Also, come to my reading tonight and prepare to be amazed.
Friday, May 30, 2014
Time to amaze with Dance in Slow Motion
Here's a cool video you need to watch on an amazing Friday.
Also, come to my reading tonight and prepare to be amazed.
Also, come to my reading tonight and prepare to be amazed.
Thursday, May 29, 2014
New way to promote audiobooks
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Wednesday, May 28, 2014
Put Butter in your Coffee is Smart! Here's five reasons why.
This might sound crazy but Cheri Lasota pointed me at this article and it makes perfect sense. Check it out. Original Post
There’s a new trend going around that may forever change the way you drink coffee. Instead of the usual cream and sugar, many people are now adding butter to their coffee and it’s just about the greatest thing ever.
To most people, putting butter in their coffee sounds skeptical if not borderline dangerous, but not all butters are bad for you. In this case, there is only one kind of butter you should put in your coffee: grass-fed butter. Kerrygold unsalted brand is probably the most common that you can find in stores. But why grass-fed butter?
Most cows are corn or soy fed. It’s cheap and filling, but cows aren’t actually meant to eat that- they can’t even digest it properly- and their milk produces the kinds of fats you don’t want in your body. Grass-fed cows on the other hand commonly produce the best milk and beef, and the butter made from those cows is just as good. Here are five reasons why you should be putting this kind of butter in your coffee (and just using it in general from now on):
1. Only grass-fed butter has the right fats that regulate cholesterol, not add to it. Grass-fed butter has the best ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids (which reduces body fat) and is a good source of vitamin K, both of which according to a studies reduce the risk of heart disease.
2. It provides healthy fats for your brain and body to create cell walls and hormones. The short-chain fatty acid Butyrate, once thought to be bad for you, has been linked topreventing neurodegenerative diseases, increased energy expenditure, and is alsoanti-inflammatory, further preventing heart disease.
3. Drinking it each morning puts your body in the routine to burn fat all day, helping you trim down overall. CLA (conjugated linoleic acid), found in grass-fed butter, has been shown to reduce body fat mass especially in overweight individuals.
4. “Bulletproof” coffee will give you energy as well as increase cognitive function that you can literally feel when it kicks in for about six hours- and without the crash. Mixed with more healthy fats from coconut oil, this amped up drink will help produce ketones,which are created when your body creates energy from fat rather than carbohydrates.
5. Two tablespoons of butter in your coffee is all you need to replace a breakfast meal altogether, making this a quick alternative for people on the go. Providing your body with essential fats and calories is a higher performance blend than a carbohydrate source like oatmeal.
When you blend it with coffee, what you get is the most pleasantly creamy drink that you can actually feel energizing your body. But why stop there? If you are going to put the best butter in your coffee, you should have the best of everything. According to bio-hacker and entrepreneur Dave Asprey, who formulated this popular blend, the quality of your coffee beans can make a noticeable difference and adding MCT oil will absolutely boost your brain’s focus in the morning. If your coffee isn’t doing it for you anymore, this is one recipe you’ll want to try. Watch the video below to try it or check out Trainer Kim‘s great blog post on it:.
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Improve Health with Heat
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2014/05/24/sauna-benefits.aspx?e_cid=20140524Z1_DNL_art_1&utm_source=dnl&utm_medium=email&utm_content=art1&utm_campaign=20140524Z1&et_cid=DM45111&et_rid=531573446
- Increasing your core temperature for short periods, as is done by using a sauna, may offer dramatic improvements to your athletic performance
- This concept, called “hyperthermic conditioning,” may have multiple positive effects on your body, from increased endurance to the release of human growth hormone (HGH) and the growth of new brain cells
- As your body is subjected to reasonable amounts of heat stress, it gradually becomes acclimated to the heat, prompting a number of beneficial changes to occur in your body
- Infrared saunas can significantly expedite the detoxification process, as they heat your tissues several inches deep, which can enhance your natural metabolic processes
- Always listen to your body when deciding how much heat stress (i.e. sauna use) you can tolerate
Saturday, May 24, 2014
Mark Ford and Tim Ferriss battle royal!
Most of you know that I'm a big fan of Tim Farris. If you haven't read his book, "the four-hour work week" you need to. I'm also a fan of Mark Ford, Brian Tracy, Craig Balantine and the rest of the guys at wealth builders. Recently one of these mentors took on the other. This happens from time to time. I'm going to include Ford's critique and my response.
By Mark Morgan Ford
Before Timothy Ferriss became famous for writing The 4-Hour Workweek, he won a martial arts championship in China. He also set a world record for tango dancing.
