Last show this year

In 2008 I spent less money on software and info products but way more on seminars:

Twice in Chicago, once in Philly, and now Long beach, California For Brendon Burchard's extravaganza.

Brendon pulled out all the stops for this show. Usually, in seminars, it is speaker after speaker, with no speaker lasting for more than 2 hours. In this case, Brendon was there about 80% of the time. Essentially, he breathed life into his "Life's Golden Ticket" book. He had a huge circus tent made specially for the event and had a real circus troop do some circus numbers.

What fascinated me the most was that I had the chance of witnessing, for three  straight days, a totally happy and contented person. Someone who is living his life on his own term and who keeps on greeting new challenges with gusto.

He wanted to have his own circus, so he went out and did it!

In this case, the medium truly was the message. Brendon was the message.

Infrequent posts, redux

I have never been very good at posting regularly to this blog.

At least, this time I have a good reason

Lately, though, the reason I haven't posted regularly is that I launched another blog.

www.project1849.com which is an attempt at brain dumping a lot of the topics I have been studying and pondering upon in the past decades.

I have at least half a dozen themes that I will write about. The aim is to gather a following of like minded people.

As usual, I did not wait for the thing to be perfect before I launched it. I set a date and stuck with it. I thought that having the launch of the blog coincide with Brendon Burchard's event in Long Beach would be a good time.

I did renew several connections with the people from Impact as well as made some more contacts that pointed me to new resources I could use to feed my blog.

I fell short of having my ebook bribe ready and did not set up an optin box yet.

Because of the time investment in the Burchard show, over 12 hours per day, I can't really expect attendees to go check my blog and comment. They will probably forget to check it out after the show. I guess I will have to send them reminder emails and tweets.

My big launch ended up being a soft launch but at least, I did it!

Now, all I have to do is to keep on writing and keep on improving my blog to capture leads and increase my following.

The power of the 1 dollar kitchen timer

What is the difference between a succesful entrepreneur and a not so succesful entrepreneur?

Okay, I will give you a few secondsto think it over. I will even help you with what it isn't.

It isn't intelligence, it isn't knowledge it isn't a bunch of stuff.

Let's face it, all original and creative entrepreneurs, and I mean the truly out of the box, bleeding edge, pushing the envelope, lateral thinkers have their brains wired differently. In most cases, that results in the dreaded ADD ADHD syndrome. OOOOOOHHH

ADD makes you very focus, they call it "hyperfocussed" for short periods of time whitin which one can accomplish what others cannot even when given 10 times the amount of time. The problem is that this hyperfocus "zone" only comes once in a while, in between long stretches of procrastination and/or depression.

What thus separates the succesful entrepreneurs from the not so succesful entrepreneurs (or the downright failures) has to do with the ratio of hyperfocus vs procrastination.

I have read several times about mental discipline and how guys like Alex Mandossian, Jim Edwards, Mark Joyner use timers (Joyner has a timer built into his wimiki software).

Alex talks of a simple kitchen timer, a hand cranked thing that you can set up for up to an hour and that will ring a bell at the end. This forces you to do tasks within an hour.

Well, the other day, I went to my local dollar store and bought one of those kitchen timers.

This thing actually works! Well, for as long as you crank it up to an hour because less than that and the spring hasn't any juice left at the end to ring the bell . . .

Anyways, I'm kind of a techie guy who loves a paperless office and everything within my laptop, preferably in my browser . . . etc

In this instance, however, I find that the obtrusive tick tick tick tick tick actually forces me to be aware of the passage of time. With a quick glance, I know exactly how much I have left. The "ticking bomb" sound kind of puts me in a state wherein if believe that if I don't accomplish the task within the alloted time, the thing will explode. One hell of a motivation to get things done isn't it ? It's like the old movie cliché of the countdown to explosion Oh no, less than a minute left, hurry up!!

In this particular case,even though for the same price you can get a digital kitchen timer, go for the manual tick tick timer because the sound puts you in the "zone".

One caveat though: You have to manually crank it every hour for it to work ;-)

Works best when you can break down tasks so that they can fit within an hour or plan part 1 and 2 of a given task.

If you finish the task within the hour, take the remaining minutes to give yourself a break. Anyways, you should give yourself a 5 minute break every hour, just to stretch a little, get a glass of water, bathroom break, whatever.

If you can accomplish a task in less than 45 minutes, don't take too long of a break or you will lose your momentum. Take a short break, as usual,and crank up the timer for the next task. If you can gain an hour at the end of your work schedule, then you can relax and reward yourself.

Over time, instead of spreading work over 12-16 hours a day, you may find yourself packing it in less that half the time and then reorganize your leisure activities with these newly found continuous hours of free time.

Imagine doing 80% of your work in 20% of the time it took you previously, that is motivation enough to do the remaining 20% of the work in the same amount of time it took you to do the first 80%. 80-20 rules still applies.

I am not there yet, but I'm working on it.

Gotta go now, my time is almost up;-)