Tag: Philip Dodson

Stick to what you believe in

Posted on by philipdodson

Easier said than done sometimes. We have decided at Team Dodson to stop using Amazon.

Amazon use a lot of temporary staff and pay them poorly. Then they pay virtually no tax, only £4.2M on £4bn of turnover.

So they use us to make huge profits, kill UK small businesses, and then contribute nothing back into the country that they make their money in.

Yet the rest of us have to pay tax, see austerity measures put in place and see many cut backs effecting our lives. If Amazon paid their fair share of tax, then we’d have more money to provide the important things in society. Also if they paid their staff better, then their staff could also enjoy their lives a bit more and be able to afford the things that would make life better.

However, I now realise just how much we all depend on something like Amazon. First is the convenience of just sitting at home/work and just clicking and then the product appears. Also, it is usually cheaper and some things you can’t find elsewhere.

But we are determined that we are going to stop using them and it isn’t easy initially. However if you want to make change it isn’t easy.

I takes a bit longer to find stuff, but most of the suppliers to Amazon have their own sites and often deliver. Yes it does mean going back to the old fashioned ways of going to a shop. It may mean paying a bit more. However, you hope by paying a bit more that the alternative suppliers pay their staff better and that they pay their taxes.

Something I’ve learnt in life, the best things and right things often require hard work to get. So if you don’t like Amazon, or anything else, the best way to change it is to stop supporting them, even if it is hard.

Writing, that seems so easy

Posted on by philipdodson

I have always been able to write well and when I first thought about actually publishing stuff, I thought this will be easy, it’s only writing.

750 Words

I started to blog for my own site, the @Work Hub site and various other sites as guest blogger. I found it much more difficult than I had realised, especially when people asked me to write something on a pre-defined topic and by a certain deadline.

As soon as there was a pressure, then the writing became hard and I would often put it off and leave to the last minute.

The other thing that I found myself doing was correcting typos/spelling as I went along. This I found would interrupt my flow and that would make it doubly difficult to get the thoughts out.

So frustrated by this, as I really wanted to write and after all I can’t be that hard!! I talked to few others that write regularly. Then one day chatting to my mate Bernie, who’s a regular and great writer, he talked about 750 words, a site where you write 750 words daily and privately. Initially, I thought shit, I struggle to do a few blog posts, 750 words a day.

Anyway, I signed up to 750Words.com in September 2014 and so far I have written 112,248 words over 138 days, so I have missed about 30 days. If someone had said to me before September to find time and inspiration to write that many words in 5 months, I would have simply laughed. My best streak was 60 days in a row.

I now find writing easy again and my best pieces, that I publish, come from 750 words. This is because there is no pressure, it’s after all a private post. So I sit and just write, I don’t worry about the spelling or typos and I lust ‘spit’ it all out on the keyboard and go with the flow.

Then if at the end I like it and think it is good enough to share, then I copy and paste it into WordPress, tidy it up, fix the spelling and add a pic. Hit the publish button and boom, job done.

So I now find writing easy.

The lessons learnt – avoid putting pressure on yourself and don’t interrupt the flow or concentration. Also realise, that not everything you write will be good, so don’t put unrealistic expectations on yourself.