He won the Chinese kickboxing contest by taking advantage of a loophole in the rules... he used his size to push his smaller opponents off the mat. Ferriss's tango accomplishment was a bit of the same. He found a clever way to represent Argentina in an event. He then finagled his way onto the Live With Regis and Kelly show. There, he turned his partner a record-breaking number of times.
Timothy Ferriss is a clever and persistent person. He clearly knows a thing or two about taking short cuts and getting media attention. (The success of The 4-Hour Workweek stems from an underground marketing campaign he started.) But what does that say about the thesis of his bestseller?
Is a four-hour week really possible? Or is it just a clever title that resulted in massive public attention?
A Dangerous Myth
I'm asking this question because the central premise of The 4-Hour Workweekhas become nearly universally accepted among the Internet marketing crowd—the gurus who teach people how to start online businesses. The idea is that it's possible to develop a successful business by spending a few hours per week doing the business chores you enjoy while outsourcing the rest.
But before I dig into it, I want to say three things: I'm not criticizing Tim Ferriss. I love the idea of the four-hour workweek. I have nothing against the idea of outsourcing.
Ferriss developed the ideas in The 4-Hour Workweek while working 14-hour days at his sports nutrition supplement company.
Frustrated by overwork and lack of free time, Ferriss took a three-week trip to Europe. During that time and in subsequent travels throughout Europe, Asia, and South America, Ferriss developed a system of checking email once per day and outsourcing small daily tasks to virtual assistants.
The rationale behind the idea is Pareto's Principle: In a typical endeavor, 20% of the effort produces 80% of the results.
This was the genesis of the book.
Ferriss saw what he was doing as an application of Pareto's law. And he no doubt saw how wonderful it would be to run his business this way: communicating with virtual assistants for four hours every week.
It doesn't take a genius to see the immediate problem with this idea. Although it is possible to keep an ongoing business afloat working four hours per week for some period of time, it is quite another thing to do that indefinitely. And still more difficult (if not impossible) to grow a business this way.
But there is another, stickier problem with this idea: the implication that you can outsource all of those business tasks.
Many gurus have taken this bad idea one step further. They tell would-be entrepreneurs not to worry if they don't like to sell things or don't know anything about marketing... or don't understand how the Internet works. "You can outsource all that stuff," they claim.
In today's essay, I am going to address these issues. I will:
How Pareto's Principle Applies to Entrepreneurial Businesses
I believe in applying Pareto's Principle to most aspects of human life. It works in acquiring skills and knowledge. It works in developing a career. It works in building wealth. And it works for business, including entrepreneurship.
The challenge is identifying the most effective 20%.
I spent 10 years writing about entrepreneurship (under the pen name Michael Masterson). I wrote a dozen or so essays on how business builders should allocate their time.
My point was always the same: An entrepreneur should spend very little time on such tasks as printing business cards and selecting office furniture... and lots of time on marketing and sales.
If you’d like to know more about this, read the essay here.
Debunking the Outsourcing Myth
The outsourcing myth goes like this:
Growing a business involves many activities: imagining the business, identifying the market, conjuring the product, finding capital, hiring people, developing the product, hiring vendors, locating office space, testing, pricing, marketing, and yes—outsourcing.
Each of these activities requires knowledge and skill. Any entrepreneur will come into the business knowing some things but not everything, and having some skills but not all of them.
Some gurus will tell you that, rather than acquire all the knowledge and skill you need, you can do what you like and know how to do... and outsource the rest.
But in fact, you can't.
With a small business, there are certain things the entrepreneur must do whether he likes to or not. Those things, as I said above, include acquiring specific knowledge of some parts of the business and developing the skill of marketing and selling the product.
You must spend the overwhelming majority of your time on sales and marketing, and only limited time on everything else.
Let's say, for example, you decide to start a new business selling exercise programs on the Internet. You like to exercise and you like to demonstrate what you know. So you plan to spend your time producing exercise videos and outsourcing the sales and marketing.
What is likely to happen?
I can tell you. You might—if you are good—develop the best exercise program ever. But your chances of selling it will be small because you don't have "inside knowledge" of the marketing side of the business you are in.
You may think you can market successfully by watching what others do. You might think you can market by hiring a consultant. But neither strategy is likely to work.
This is because the main marketing objective of every business is to acquire new customers for a particular product at an allowable acquisition cost. And this cost is different for every business.
The Promise of the Four-Hour Workweek
I do believe it's possible to start a business working four hours per week... Only after the business has grown to a certain size and level of sophistication (what I call a Stage Three business in Ready, Fire, Aim).
Before then, you must work lots of hours. More hours than you will want to believe.
As I said before, I love the promise of the four-hour workweek. And I believe we should all focus on working less as our businesses grow.
