Philosophy Discussion Forums

As this section allows us to inquire about various topics, I am keen to learn more about you. Which university did you attend, and which course did you pursue there? Additionally, could you please provide the year of your graduation?

My primary inquiry centers around your motivation for establishing an online book club. As a young adult, I am eager to uncover the responses to these inquiries.

What is the name of the next book you are going to write? What are your upcoming writing projects? Do you have any plans for the future and strategies to accomplish those goals?

If you haven't already, you can sign up to be personally mentored by Scott "Eckhart Aurelius" Hughes at this link.


Hi, Davy Ifedigbo,

Thank you for your questions!

Davy Ifedigbo wrote: ↑May 23rd, 2023, 10:12 am As this section allows us to inquire about various topics, I am keen to learn more about you. Which university did you attend, and which course did you pursue there? Additionally, could you please provide the year of your graduation?

Great question! Here's the answer: I never attended college at all, not even a single course or semester.

Davy Ifedigbo wrote: ↑May 23rd, 2023, 10:12 am My primary inquiry centers around your motivation for establishing an online book club. As a young adult, I am eager to uncover the responses to these inquiries.

I wanted to be able to chat about books I had read recently with other people who had read the same book. This was back before the iPhone or Kindle had been released. Nowadays, it's common for one to hop online and chat with a niche community about their interests.

In real life, if I just read a book, the odds that any random person would have read it recently, or even at all, were low. So there was nobody to talk about it with. But with the internet, and especially my idea of OnlineBookClub, I could easily hop online and instantly be connected with other people who read that exact book and chat about it with them.

Nowadays, if you want to chat with people about something very specific (e.g. a certain book you read, a certain motorcycle you might want to buy, a certain video game, etc.), it is easy and common to do. But at the time, it wasn't, and I was slightly ahead of the curve in creating OnlineBookClub.

For example, I created OnlineBookClub before Goodreads was created.



Thank you,
Scott
a.k.a. Eckhart Aurelius






In addition to having authored his book, In It Together, Eckhart Aurelius Hughes (a.k.a. Scott) runs a mentoring program, with a free option, that guarantees success. Success is guaranteed for anyone who follows the program.

If you haven't already, you can sign up to be personally mentored by Scott "Eckhart Aurelius" Hughes at this link.


Hi, Surabhi Rani,

Thank you for your questions!

Surabhi Rani wrote: ↑May 24th, 2023, 1:19 am What is the name of the next book you are going to write?

In It Together: The Beautiful Struggle Uniting Us All might be the last.

However, I am going to release a slightly updated edition soon, and then an audiobook. I also want to create translated versions of In It Together: The Beautiful Struggle Uniting Us All in several other languages.

I also proposed an idea to write a book with a title like Time is Not Real: An Easily Understood But Rigorous Scientific Explanation, and put it up to vote via retweet on Twitter, but so far it only has 8 retweets, so I don't think I'll do it, unless it gets a lot more retweets. 1,000 retweets and I will probably do it. Anything less, probably not.

Surabhi Rani wrote: ↑May 24th, 2023, 1:19 am What are your upcoming writing projects? 

Other than what I've mentioned above, I mostly only journal now, both prose and poetry. If anything is good enough to share, I just post it online using either (1) social media, (2) the In It Together Discussion Forum at OnlinePhilosophyClub, and/or (3) the Creative Original Works: Poetry Forum at OnlineBookClub.

To partly answer your next question, I don't have a goal to journal or write, so I also don't have or need a strategy to accomplish it. It happens on its own, much more like a burp or sneeze. In fact, a sneeze is a great analogy because I can kind of hold it in if I choose to, but there's just a great relief when I let it out.

A big reason I like to write and journal is simply to get the words out of my head so my head can be emptier and my mind can be clearer. This goes for even things like to-do lists and my calendar. I do not try to remember my to-do list or events calendar. If anything, I actively do my best to forget them when I write them down, and I write things on my to-do list or calendar precisely so I don't have to walk around having my head crowded with all sorts of repeated thoughts like, "Today I want to do X, and also Y, and also Z, and I have a deadline for A coming tomorrow to worry about, and oh yeah, I need to pick up my dry cleaning, etc. etc. etc.".

