++ Magazine didn’t start by selling their soul to the devil. Nay! They started by believing that we should all unite in our search for happiness in a positive way.
++Magazine was founded by Tamir Ziad in March 2008 and has since then developed rapidly into one of the most positive sites on the Web. The twelve writers that were present at the launch of the site are all stilling working for the site.
Tamir Ziad has always tried and will always try to be a-political as possible, because he thinks the ++ feeling is a-political. Happiness is in everybody and everybody wants to be happy. No need to mix that pretty stuff up with something that has never been able to make people entirely happy.
After a pretty difficult start with only a few readers ++Magazine is on their way to reach the goal set for the magazine. Only if they reach that goal and succeed ++Mag will look into the future.
Future
Our hope is to expand our love in to different areas of the positive world. Of course to achieve this we first have to make ++Magazine a fundamental basis for our future spreadings of happiness. It’s not our goal to become a commercial success though. ++Magazine hasn’t been founded to provide our financial fantasies.
Nor is it to make the world a place without wars, poverty, famine or any other utopian belief. You can only get happy through this site if there’s a little bit of ++ in you. So we just want to share our thoughts with likeminded people.The more people we reache and give a positive feeling, the closer we get to achieving our goal!
Q & A with ++Magazine Founder Tamir Ziad
On the morning of the interview I was pretty nervous meeting Tamir Ziad, the creator of this site and also our ‘boss’. The putting together of the crew for this site wasn’t an easy task. Nobody knows each other personally. We all reacted on a post on a young writers site, which ironically isn’t online anymore. In that post Tamir explained his concept for this site. I’m the first to meet him from the writer’s crew and hope to give our readers and writers a good idea about who Tamir Ziad is.
How did you come up with this site and the post for finding the writers?
I was thinking of creating a platform for a long time before I actually took action. One day I was surfing the web and saw a site dedicated to young journalists and writers. I felt like that was a sign that I should get off my lazy ass and start this site. There are young people that want to write and there are young people that like to read. I thought posting an ad on that website was the best way to bring those people from all around the world together, on ++Magazine.
Why start a new site and not use the available site?
That site was not a platform. It wasn’t a place where I could post my writings, but it was for Journalism students who had just graduated. I wanted something appealing to people like me. I was always scared of criticism and thought I wasn’t good enough to write. So I thought, if there are people who think like me, they will like to write for a site where the only two prerequisites are having a positive vibe and me liking you. We can learn from each other while writing and also share the big step of putting yourself out there with each other. The hardest part was actually finding out if the people who reacted on the post, were the people I was looking for. So I conducted a lot of e-mail interviews and chat sessions. If I had the feeling they had something that could make other people think about life on a positive way, I told them they were part of the gang. Just like it went with you!
But why didn’t you ask people you know to write?
I have friends who like writing, but being friends doesn’t mean you like the same style of writing or the same movies, music or whatever. I understood that there is a big difference liking each other and liking the same kind of literature. My friends didn’t really like the stuff I wrote. It wasn’t that good, but I didn’t think they got all of my intentions. When I used to recommend a movie or a book to them, most of them wouldn’t like it and I would get sad. I wanted so badly to make us all like the same stuff, but that just didn’t work. So I thought, if I like it there must be people who like what I write and I’d probably like what they write. Finding them and sharing our experiences was my goal and what is a bigger network than the Internet?
You have a Jewish first name and a Palestinian last name. Has your background influenced you in wanting to build bridges between people?
Definitely. I have a Jewish mother and a Muslim father. They met in Jerusalem at a student party and had a one-night stand. I’m the product of love between enemies. Or lust, haha. They never married but they stayed in touch for my sake. My mother raised me, because when I was four my father was killed during an Israeli attack on his village. That gave me the insight that life consists of moments. Those moments where people fight, hate and killed. But for me especially about those moments where you feel love and share it with others. To me that’s life, probably because I owe my whole existence to one of those moments. I don’t think there is a big scheme on which everything is based and so religion didn’t work with my ideology. I didn’t think it would make me happier. It was a rational decision. My parents didn’t force me to be religious and they couldn’t. Which one should I chose? It would be a choice between my mom and my dad.
What’s this obsession with positivity?
It’s not an obsession. It’s more about our life. The way we think we have to lead it. Everybody is chasing a career without ever taking the time to think about where their life is going and what they want. Look at books like The Secret. It’s a supposed to be a book about achieving what you want. But is it about happiness? No. It’s about money, career moves, feeling better than your friends. To me that’s not success, that’s closer to misery. The whole world turned into this racetrack where people are doing anything to come out as winners. I don’t want to think about my CV when I do something. I want to think about liking what I’m doing without hurting anyone else. But it’s hard to change the way people think, because if money makes the world go round, how are you going to preach against this ideology without money? That’s where the Internet comes in handy. You need to have access to it and that’s it. No million-dollar companies to reach the masses. No big media moguls feeding us with lies and such. Just through simple stories that tell about our lives and the way we think, we can achieve happiness.
Don’t you think you sound like a new age missionary
That’s pretty upfront towards your boss, haha. No, I’m kidding. I don’t want to be a preacher. I don’t want to change everybody. We will always think differently. And that’s okay. But there are people who feel lost and looking for a way to make the best out of life. I think we can help them. The change I want is to be able to share this with more people. To feel the connection with somebody in Zimbabwe, who thinks like me, is heaven! It’s a way of thinking and it’s a certain kind of person that thinks like me. It’s about being positive. If you don’t think alike, no sweat. I don’t think this is the golden path. But I do think there are people from all classes, sexes, nationalities, cultures that think like us. For me to achieve my goal I had to do the things I did and I have to do the things I’ll do. If people join me on my journey I’ll be even happier, if they don’t I’ll be that crazy guy that wanted to live in a fantasy. But like one of our colleagues wrote: ‘at least I tried’.
What are your future plans?
++Magazine is just the beginning. As I said before, in the digital world, problems like a tight budget constrain you less than in the real world. I feel like the group that came together can achieve much more. I’m not only thinking of literally ambitions, but also about some kind of platform in the music industry, movie industry, and perhaps an online concept store for beginning designers.
Do you have delusions of grandeur?
Haha, a lot of my friends think that. I don’t think so. What is big and successful? Being rich? I don’t want that. I want to offer people the means to get-together. This is what I’m missing out there. A site where, without being a writer/director/painter/whatever, you can just join the community that you feel you’re part of. You look at movies and listen to music and recognize so much of your own life. You want to share your life with those people. ++Magazine makes that possible. Because by spreading our positive ideas to our readers, we try to make them spread it as well. Kind of like a virus, but then a very benign one.
To end this interview, the most important question: are you happy?
Life is great. I love the good times and the shit times. It’s all part of life, my life. A friend of mine once told me: “the thing that I really like about you is that you always look at things like you see them for the first time”. And I want to hold on to that, experiencing everything like it’s the first time. I don’t want to get bitter when I get older. I hear people my age already say stuff like “you’ll never fall in love like the first time”. Well my second time was bam! So different and so good. It felt like love and that relationship didn’t work out as well. So the next time I’ll have that same feeling again in a different way, but it doesn’t make sense to idealize your youth and act like it all goes down from there. Learning from your mistakes and being open-minded are not mutually exclusive. A lot of people call my way of thinking naïve and naive is a bad thing to a lot of people. They got older and gave up on their dreams. They call it growing up and getting wiser. I call that losing joy in life. As long as I keep on thinking this way, no matter what happens in my life, I think I’ll be happy.