In my own case, I never had any intention of working more than 40 hours per week. But while I was starting my businesses, I found myself working 60-80 hours per week. I didn't want to work that hard, but I had to. The good news is that I hardly noticed I was working so much. The time flew by, and the work was exhilarating. But the hours were long.
A Realistic Time Line for Entrepreneurs
As you may know, the business-building program we give Wealth Builders Club members is aimed at starting a home-based business on a capital investment of no more than $25,000. The goal is to grow the business so that its value meets or exceeds $1 million in seven years or less.
When the business is new, your main job is to figure out how to bring in new customers at a sustainable price (allowable acquisition cost). To do that, you have to study the market and its primary businesses. You have to study the products and the sales and marketing strategies. And then you have to begin testing the market slowly and carefully.
Figuring all this out—the right media, the right advertising platform, the right offers, and the right advertising copy—is what I call the optimal selling strategy.
This takes time. You should expect to spend hundreds of hours of study and thousands of hours of work spread over the number of months you are willing to devote to getting the business going.
Once you discover the optimal selling strategy, things will get much better. Cash flow will go positive for the first time. You will start to see revenues climb month after month, so long as your strategy works.
The emotional stress and financial burden should diminish at this point, but other demands of the business will increase. You will have to hire people, fill orders, deal with customer service problems, and the like.
You can delegate most of this work as soon as you are able. But you won't be able to in the beginning because delegation implies teaching and guidance. And you won't be able to teach or guide anyone until you know what needs to be done.
Hiring and training these new people—in addition to running the marketing machine you've built—will keep you working 50-plus hours for six to 12 months. And then, just when your employees are handling these nonessential activities, you may discover that your initial product and optimal selling strategy are not working so well any more.
The market has absorbed your efforts and you've attracted copycats. To stay in business, you must keep growing. You have to create a new product and find a new optimum selling strategy.
That should take about half as many hours as with the first product. This is because you are much smarter now and have all those people working for you. So you continue putting in 50-plus hour workweeks. But you hire qualified people to help you with the marketing and sales. That way, when you get to the next level, you can finally start to work less.
This will take another year or two. And then, finally, you will feel like you are ready for those four-hour workweeks. You'll have an excellent marketing and product team and competent people, in-house or outsourced—handling other aspects of the business.
But at that point—when you are in the $10 million revenue range and have more employees than you can keep track of—things could start to fall apart.
The machinery you've relied on to grow to that point—the accounting, fulfillment, operations, and customer service practices, protocols, and systems—could begin to break down. You will have to cancel your six-month vacation and hire and train a handful of very good CEO and CFO types. You have to make your business efficient.
This may take another year or two. But then—if you've done everything right—you will be ready for a four-hour workweek.
Unless you decide to start another business.
Don't laugh. I know: Who, having gone through all that (with the ultimate goal of working only four hours per week) would start the whole process over again? And why?
Don't ask me. Ask my shrink.
But even if you are smart and don't start another business, you will realize you have spent as many as seven years getting your business to that point.
Again, you can find out all about this by becoming a member of the Wealth Builders Club. The club currently includes six wealth-building programs, one of which focuses on the particular subject of growing a million-dollar business in seven years or less. For more information on that, go here.
The Challenge of Outsourcing
I've given you the big picture. Now I want to go into more detail on this dream, this myth of outsourcing.
On the surface, it sounds good. Hire people in Kentucky and Oregon. Hire people overseas. Easier. Cheaper. Simpler.
But the more you look at it, the more complicated it gets. Or, the more focused the skill set, the more difficult it is.
At the broadest level of skill—say data entry—it can be done. The businesses I own or consult with routinely outsource data entry. This is possible because these jobs are relatively simple. As long as there are good programs and effective management, data entry can be done by anyone with a grade-school education.
It is also advisable to outsource some professional services such as legal and accounting. When you have a small business, outsourcing services like these is just more cost-effective. When your business gets larger, you may find that some of these services are more efficiently done in-house, even if they cost a little more.
But if you take one more step above that in terms of focus, outsourcing gets tricky.
Customer service is a good example. You can outsource the most basic elements of customer service without much problem. But once you get into the area of handling specific problems or answering questions, the challenge mounts.
Twenty years ago, virtually everything in business magazines predicted 90% outsourcing of customer service for American companies. But in the last 10 years, many of those jobs have come back home. Businesses have discovered that efficiency and quality are tough to outsource.
Moving up the business-focus ladder, outsourcing gets even more difficult. I'm talking about formulating and manufacturing products, developing and carrying out marketing plans, and handling virtually every aspect of management.
To be able to hire freelance help in these areas, you need to have some knowledge of the skill. Hiring data entry is easy. But 80%-plus of a business's activity—and 90%-plus of its problems and challenges—are more complicated than data entry.
