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1

Voila! The new quirkyalone.net!

Jun 13, 2009 - Written by Sasha Cagen  |  Filed under: Relationships, Website

Today I am oh so pleased to unveil the new, resdesigned quirkyalone.net!

The new site has been designed to showcase popular content so that when you land on the blog, there are easy ways to click and find more of what interests you. The changes include:
- Daily fresh content on the blog. Soon we’ll be adding new contributors writing on the single life, quirkytogether marriages, politics, pop culture, travel, and more.
- Top tabs surfacing the most popular and featured blog posts along with contributors and archives
- Sample chapters from the book
- Cool new galleries to display images, like those in the IQD party pack
- Threaded comments (now you can reply to someone else’s comment on a post)

Thank you to Randy Jones from Aquatoad Design for working with me on every last detail. Thanks also to Sara Cambridge, Matt Albiniak, and Bonni Evenson.

Please take a whirl around and leave comments with any bugs you find. I was eager to launch before I head to New York for a sure-to-be wacky and surreal Twitter event: the 140 characters conference, where I will be a “character.” In all the last-minute madness, I haven’t had time to do full QA on QA–so eager to hear about any bugs you find! Looking forward to your comments, feedback, and ideas and the continuing evolution of quirkyalone.net. xo Sasha

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4

What’s your quirkyalone story?

Apr 28, 2009 - Written by Sasha Cagen  |  Filed under: Uncategorized

Sometimes authors talk about their books as babies. With no disrespect to the mothers of human beings, it’s true that when you publish a book, it feels like giving birth. You can’t just forget your new child either once it’s out. You take care of it over the years, pushing it out into the world, loving and caring for it so that it can have a life of its own. For me, quirkyalone is a conceptual baby because it’s had so many incarnations: book, website, holiday, workshop (summer camp for adults).

I have tended to quirkyalone now, amazingly, for ten years. It’s been ten years since I first uttered “quirkyalone” to friends, and nine years since I first pushed it out to the world in an essay in To-Do List magazine. (Five years since the book was published and this website launched.)

Continue Reading →

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3

Find Your Life Purpose in Five Easy Steps

Apr 23, 2009 - Written by Sasha Cagen  |  Filed under: Featured, Personal Growth, Solitude

postits

1. Meet a friend at a café. Bring post-it notes.

2. Give your friend and yourself five post-it notes each. Tell your friend to write down the five most important things in his or her life, right now, at this moment. Do it yourself. You could write anything: a person, a feeling, a place, a way of being in the world, or a value.

3. After you have both written down your five things, lay them out on the table.

4. Now, you must give one of them up. Choose the first thing you would give away if you had to. What could you live without? Then, choose the second thing you would live without. Continue discarding things one by one.

5. The final post-it note is the one thing you don’t think you could live without. This is your life purpose, or you could also say, the most important thing in your life.

Where did this exercise come from? A new friend introduced it to me. My friend has been enormously successful as a doctor, academic, and biotech CEO, but the purpose of his life wasn’t completely self-evident to him until he went through a period of dedicated inquiry. He offered to do this exercise with me (he supplied the post-its) and explained that you can do the exercise repeatedly. The answers might change over time. He says the challenge is to live your life to truly serve that final post-it note (or rather, what you wrote in it) and to constantly ask yourself whether what you are doing is aligned with that which is most important to you. He’s on something of a mission to help other people drill down into their life purposes. He often encourages other CEOs (who think he’s crazy) to go through the post-it exercise. Their default most-important-thing is often to make money (to provide for their families), but a more specific answer is more of a guide.

I won’t tell you my life purpose because it seems more interesting to let that by mysterious, but I will say, It’s been an illuminating exercise that continues to resonate. I’ve been thinking about the last post-it I left on the table a few times a week, asking myself whether the things I am actually doing, day-to-day, express what I wrote. Keeping a central theme in mind makes life feel more sacred and less random.

The next morning, I couldn’t resist sharing this exercise with my roommate. And then with friends. So I wanted to share it with a larger audience, including you.

Order a latte and whip out some post-it notes. Bon courage.