Archive for the ‘Start Here!’ Category
The Sixth Day of Christmas – Research & Development
You haven’t forgotten that you’re your own little company have you? How’s your Research and Development department ticking along? Have you managed a break through this year? Why not?
There’s been plenty written lately about the past year, reflecting on personal events, milestones and goals achieved. Soon enough we’ll be into New Years resolutions. You can pick from your standard range: get fit, quit smoking, save more money, be nicer to people etc. Why not resolve to do something that can benefit you in the long term and open up your eyes to a world of possibility?
I’m talking about learning something new: experimenting with additional income streams, setting yourself up as a small business, anything that’ll help you get out of the rat race!
You’ve spent more time figuring out which bank would give you 3.75% pa on your $5,000 term deposit than you have even thinking about getting out of the rat race! (By the by, making your money work for you this way would net you a whopping $187 profit for the year before tax)
I’ll cut to the chase, you can get your tax rate down to the low 10 – 15%, increase your net worth & asset base, get involved in the stock market, have a look at an eBay store… the list goes on!
If you went to college or university you’ve spent anywhere from $20,000 upwards on a qualification that’s going to tie you to a job until you retire, but you might turn your nose up at a stock market seminar that’s charging $1,000? Think about it.
The Sixth Day of Christmas is going to be short and sweet; if you haven’t already you should kick your Research and Development department into gear in ‘10.
Make your New Year’s resolution count for 2010, maybe turn off your TV and learn about drop shipping a product online? (Turning your TV off will give you an extra week and a half of time to lead your own free world)
What’s your resolution? Leave a comment below, follow me on twitter, sign-up for the RSS feed or join the facebook group? If you’ve got something to say that’ll help us all lead our own free world contribute and write an article for the site!
Related Articles
Facebook is Your New Best Friend
On the Second Day of Christmas, My True Love Gave to Me, A Massive Invasion of Privacy…
Do you have ‘spending 2 hours a night on Facebook’ under ‘Activities’ in your personal information profile? In light of trying to lead our own free world, improve the work life balance and get out there and do something, we seem to be spending an awful lot of time on facebook?
This week facebook rolled out its new privacy settings and this caused somewhat of a small uproar amongst people. “What? Now how am I supposed to spy on people’s photos?” On the surface, facebook is great for connecting with your friends, sending emails and sharing your photos with each other. What it’s really for is advertising! Never before has there been more targeted demographic advertising than facebook.
Your New Best Friend
Facebook knows what you’re a fan of, what you like, what activities you’re interested in, where you live, your gender, relationship status, employer and what you’ve been up to lately! The combination of all of your keyword inputs are used to generate advertising that is directed at you. I was a bit miffed to be offered not one but two lovely ladies courtesy of facebook.
Become a fan or join groups of the most obscure things and see what pops up on offer as an advertisement?
You might have changed your privacy settings or made custom friends lists so your boss can’t see you drinking beer through funnels on the weekend, but facebook will always know all!
Status Updates That Should be Banned
- Anything containing ‘OMG’
- Telling me you’ve just gone to the letterbox to check the mail
- That you’re soooo bored
- That you’ve just been to the shops
- That you’re at the pub* (You’re at the pub! Out and about, not on facebook, enjoy it!)
- Complaining about shit drivers on the freeway, while you’re using your cell phone to do a mobile facebook update while you’re driving. Think about it.*
- *All mobile uploads
Targeted Advertising
Back to the target demographic advertising, anything you are a fan of, like, or activities you list then you’re falling into an advertising ‘category’. As far as facebook is concerned I enjoy breathing in, ice-creams named with a homosexual vibe, I have a yearning to be playing with my childhood toys, I watch too much television and I enjoy not being on fire. Advertise to that!
Before you hit me with the hypocrite stick, I quite enjoy facebook. I think it’s brilliant for keeping in touch with family and friends and especially friends overseas. It also has plenty of other pros;
- Spying on school pals who’re bald & look like they’re 40
- Checking up on school pals that are on their second marriage
- Tagging your friends as farm animals
- Realising that the vast majority of people don’t know how to spell
With all of this facebook privacy who-ha that has been going on keep things in check, remember what the service can do for you. You don’t need to divulge all of your personal information. You might have just been on an amazing vacation to Costa Rica but would you sit down in your lounge room with all of your ‘friends’ on facebook and show them your holiday snaps in a photo album?
Well you know that I long to play with Lego, enjoy not being on fire and smother everything in HP sauce. Tell me about your experience with facebook. You can leave a comment below, follow me on twitter, sign-up for the remaining 10 days of Christmas or ironically join the Facebook group.