Take copywriting—the writing you do to advertise your business. How can you farm that out without knowing if what you're paying for is good copy or bad copy?
The same is true for pricing your product and developing a marketing strategy. Yes, you can hire experts to help. But how will you know if the experts are actually helping you or just wasting your money? You need to be able to figure out the answers to the core questions yourself.
So what am I saying here?
First, that Dan Ferriss is right: Pareto's Principle applies to start-up business ventures. But you need to understand which specific activities will generate the greatest returns for your businesses' growth.
Second, the idea that you can outsource sales and marketing is a myth—a dangerous, expensive myth.
And third, if you take the right steps (the steps I outline in Ready, Fire, Aim and the Wealth Builders Club), you will one day be able to run your business working four hours per week. But until that point you, will be working 40, 50, 60, or even 70 hours per week.
The good news is that those hours will fly by and you will love what you are doing. And when the time comes for your abbreviated work week, you will have a business that is worth a million dollars or more.
Best,
Mark
My open letter in response:
| The Four-Hour Workweek, Ha, Ha, Ha |
 |
He won the Chinese kickboxing contest by taking advantage of a loophole in the rules... he used his size to push his smaller opponents off the mat. Ferriss's tango accomplishment was a bit of the same. He found a clever way to represent Argentina in an event. He then finagled his way onto the Live With Regis and Kelly show. There, he turned his partner a record-breaking number of times.
Timothy Ferriss is a clever and persistent person. He clearly knows a thing or two about taking short cuts and getting media attention. (The success of The 4-Hour Workweek stems from an underground marketing campaign he started.) But what does that say about the thesis of his bestseller?
Is a four-hour week really possible? Or is it just a clever title that resulted in massive public attention?
I'm asking this question because the central premise of The 4-Hour Workweekhas become nearly universally accepted among the Internet marketing crowd—the gurus who teach people how to start online businesses. The idea is that it's possible to develop a successful business by spending a few hours per week doing the business chores you enjoy while outsourcing the rest.
But before I dig into it, I want to say three things: I'm not criticizing Tim Ferriss. I love the idea of the four-hour workweek. I have nothing against the idea of outsourcing.
Ferriss developed the ideas in The 4-Hour Workweek while working 14-hour days at his sports nutrition supplement company.
Frustrated by overwork and lack of free time, Ferriss took a three-week trip to Europe. During that time and in subsequent travels throughout Europe, Asia, and South America, Ferriss developed a system of checking email once per day and outsourcing small daily tasks to virtual assistants.
The rationale behind the idea is Pareto's Principle: In a typical endeavor, 20% of the effort produces 80% of the results.
This was the genesis of the book.
Ferriss saw what he was doing as an application of Pareto's law. And he no doubt saw how wonderful it would be to run his business this way: communicating with virtual assistants for four hours every week.
It doesn't take a genius to see the immediate problem with this idea. Although it is possible to keep an ongoing business afloat working four hours per week for some period of time, it is quite another thing to do that indefinitely. And still more difficult (if not impossible) to grow a business this way.
But there is another, stickier problem with this idea: the implication that you can outsource all of those business tasks.
Many gurus have taken this bad idea one step further. They tell would-be entrepreneurs not to worry if they don't like to sell things or don't know anything about marketing... or don't understand how the Internet works. "You can outsource all that stuff," they claim.
In today's essay, I am going to address these issues. I will:
| 1. | Show how Pareto's Principle applies to start-up ventures. |
| 2. | Debunk the claim that you can "outsource anything." |
| 3. | Tell you the truth about the four-hour workweek. This is a truth you need to understand and accept. |
I believe in applying Pareto's Principle to most aspects of human life. It works in acquiring skills and knowledge. It works in developing a career. It works in building wealth. And it works for business, including entrepreneurship.
The challenge is identifying the most effective 20%.
I spent 10 years writing about entrepreneurship (under the pen name Michael Masterson). I wrote a dozen or so essays on how business builders should allocate their time.
My point was always the same: An entrepreneur should spend very little time on such tasks as printing business cards and selecting office furniture... and lots of time on marketing and sales.
If you’d like to know more about this, read the essay here.
The outsourcing myth goes like this:
Growing a business involves many activities: imagining the business, identifying the market, conjuring the product, finding capital, hiring people, developing the product, hiring vendors, locating office space, testing, pricing, marketing, and yes—outsourcing.
Each of these activities requires knowledge and skill. Any entrepreneur will come into the business knowing some things but not everything, and having some skills but not all of them.
Some gurus will tell you that, rather than acquire all the knowledge and skill you need, you can do what you like and know how to do... and outsource the rest.
But in fact, you can't.
