Ang Peregrino Recommends 9: Zen?Hab?its?.Net

Zen​Hab​its​.Net
URL: http://​zen​hab​its​.net/

The first thing that struck me about Zen​Hab​its​.Net is its Uncopy­right Law.

It states:

Now, I’m grant­ing full per­mis­sion to use any of my con­tent on Zen Habits or in my ebook, Zen To Done, in any way you like.

I release my copy­right on this content.

From now on, there is no need to email me for per­mis­sion. Use it how­ever you want! Email it, share it, reprint it with or with­out credit. Change it around, put in a bunch of swear words and attribute them to me. It’s OK. :)

Credit and pay­ment
While you are under no oblig­a­tion to do so, I would appre­ci­ate it if you give me credit for any work of mine that you use, and ide­ally, link back to the orig­i­nal. If you feel like spread­ing a copy of my ebook, I’d appre­ci­ate pay­ment. I’d pre­fer peo­ple buy my ebook, but if they want to share with friends, they have every right to do so.

I rec­om­mend the web­site for that brave and bold move, and for the phi­los­o­phy behind it. While every­one else are so afraid of copy­right and the loss of money, here is Zen­Hab­its releas­ing Copy­right of his content.

Come to think of it, and push­ing the argu­ment fur­ther, there is really no “orig­i­nal” idea at all. Every­thing is an amal­ga­ma­tion of dif­fer­ent ideas and philoso­phies and expe­ri­ences. The inter­net has actu­ally proven that: you google a topic, and you find a thou­sand web­sites talk­ing about that one par­tic­u­lar topic. If you think you have orig­i­nal dibs at things, then maybe, you should just google what you have writ­ten about, and you’ll be hum­bled by the fact that a thou­sand other writ­ers have writ­ten about that “orig­i­nal” idea of yours years before you, and with bet­ter research than you have ever done.

In fact, own­er­ship of ideas is really a West­ern thing. In the east, there is no such thing as author­ship– St. Paul was sup­posed to have writ­ten all the epis­tles “of St. Paul” in the New Tes­ta­ment, but research shows us that some weren’t by the “real” St. Paul. These were just attrib­uted as being writ­ten by him. The same thing could be said about the Gospel of John. In the past, not even land can be owned.

Aside from this bold move, I rec­om­mend it for the writ­ing and its very use­ful arti­cles and great top­ics. Zen­Hab­its is about “achiev­ing goals, pro­duc­tiv­ity, being orga­nized, GTD, moti­va­tion, elim­i­nat­ing debt, sav­ing, get­ting a flat stom­ach, eat­ing healthy, sim­pli­fy­ing, liv­ing fru­gal, par­ent­ing, hap­pi­ness, and suc­cess­fully imple­ment­ing good habits.”

Spe­cially since it’s Holy Week this week, I am using some of his ideas on Unclut­ter­ing one’s life, and GTD (Get­ting Things Done). I espe­cially like his ideas on clear­ing your desk which I have actu­ally imple­mented at work (I now have a really unclut­tered desk with just the office lap­top on it and every­thing else neatly piled inside the pedestal beside my desk), sim­pli­fy­ing your house­work, and sim­pli­fy­ing your life.

I will talk about that in the com­ing days of the Holy Week. So for great use­ful stuff that you can “imple­ment” in your own life, AngPere­grino Rec­om­mends Zen​Hab​its​.Net