James Dean is an iconic figure of legendary proportions.  He was a paragon of coolness who occupied the middle ground between normalcy and anti-social rebellion.  He took up lots of space (both physical and psychological) and his body language simultaneously conveyed extreme confidence and boyish vulnerability.

For those who’ve forgotten Jimmy’s coolness, see below for a reminder:

Anyway, you might not be a real bad*ss, but with Jimmy as our guide we’ll be showing you . . .

7 Rules for Being a Body Language Bad*ss

Rule #1: Lean on Stuff While Standing

Gravity is a fact of life, but a fact of life that Jimmy had little little time for.  As a result, he expended little energy holding himself up and supporting his own weight.  If Jimmy was near an object, you can put your money on him leaning on it sooner or later.  (It seems nearly impossible to find a picture of James not propping himself up on one object or another).  This doesn’t just apply to the “trunk” of his body, it also applies to his limbs: James often took all of this a step further by propping up one leg (see the middle picture, above) or using an object to support one or both arms (see gun picture, above). (more…)

My mom is awesome (see Disneyland picture to the right).  But awesomeness just isn’t correlated with knowledge of RSS, and my feed hasn’t seen hide nor hair of mom since day 1.

So how does my mom read The Growing Life and other productivity blogs?  Not via email, because she never checks it.  She checks my feed with Alltop (hopefully before rushing over to Zenhabits :-), which is an interesting project started by Guy Kawasaki.  (If that name sounds familiar, it’s because Guy wrote the book on business evangelism and was one of the original Apple employees responsible for marketing the Macintosh; he’s also a well-respected blogger).

Mom’s only recently been able to pick me on Alltop, after Guy graciously added me to the lifehacks section. Here’s a little more information . . . (more…)