With a small business, there are certain things the entrepreneur must do whether he likes to or not. Those things, as I said above, include acquiring specific knowledge of some parts of the business and developing the skill of marketing and selling the product.
You must spend the overwhelming majority of your time on sales and marketing, and only limited time on everything else.
Let's say, for example, you decide to start a new business selling exercise programs on the Internet. You like to exercise and you like to demonstrate what you know. So you plan to spend your time producing exercise videos and outsourcing the sales and marketing.
What is likely to happen?
I can tell you. You might—if you are good—develop the best exercise program ever. But your chances of selling it will be small because you don't have "inside knowledge" of the marketing side of the business you are in.
You may think you can market successfully by watching what others do. You might think you can market by hiring a consultant. But neither strategy is likely to work.
This is because the main marketing objective of every business is to acquire new customers for a particular product at an allowable acquisition cost. And this cost is different for every business.
I do believe it's possible to start a business working four hours per week... Only after the business has grown to a certain size and level of sophistication (what I call a Stage Three business in Ready, Fire, Aim).
Before then, you must work lots of hours. More hours than you will want to believe.
As I said before, I love the promise of the four-hour workweek. And I believe we should all focus on working less as our businesses grow.
In my own case, I never had any intention of working more than 40 hours per week. But while I was starting my businesses, I found myself working 60-80 hours per week. I didn't want to work that hard, but I had to. The good news is that I hardly noticed I was working so much. The time flew by, and the work was exhilarating. But the hours were long.
As you may know, the business-building program we give Wealth Builders Club members is aimed at starting a home-based business on a capital investment of no more than $25,000. The goal is to grow the business so that its value meets or exceeds $1 million in seven years or less.
When the business is new, your main job is to figure out how to bring in new customers at a sustainable price (allowable acquisition cost). To do that, you have to study the market and its primary businesses. You have to study the products and the sales and marketing strategies. And then you have to begin testing the market slowly and carefully.
|
This takes time. You should expect to spend hundreds of hours of study and thousands of hours of work spread over the number of months you are willing to devote to getting the business going.
Once you discover the optimal selling strategy, things will get much better. Cash flow will go positive for the first time. You will start to see revenues climb month after month, so long as your strategy works.
The emotional stress and financial burden should diminish at this point, but other demands of the business will increase. You will have to hire people, fill orders, deal with customer service problems, and the like.
You can delegate most of this work as soon as you are able. But you won't be able to in the beginning because delegation implies teaching and guidance. And you won't be able to teach or guide anyone until you know what needs to be done.
Hiring and training these new people—in addition to running the marketing machine you've built—will keep you working 50-plus hours for six to 12 months. And then, just when your employees are handling these nonessential activities, you may discover that your initial product and optimal selling strategy are not working so well any more.
The market has absorbed your efforts and you've attracted copycats. To stay in business, you must keep growing. You have to create a new product and find a new optimum selling strategy.
That should take about half as many hours as with the first product. This is because you are much smarter now and have all those people working for you. So you continue putting in 50-plus hour workweeks. But you hire qualified people to help you with the marketing and sales. That way, when you get to the next level, you can finally start to work less.
This will take another year or two. And then, finally, you will feel like you are ready for those four-hour workweeks. You'll have an excellent marketing and product team and competent people, in-house or outsourced—handling other aspects of the business.
But at that point—when you are in the $10 million revenue range and have more employees than you can keep track of—things could start to fall apart.
The machinery you've relied on to grow to that point—the accounting, fulfillment, operations, and customer service practices, protocols, and systems—could begin to break down. You will have to cancel your six-month vacation and hire and train a handful of very good CEO and CFO types. You have to make your business efficient.
This may take another year or two. But then—if you've done everything right—you will be ready for a four-hour workweek.
Unless you decide to start another business.
Don't laugh. I know: Who, having gone through all that (with the ultimate goal of working only four hours per week) would start the whole process over again? And why?
Don't ask me. Ask my shrink.
But even if you are smart and don't start another business, you will realize you have spent as many as seven years getting your business to that point.
Again, you can find out all about this by becoming a member of the Wealth Builders Club. The club currently includes six wealth-building programs, one of which focuses on the particular subject of growing a million-dollar business in seven years or less. For more information on that, go here.
|
I've given you the big picture. Now I want to go into more detail on this dream, this myth of outsourcing.
On the surface, it sounds good. Hire people in Kentucky and Oregon. Hire people overseas. Easier. Cheaper. Simpler.
But the more you look at it, the more complicated it gets. Or, the more focused the skill set, the more difficult it is.
At the broadest level of skill—say data entry—it can be done. The businesses I own or consult with routinely outsource data entry. This is possible because these jobs are relatively simple. As long as there are good programs and effective management, data entry can be done by anyone with a grade-school education.
