s not that I don’t believe in giving gifts, but because I would rather share experiences with my friends and family, rather than to get “stuff.” In college, instead of allowing my friends to give me presents on my birthday, I asked them to donate to a cause of my choosing, because I know that money could have been better spent elsewhere.
It’s not my birthday yet, but it is the holiday season, and this holiday season, I would like to ask my readers to please donate to the Wikimedia Foundation.
The donation does not have to be large, just $20 or whatever amount you have to donate. Wikipedia, and all other wikis out there, are the ideal example of what humans can accomplish just by collaborating and donating a bit of their time and knowledge to a greater good. It’s created by volunteers and sustained by volunteers. I once made a statement that just because something isn’t profitable, doesn’t mean it’s not worth our time or effort. People thought I was crazy. But I’m glad someone out there shares that same vision. We can accomplish more in an open, collaborative world.
This is one of my all time favorite TED talks. My blog is about causes and there’s no cause closer to my heart than this one, to teach each and every child about food. Why? Because nutrition has an enormous impact on the way we feel and on our cognition (and so does exercise). Most Americans think they can cure anything with a pill. Have a headache? Take aspirin. Have depression? Take Prozac. Have an irregular menstrual cycle? Go on birth control pills. Overweight? Take this diet pill, get this surgery, etc. And so on and so forth.
Nobody ever considers the fact that something as simple as changing our diets can potentially help cure all these problems. Chronic headaches could be a symptom of the food you’re eating. Most of the people I take classes with regularly at the gym are the most positive and upbeat people I’ve ever met at my life. I’m pretty sure none of them are depressed. And, I’ve read cases where women with polycystic ovarian syndrome were able to overcome it by changing their diet.
Why treat diseases when you can prevent them?
People make time for the things that are most important to them. If your health is important to you, if your children’s health is important to you, if your family’s health is important to you, please take 20 minutes to watch the video below.
Key Points:
People say they don’t have time to cook or eat healthy. Or that they don’t have the time to exercise. But yet, they make the time to watch TV or watch movies or play video games or surf the Internet, and so on. Like I said before, people make time for the things that are most important to them. So, is your health worth it? I think so.
