A BOOK REVIEW OF STELLABELLE'S "UN-CRAP YOUR LIFE"

You need to be seen to succeed and there is no way around this.

@stellabelle has shot up from being a minnow to a whale after 800+ hours of writing 3000+ blog posts and no additional investments. She has even quit her day job and now is a full time Steemian living the dual (and seemingly impossible) dream of doing what she loves and getting paid for it.

"In a nutshell, when we become whale shills, we censor our most creative energies, dilute their strength and churn out mediocre shit that no one wants to read.”-- Fearing The Dry Whale Teat

“How could I be alive and not have the feeling of love inside my heart? I guess I had died.”-- The Dark Horse Has Infected Steemit

“One voice that answered sounded like it was a person trapped in a room, like they were muffled with a sock in their mouth. They said a few words, then total silence except for something metal clacking in the background. Every time I called the number, I became terrified.” -- My Descent Into A Horror Rabbit Hole On Youtube...

I ended up winning a copy of @stellabelle’s book by leaving a haiku comment on one of her blog posts.

You may have seen @stellabelle ’s Steemit posts, but does her ability to blog translate to writing a good book?

UN-CRAP YOUR LIFE's (referred to as uncrapping from here on down) chapters are not laid out in chronological order. There is no major climactic moment where @stellabelle fights one nemesis and instantly saves the day.

Instead, she assembles a montage of experiences (good and bad) that systematically show how she gets out of a bad situations or makes a good environment better.

In fact, the book is written as a series of acute stories very much like what you would see if you were peering over someone's shoulder as they made daily journal entries.

She has been through some stressful times and some have been bad enough to give her PTSD, but every chapter ends with a series of questions that force the reader to make sure they are not repeating the same mistakes.

She unifies her readers by sharing the suffering that comes as part of human existence, and the struggles detailed in her book provide a context to appreciate her Steemit success.

She has dealt with psychopaths, a string of dead end jobs, bad managers, the 2008 recession, drug addictions, moving to California by herself, and raising a child as a single mother.

I originally said there wasn't one major climax in the book, but there are a lot of mini climaxes. These inflection points in her life are where she took a real assessment of her plight and made concrete decisions to improve herself and her environment.

There were times where she walked away from toxic positions at work and dangerous personal relationships with enough resources to start over. She left her regional comfort zone in Kansas to move to California for better opportunities. She also tackled her fear of public speaking by video taping herself and practicing the flaws away.

With these many challenges and climaxes she has victories, but only by taking a sober assessment of who she was and where she wanted to be.

She desired more personal and creative freedom and outlines her process for obtaining it.

Chapter 8 is a clear turning point where she makes compelling videos and converts them into moderate youtube checks. It is here where she gets her first taste of the wild and unpredictable Internet market.

Within Uncrapping is a subtle thread she leaves for the reader to discover and even she only notices it in hindsight.

When dealing with a highly intelligent market on the Internet, one has to be a highly intelligent creator.

Intelligent creativity, as she puts it, involves spending time with other intelligent creatives and performing simple research like using google trends to see what questions people are asking.

The elephant in the room of your inner life will be a fear. A fear of failure, fear of success, or something in between.

@stellabelle was a perfectionist and struggled with a fear of creating something that fell short of her goals. One of the methods she used while conquering this obsession with perfection was to get in the habit of releasing small low risk imperfect creations. This materialized into a slew of youtube videos and blog posts which she has continued to churn out with no loss of quality even as she approaches her 4000th post.

The fuel she uses to remain diligent is a careful use of time and energy.

Chapter 12 talks about using misdirected energies for good and chapter 14 puts this lesson into action when she discusses her decision to reduce her time on social media to write Uncrapping.

This 90 page book is a breeze to read, even for people who have short attention spans like me.

Consider getting a copy of this book if you are stuck in a craptrap.

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• Special thanks to my wife for proofreading this post.
• The first photo is a selfie.
• The other photos are from Unsplash.com