It is also advisable to outsource some professional services such as legal and accounting. When you have a small business, outsourcing services like these is just more cost-effective. When your business gets larger, you may find that some of these services are more efficiently done in-house, even if they cost a little more.
But if you take one more step above that in terms of focus, outsourcing gets tricky.
Customer service is a good example. You can outsource the most basic elements of customer service without much problem. But once you get into the area of handling specific problems or answering questions, the challenge mounts.
Twenty years ago, virtually everything in business magazines predicted 90% outsourcing of customer service for American companies. But in the last 10 years, many of those jobs have come back home. Businesses have discovered that efficiency and quality are tough to outsource.
Moving up the business-focus ladder, outsourcing gets even more difficult. I'm talking about formulating and manufacturing products, developing and carrying out marketing plans, and handling virtually every aspect of management.
To be able to hire freelance help in these areas, you need to have some knowledge of the skill. Hiring data entry is easy. But 80%-plus of a business's activity—and 90%-plus of its problems and challenges—are more complicated than data entry.
Take copywriting—the writing you do to advertise your business. How can you farm that out without knowing if what you're paying for is good copy or bad copy?
The same is true for pricing your product and developing a marketing strategy. Yes, you can hire experts to help. But how will you know if the experts are actually helping you or just wasting your money? You need to be able to figure out the answers to the core questions yourself.
So what am I saying here?
First, that Dan Ferriss is right: Pareto's Principle applies to start-up business ventures. But you need to understand which specific activities will generate the greatest returns for your businesses' growth.
Second, the idea that you can outsource sales and marketing is a myth—a dangerous, expensive myth.
And third, if you take the right steps (the steps I outline in Ready, Fire, Aim and the Wealth Builders Club), you will one day be able to run your business working four hours per week. But until that point you, will be working 40, 50, 60, or even 70 hours per week.
The good news is that those hours will fly by and you will love what you are doing. And when the time comes for your abbreviated work week, you will have a business that is worth a million dollars or more.
Best,
Mark
My open letter in response:
I thought this one was a little hypocritical. Mark is basically running the kind of business described in 4hww. Tim doesn't say that you can start a business on 4 hours a week, or that you don't need to know how to do the things you're going to outsource. I think 4hww is so far outside the box that people really have a hard time understanding it.
What Tim is basically doing in 4hww is setting up an extreme example to illustrate how many decisions we make automatically in business and life, that aren't don't support what our hearts want and don't have to be that way. I think Tim is slaying sacred cows and doing so in a gonzo style because that draws attention.
For example a sacred cow of business: The accepted thought is that you to start and run a small business you need to virtually master every aspect of that small business. ie a restaurant owner must know accounting, marketing, production management, interior design for laying out the kitchen and dining room, be a chef, waiter, hostess, buss boy, and so on. Then you must work 100 hours a week doing as much of it as you can for several years to keep as much margin as you can until its on its feet. Then you can probably outsource some of the tasks like bookkeeping, cooking etc. and one day sell you business to your kids if they want it, but you'll probably never retire on it.
Tim's Method: Don't get into a business that doesn't have a big enough margin, because you're going to outsource everything you don't enjoy doing. (Not that you can't do it, just that you don't like doing it.) If you have to outsource some of it why not outsource nearly all of it--if you can manage employees you can manage virtual assistants.
Be strategic in your contribution and your desires. If you want to run a restaurant because you like coming up with creative themes and strange food combinations then running a kosher deli for 40 years won't make you happy. You need to build a team of people who can manage the aspects of running a restaurant leaving you free to move on to the next big idea. In other words, its okay to make a million dollars a year as a business and only personally take home $1,100 a month if your contribution was fun or it only took you 1 day a week to do it.
Sacred Cow of Personal Life: Clearly $1,100 a month isn't enough to live on for most people. Well, most people don't live from the heart. Is it okay to have an older car if it means you can spend more time with your kids? Is it okay to live further outside the city if you only commute in once a month? Is it acceptable to retire at 65 instead of 60 if it means you can take your family around the world in a year while you're all young enough to enjoy it? Those are questions most people will never ask their hearts because they are busy working to guild their own cage.
Tim's Method: Be willing to do things entirely upside down if that lets you spend more time fulfilling what your heart wants. Most of what we don't do is because we're afraid of things that might never happen, or that wouldn't be that bad if they did.
Tim isn't saying everyone can do it in 4 hours, or that you won't need a bunch of extra work during start-up, or that you won't ever have to do things you don't enjoy, or that you don't need to know how to do the things you'll have you VA do for you, or that there's no risk in following his advice. He's setting up an exaggerated example of something so different than everyone else does it to make you ask yourself questions about what you really want and whether the path you are on will even lead you there.
