“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” -Antione de Saint Exupéry

All 135 characters of this quote fits snugly into the 140 character limit of Twitter, but instead of just tweeting it (which I did), I blogged it.

I think it’s fairly obvious why, but at the risk of having excess I will explain. I had a whole blog post centered around the quote, but the rest wasn’t an improvement on what he wrote, it was excess.

All I can say is that throughout our lives we surround ourselves with excess, excess house, excess car, excess cable channels, excess words in a blog post. And all of this excess only leads to more excess; electricity bills, gas bills, cable bills… We live highly inflated lifestyles believing that these things make us happy, but the feeling of happiness is fleeting, takes us off track, and leaves us wanting more. Our car is no longer the latest and greatest, so we trade it in for another, a bigger/slimmer TV comes out so ours is already outdated, our wants turn into “needs” and we truly think of them that way. When this happens we lose focus of the little joys that make us happiest; things like watching the sunrise, reading a good book, meditating, and spending time with loved ones.

I won’t proclaim to have the answers to perfect happiness, but I would bet that it starts out by stripping away the excess in our lives.

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I’ve been fairly good about trying to keep my work life, personal life, and blogging all separate, and I’ve taken a few steps to try and keep it that way.  I don’t specifically mention where I work in this blog (and I never will), Young and Frugal is not on my professional resume, I’m pretty sure no one at work knows that I blog, and if you know my full name it’s either because you actually know me, or you read Brazen Careerist.

Not that any of those steps are foolproof for keeping my identity secret (they are not…especially having my full name on Brazen Careerist), but they have enabled me to reserve some deniability and relative anonymity.  These mild few steps have also allowed readers to find me with relative ease, but not allow people looking for me to easily find my blog.  However, my Google ranking turned my relative comfort in all of this upside down.

I’ve been trying to understand what my ranking means for me, and it’s confusing.  The reality of it is that all someone has to do is search for my name to learn more about me than they ever would by reading my resume.  Part of me thinks that this is the coolest thing ever, and the other part of me thinks that I probably should not have written about my boss being bitchy.  Regardless, it’s out there and I can’t hide from it, so I figure that it’s time for me to take off my corporate camo, stop resisting, and embrace some of Dan Shawbel’s advice to more actively brand myself.

In order to provide a cohesive brand for myself I’ve listed a few steps that I will use to get myself started.

• My name is Daniel Bowen.  You can find me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
• Young and Frugal is something to be proud of.  It will appear on my professional resume starting tonight.
• No more online political debates. (This one should be a lot easier for me now that the election is over.)
• I won’t advertise my online presence at work, but if questioned it won’t be denied.
• I will work to create a professional website for myself.
• I will try to improve my Google Rankings.

I don’t know why I have waited so long to do this, but I am praying that this new experiment is a success.

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