With my pen, I delegate my thoughts to the page, so I don't have to deal with them.
 

Surabhi Rani wrote: ↑May 24th, 2023, 1:19 am Do you have any plans for the future and strategies to accomplish those goals?

Well, as preface, my favorite fiction book, Of Mice and Men, the title of which is taken from a poem that includes the line, "The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry." 

I do set goals and plan out strategies, but I don't get attached to the plans. That's for many reasons, but one is so that I can stay nimble and adapt as needed, so to speak.

With that said, I do still have a goal to fulfill my promise to do my book tour. My goal is to have that fully planned out by July 15th, and then fully complete the whole tour within a year or so at most. To get there, I do want to first release the aforementioned 3rd Edition and audiobook.

There are many steps in my plan for that, but one is that I want to either hire one overall tour manager to manage the tour, or hire a person at each and every location to manage the book tour in that spot. I can choose dates and buy plane tickets and get myself to the airport and then attend and do whatever it is authors do on a book tour, but I can't do all that and then also play the role of tour manager and planner, especially since I'm not familiar with the locations I will be attending.

I am also working on some software for my mentoring program that will be scalable and ideally serve as an all-in-one productivity app for all sorts of people and purposes, not just to facilitate mentor/mentee relationships.

Finally, I have a goal to use my mentoring program to also partner with 12 people over the next year to start 12 different companies. I cannot be the CEO of 12 different companies, but I can mentor and partner with 12 individuals who can each be the CEO of their own company, and so that's my goal.



Thank you,
Scott
a.k.a. Eckhart Aurelius






In addition to having authored his book, In It Together, Eckhart Aurelius Hughes (a.k.a. Scott) runs a mentoring program, with a free option, that guarantees success. Success is guaranteed for anyone who follows the program.

Eckhart Aurelius Hughes wrote: ↑May 25th, 2023, 2:03 pm Hi, Davy Ifedigbo,

Thank you for your questions!

Davy Ifedigbo wrote: ↑May 23rd, 2023, 10:12 am As this section allows us to inquire about various topics, I am keen to learn more about you. Which university did you attend, and which course did you pursue there? Additionally, could you please provide the year of your graduation?

Great question! Here's the answer: I never attended college at all, not even a single course or semester.

Davy Ifedigbo wrote: ↑May 23rd, 2023, 10:12 am My primary inquiry centers around your motivation for establishing an online book club. As a young adult, I am eager to uncover the responses to these inquiries.

I wanted to be able to chat about books I had read recently with other people who had read the same book. This was back before iPhone or Kindle had been released. Nowadays it's common for one to hop online and chat with a niche community about interest.

In real life, if I just read a book, the odds that any random person would have read it recently, or even at all, was low. So there was nobody to talk about it with. But with the internet, and especially my idea of OnlineBookClub, I could easily hop online and instantly be connected with other people who read that exact book and chat about it with them.

Nowadays, if you want to chat with people about something very specific (e.g. a certain book you read, a certain motorcycle you might want to buy, a certain video game, etc.) is easy and common to do. But at the time it I was slightly ahead of the curve in creating OnlineBookClub.

For example, I created OnlineBookClub before Goodreads was created.


Thank you,
Scott
a.k.a. Eckhart Aurelius

Hi,

Thank you for sharing this. Since you're answering personal questions, I also have a few: I read that you created OnlineBookClub at 19. Did you learn web programming in school or was it self-taught? I also read that so many people, including Mark Zuckerberg, had initial startups that didn't do very well before Facebook. Are there any startups that you created before or after OnlineBookClub that didn't do as well as you expected?

Have you ever done an author interview on Onlinebookclub? If so, can you share a link?

Thank you so much for sharing your experience with us.

If you haven't already, you can sign up to be personally mentored by Scott "Eckhart Aurelius" Hughes at this link.


Hi, Melissa Jane,

Thank you for your questions!

Melissa Jane wrote: ↑May 25th, 2023, 3:14 pm I read that you created OnlineBookClub at 19. Did you learn web programming in school or was it self-taught?

It was self-taught.
 