Related Articles
Four Hour Work Week – My Arse!
4HWW - Australian Edition
My arse indeed Tim Ferriss. Let’s get things straight, I’ve read the Four Hour Work Week (4HWW), I love it and it’s consumed my life for the last 9 months. I’ve recommended it to a dozen people and given away about three copies. (Affiliate commission cheque in the mail?).
The concept is great, create an automated income stream by developing a muse product to sell online, and thus scaling your own work commitments back to only four hours per week, while having your bank account swell to fund your custom designed lifestyle of jet-setting, traveling, dancing around in South America and learning foreign languages.
You spend 4 hours a week at work making coffee.
You’ll finish reading this book and have a sense of drive, hopefully you realise that your current situation of converting your time for an income is ridiculous. Do you want a successful career or automated money, deposited into your bank every week, offering you the freedom to do whatever you like? Your friends don’t care that you put in 60 hours at the office this week, but they’ll sit up and take note if you’re cashed up and DON’T have to go to the office.
In the book, Tim Ferriss establishes a protein/supplement product which he sells on line. This is used as his vehicle for automation, dealing with clients, outsourcing tasks, streamlining website sales and generating an income stream.
So there I was, sitting in the airport and pouring through my copy of 4HWW. Almost hiding it from view from people who passed by as if I’d been let in on a secret; lifestyle design, escaping the 9-5 and all that jazz and I didn’t want anyone else to know about it until I’d cracked the code myself.
Skip the first couple of chapters.
If only Tim Ferriss had released a precursor to the Four Hour Work Week. He managed to gloss over it in the book, but in order to build his company and finally crack under the workload of a hundred hours per week, he actually had to build a company. He didn’t manage to fund his ideal lifestyle by:
- writing google Adwords ads to shitty online products and collect an affiliate commission from Clickbank,
- writing some fluffy self help eBook about freeing himself from work and how you can to, by buying the fluffy eBook, which is about how to write your own fluffy eBook and sell it,
- starting a blog, building subscribers and a sense of trust and then try and sell them a product.
Nope, he started a legitimate business & product that provided REAL, tangible and direct value to the customer. Dealt with sales issues & keeping customers happy and then removed himself from the decision tree in an effort to automate.
He started his own company & launched a product, built a client base, managed sales, worked his arse off and then outsourced & automated.
I wish someone had told me this before I read the 4HWW. Everyone reads the book, gets a fuzzy notion that you can sell a crappy product, set up a website, buy a few keywords from google and point them at your site to drive traffic. Now you only need to sell 8 alarm clocks per day to fund your ideal lifestyle.
Unfortunately (or fortunately?) the 4HWW has sold a truckload of copies. So now everyone has had a wake-up call, sadly every man and his dog are trying to think of the next muse, the next product that can be manufactured in china for 30 cents and drop shipped to needy customers all over the world.
I’d still recommend the book to people, as a starting point. I’m still getting strange looks when I tell people I’ve thrown my job in to finish off my muse, build a client base and focus on marketing and sales.
The 4HWW is a snap shot of what Tim had accomplished; it glossed over his hard yards and focused on the jet setting, the automation and the lifestyle. It makes a good story and acts as a good first step for people who are stuck in the 9 – 5 to realise that there ‘might’ be something else out there. I can definitely credit the book with giving me the kick in the arse I needed.
What’s been your experience since reading the 4HWW? Have you read it? Are you still trying to think of the ever elusive muse?
Related Posts
Why You Don’t Need to Go to School to Be Successful
When I started leadersofthefreeworld.org, one of the objectives was that it could act as a forum for everyone to unite against the norm! I’m very pleased to publish the very first guest post on Leaders of the Free World! Oscar Del Ben from freestyle mind was kind enough to contribute his personal experience as to why you don’t need to go to school to be successful.
Why You Don’t Need to Go to School to Be Successful
I always wondered why schools suck the way they do. I left school when I was 18 because I was simply not learning something useful at that time.
This happened over four years ago. Once I left school, I went to work for more than one year doing manual labor tasks for small companies. I didn’t enjoy it and my parents (along with everyone else) were saying to me that without school I was going to be stuck with laboring for my whole life.
Of course I knew it was just bullshit and after one year I established my own company and started doing consulting. Now, four years later, I’m expanding my business on the internet as I want to create (and live) off passive income. It’ll not be easy but that’s not a reason for me to give up just yet.
What does this story have to do with school? Well, in these four years I studied a lot, I devoured hundreds of books and learnt a foreign language (english).