Mark Ford is walking the Tim Farris path and sort of missing the point.
Friday, May 23, 2014
Some resources for Promoting Audio Books
Audio Book promotion has been a bit of a grey spot at the end of a long path for most of us writers. What I mean by that is that most of the writers I encounter knew nothing about marketing when they published their Indie work, and had to take several expensive crash courses in it to promote their books. The results of it all is often mixed. Usually what works, doesn't work by the time you discover it, and most of the really successful Indies I know "got lucky" which lead to continued success because they had the talent and work ethic to capitalize on that luck.
After a couple years of not giving up, most of us have learned a enough to say that we will make it if we can just get more time to make it happen or a little bigger marketing budget. Then someone brings up audio books. It's the same conundrum only without the wealth of other authors experimenting and developing ways to promote your work. That's extra daunting. Here's some links to great info, but first let me introduce the best new idea in audio marketing I've encountered.
Let me introduce Audavoxx--it's brilliant, inexpensive, and I believe it will be very effective as soon as it's a little more mature in the audience (Give it 3 to 6 months).
Here's some links:
http://blog.acx.com/2014/05/15/guest-post-karen-commins-on-marketing-audiobooks-part-one/
http://blog.acx.com/2014/05/20/guest-post-karen-commins-on-marketing-audiobooks-part-two/
http://blog.acx.com/2014/05/14/the-acx-authors-audiobook-checklist/
Wednesday, May 21, 2014
Healthy beef
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2014/05/21/grass-fed-beef-dairy.aspx?e_cid=20140521Z1_DNL_art_1&utm_source=dnl&utm_medium=email&utm_content=art1&utm_campaign=20140521Z1&et_cid=DM45039&et_rid=527988186
- Organic, grass-fed standards do not permit non-medical use of antibiotics. With antibiotic-resistant disease being a major public health hazard, buying organic meats is an important consideration
- Antibiotics and hard-to-digest grains radically alter the bacterial balance and composition in the animal’s gut, thereby promoting disease. It also has a detrimental effect on the nutritional composition of the meat
- Grass-fed beef tends to be leaner, and have higher levels of vitamins, minerals, and cancer-fighting CLA. It also has a healthier ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fats
- Organic farms tend to provide far more sanitary conditions overall, since the animals are not kept in overcrowded barracks day in and day out. As a result, the animals are far less likely to harbor dangerous pathogens
- Raw milk from organic, grass-fed cows, and certified organic eggs from free-range hens are also healthier options due to superior nutrient content and reduced risk of contamination with drugs and pathogens
Friday, May 9, 2014
Life Update (part 23??)
Hi everybody,
Alright, it's been a crazy few weeks. My baby is 22 days old. My wife is recovering well from her C-Section. Life has begun to shuffle forward whether I'm ready for it or not. I'm feeling positive, but it's impossible to describe the busy/exhausted/adrenaline filled craziness of having a preemie in the NICU. I won't even try. Those who have been where we are no it already and despite the fact that it's my job to relate experiences to my readers this is beyond my ability. So I'm going to save time and say what must be said and then get back to important things like holding my baby.
That's the theme of my life right now--do the "urgent" as best you can and defer anything that you can while counting on those who love us to come through in ways we could never normally ask them to come through. We've been hugely blessed by folks at our church and my wife's work, as well as friends and family. I owe them a thanks that can't be put into words. I am committed to helping others out when life goes sideways in honor of those who've come through for us in this time.
So, along that theme, I have updates to share with my friends and fans.
On the personal front, my wife is on maternity leave. We don't know exactly when Olivia Grace will be coming home but she's passed most of her milestones. The numbers all lean on each other now, she has to continue to put on weight while taking over more and more developments for herself that require her to burn calories. For example: she's now regulating her own temperature and that can't eat up all the energy she absorbs. There's some other protocols along the way, like transitioning from stomach sleeping to back sleeping. Stomach is better for digestion but worse chance of SIDs. So before she goes home we need her sleeping on her back without needing her vitals monitored and still digesting. She'll also have a car seat challenge where she spends 90 minutes in a seated position. If she doesn't hold her chin up when she's moderately reclined then we can't be sure she won't stop breathing at some random time in a car ride.
So there's reasons for it all and they just check each thing as her weight and gestational age indicate she's a candidate for it. So far she's not failing any test. For a time she was trending up on weight but at the smallest possible increment. They told us that its normal for her to add slowly at first and to anticipate a day when she starts getting it all down. We're kinda seeing that now, as Olivia has put on about 2 oz a day for 3 straight days. They already disconnected her oxygen monitor since she's not struggled with apnea at all. No one will say when she's coming home for sure but realistically it's between a week and 10 days, perhaps less.