Around the same time, I would even have some people I knew in real life sometimes offer to pay me small amounts of money to jazz up their MySpace page.
 

Melissa Jane wrote: ↑May 25th, 2023, 3:14 pm I also read that so many people, including Mark Zuckerberg, had initial startups that didn't do very well before Facebook. Are there any startups that you created before or after OnlineBookClub that didn't do as well as you expected? 

Not formally. In other words, I've never run a company that had to declare bankruptcy or even be sold off (at all, let alone for a loss).
 
I never took any outside investments or loans, but rather bootstrapped the whole thing. So even if OnlineBookClub had failed in the first 8 years, it probably wouldn't have caused me any long-term damage, let alone leave investors or loaners hung out to dry.
 
But, to this day, I start plenty of projects that flop or fail. I don't register them as formal companies or such. They fail too quickly to ever get off the ground.
 
For example, one time I started a blogger review program at OnlineBookClub. It never really worked well, and eventually I just shut it down.
 
To really answer your question, though, almost every project, including all of my books and OnlineBookClub itself as a whole and any subventures within it, never does as well as I hoped or anticipated. I may have never hit the moon, and likely and perhaps luckily never will, but in a way I'm always aiming there. In some ways, if I don't think I'll hit the moon, I don't even take the shot. Any time I go forward with a book or business or idea, at first I typically think it's the next big thing and will do thousands of times better than it ultimately does.
 
It may look like I was aiming for the top of the fence and succeeded, but I aim only for the moon. What some other people might consider success might be my worst-case scenario, so to speak.
 
There's a wise expression: Hope for the best, and prepare for the worst.
 
Personally, I don't think much in terms of 'hope' at all because I see hope as synonymous with fear, so for me, we could rephrase it as: Incorrectly anticipate the best, and prepare for the worst. That's kind of the story of my life.
 
My physical actions might often indicate a person who is conservatively strategic enough to know to not walk too far out on the ledge, but in my heart, I still believe I can fly. 
 

Melissa Jane wrote: ↑May 25th, 2023, 3:14 pm Have you ever done an author interview on Onlinebookclub? If so, can you share a link? 

 
Yes, here is the link:
 
https://forums.onlinebookclub.org/viewtopic.php?f=80&t=217356
 




Thank you,
Scott
a.k.a. Eckhart Aurelius






In addition to having authored his book, In It Together, Eckhart Aurelius Hughes (a.k.a. Scott) runs a mentoring program, with a free option, that guarantees success. Success is guaranteed for anyone who follows the program.

Thank you, Sir, for all your initiatives! It was very informative and enriching to learn about your ideas and projects for the future. I appreciate your idea of translating your book, 'In It Together: The Beautiful Struggle Uniting Us All.' Your idea of a book tour was greatly inspiring and knowledgeable. Also, I wish you all the best for the new app you are going to create for people from all walks of life. It feels really great to learn about such a platform being created for keen readers!

Hello Scott. Please I know this forum is for a completely different topic, but it would be my greatest pleasure if you could help me with something regarding my OBC account. I’m trying to change my PayPal. Can you help me with this? It would be great if you could sir.

Hello, I did like your book and some of the Question too because it makes you wonder about that in today's world. Because in today's world, we have challenges about racists, but you could say Freedom and the left condemning you about it. You have started a very great book keep it up.

Hello,
I saw you recommend a lot of philosophical or self-help books, but is there any fiction book you would recommend? Maybe even some SFF book?

Yes, James Patterson any of his books are good. I read his books too. I have read about History that is true events.

Yes, a shot down is a history that is based on true events.

How did you know you wanted to become an author? I don't know if I am asking this right..but what inspired your journey to write? Also, what advice would you give to someone who is thinking of venturing in the writing industry to also become a best selling author?

I think when you become or thinking to write you have to be passionate about it when you write.

Hi Scott, in your book, you refer to 'enabling' as always being a bad thing. I've used it in the past as being a good and an evil act. I'm wondering though, if 'empower' is a better word to use when giving someone the ability to improve their life or do good. Is this your preferred word or is there a better one, and am I best to only use 'enable' in its negative form?