Bottom line is that this is dominating my time and impacting every area of my life--but I feel tremendously blessed. If anyone is waiting on me for anything feel free to remind me, as I can get a few things done here and there.
My Writing Life, is crazy too. Thanks to my amazing wife and some great friends willing to edit for free, I'm back on schedule with my Anthology--Diner Tales: A Contemporary Canterbury Anthology.
In talking it over with my wife, we feel that I need to return to publishing my novels in the fastest order. That means I need to put the projects forward that are closest to completion. Sadly, the sequel to Suffering Rancor is not next on the list. Given how little time I'll have once the baby comes home, if I want to get a second book out this year it'll have to be my mystery thriller: Vancouver Scooter Club Mysteries. Sorry to disappoint. I'm looking at the order of completeness of my other projects and I hope to get to the Rancor Sequel in 2015.
Thanks everyone!
PS I'll be reading from Diner Tales at the Bards and Brews Event in Hillsboro the last Friday of this month. See post below. If you can't wait to get a copy of this masterpiece follow this link and buy the first edition (somewhat flawed), which is just around while I iron the publishing kinks out. I've personally worked with Brad Cameron and Amanda Washington before so I can tell you that this is the reading to get to. Minds will be blown!
Alright, it's been a crazy few weeks. My baby is 22 days old. My wife is recovering well from her C-Section. Life has begun to shuffle forward whether I'm ready for it or not. I'm feeling positive, but it's impossible to describe the busy/exhausted/adrenaline filled craziness of having a preemie in the NICU. I won't even try. Those who have been where we are no it already and despite the fact that it's my job to relate experiences to my readers this is beyond my ability. So I'm going to save time and say what must be said and then get back to important things like holding my baby.
That's the theme of my life right now--do the "urgent" as best you can and defer anything that you can while counting on those who love us to come through in ways we could never normally ask them to come through. We've been hugely blessed by folks at our church and my wife's work, as well as friends and family. I owe them a thanks that can't be put into words. I am committed to helping others out when life goes sideways in honor of those who've come through for us in this time.
So, along that theme, I have updates to share with my friends and fans.
On the personal front, my wife is on maternity leave. We don't know exactly when Olivia Grace will be coming home but she's passed most of her milestones. The numbers all lean on each other now, she has to continue to put on weight while taking over more and more developments for herself that require her to burn calories. For example: she's now regulating her own temperature and that can't eat up all the energy she absorbs. There's some other protocols along the way, like transitioning from stomach sleeping to back sleeping. Stomach is better for digestion but worse chance of SIDs. So before she goes home we need her sleeping on her back without needing her vitals monitored and still digesting. She'll also have a car seat challenge where she spends 90 minutes in a seated position. If she doesn't hold her chin up when she's moderately reclined then we can't be sure she won't stop breathing at some random time in a car ride.
So there's reasons for it all and they just check each thing as her weight and gestational age indicate she's a candidate for it. So far she's not failing any test. For a time she was trending up on weight but at the smallest possible increment. They told us that its normal for her to add slowly at first and to anticipate a day when she starts getting it all down. We're kinda seeing that now, as Olivia has put on about 2 oz a day for 3 straight days. They already disconnected her oxygen monitor since she's not struggled with apnea at all. No one will say when she's coming home for sure but realistically it's between a week and 10 days, perhaps less.
Bottom line is that this is dominating my time and impacting every area of my life--but I feel tremendously blessed. If anyone is waiting on me for anything feel free to remind me, as I can get a few things done here and there.
My Writing Life, is crazy too. Thanks to my amazing wife and some great friends willing to edit for free, I'm back on schedule with my Anthology--Diner Tales: A Contemporary Canterbury Anthology.In talking it over with my wife, we feel that I need to return to publishing my novels in the fastest order. That means I need to put the projects forward that are closest to completion. Sadly, the sequel to Suffering Rancor is not next on the list. Given how little time I'll have once the baby comes home, if I want to get a second book out this year it'll have to be my mystery thriller: Vancouver Scooter Club Mysteries. Sorry to disappoint. I'm looking at the order of completeness of my other projects and I hope to get to the Rancor Sequel in 2015.
Thanks everyone!PS I'll be reading from Diner Tales at the Bards and Brews Event in Hillsboro the last Friday of this month. See post below. If you can't wait to get a copy of this masterpiece follow this link and buy the first edition (somewhat flawed), which is just around while I iron the publishing kinks out. I've personally worked with Brad Cameron and Amanda Washington before so I can tell you that this is the reading to get to. Minds will be blown!
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