At some point during the past four years, I realized that the reason people are not successful is simply because of what they learnt at school, or better what they didn’t learn at school.
Being successful is primarily a state of mind. If you don’t have it, it doesn’t matter how much money you have in the bank, you’ll be never be happy. On the other side, having the right mindset makes it straightforward to achieve success.
The problem is that they don’t teach you how to be successful at school, you have to learn it yourself.
School prepares people to join the corporate world, they teach you how to work in a corporate environment, and not how to become a leader.
Here I’m talking about 90% of schools, because I haven’t attended Stanford University, so I don’t know what they do, although most of their courses are available for free online.
And here’s the point – If you want to learn how to be successful and how to develop a successful mindset, you can learn it from books and videos thanks to the Internet.
And you don’t have to buy some secret guide that someone is trying to sell online, you can go just fine with what you can already find for free.
Having said that, schools are not that bad, simply don’t expect them to teach you how to be a leader, because you have to learn it yourself.
Oscar Del Ben is a personal development blogger. He writes about productivity, success and personal growth. You can read his blog at freestylemind.com.
Related Posts
You Only Need One Idea…
This article is a call to action, delving into your current situation, being ‘stuck’ with your job, an idea to free yourself and some great resources to get you started in making the leap into the free world…
Gloomy
You’ve worked, saved your money, and are looking to the future. A bit of world travel, an investment property or two later, and you’ll be staring down the barrel of 30 years of work, career progression, climbing the ladder and moving into management positions. Which you’ll soon discover means more responsibility, longer hours and an enforced ‘passion’ for the job.
A couple of years of panic, job swapping, research, trialling alternate income streams and saving those pay checks and that brings us to the present day. It’s time to focus our efforts on ‘You’ Pty. Ltd. Not someone else’s company.
Good Friends or Work Colleagues?
I found myself struggling with the concept of ‘being employed’. You’re not in control, your employer controls your life essentially; overtime, family time, waking time, vacation time – you’re not in control.
You could be working so much that the only people you socialise with are work mates? That’s not your fault; you spend all of your time there! I’ve been lucky enough to make some good friends for life in a couple of my jobs, some of them I’ve had lengthy discussions about the state of the working world and even convinced a couple of them to look at investment properties, re-arrange their finances, start freelancing for themselves and say goodbye to the working world. (Personally this is my driver for writing these articles, the feedback & encouragement I’ve had from my converts!)
Stuck
“Get a degree behind you; it’ll open so many doors”. And so after completing my university studies, I found that it also closed plenty of doors. I’d done four years of full-time study, there’s an expectation that surely you wouldn’t waste four years of study and ‘not’ play along with the working world? You’re throwing your career away!
Taking the leap, jumping off the cliff and landing in the free world doesn’t have to mean quitting your job or throwing the towel in, it’s a change of attitude and focus, an adjustment.
Just One Idea…
All you need is an idea, but to get to this stage you’ll need to free up your time. Clear your mind and be able to switch off from ‘work’ and ‘your’ looming deadlines. Your current situation could well be full and too busy, how on earth will you find the time to work on a side project?
I’m a firm believer in de-cluttering your life and this includes your day-to-day schedule. How often do you check your email, read the news online, post blog comments etc? You can batch repetitive tasks that you do throughout the day to once a day; the aim is to become effective. Soon you’ll realise that if you can do your job in half the time, your boss will ask you to do twice as much! This alone should make the light bulb go off and hopefully you’ll realise something’s not right?
Internet freelancers are available at the click of a button to do practically anything you need. Virtual assistants, shelf companies, freelancers, designers – the possibilities of out-sourcing are endless.
All you need is an idea. Now it’s probably best to not try and re-invent the wheel, or grab the old wheel and put an alarm clock in it. What do you do at work? Ever think you could do things a better way? If you’re a nurse do you spend your whole day hauling fat people off to the toilet or lifting them out of bed for a sponging? What would make your day easier? What about getting a cradle or sling designed, taking out a patent, getting it manufactured overseas and selling it online? Anything! If you think there’s a market for something have a go! Like everything else, if you try and fail you’re only going to end up right back here.
If you still don’t believe me, I want you to think about this;
The Ped-Egg;
For those of you not familiar, the ped-egg is a small hand-held container/fine grater that is used to remove dead skin off your feet, yummo. It’s just an Ikea cheese grater scaled down, used in a different application and with a bit of marketing spin! I use the ped-egg analogy because it’s the perfect product.
- Priced at around $20
- Appeals to general public/consumers
- No moving parts (nothing to break)
- Cheap to manufacture ($$)
- Small (easy to distribute/ship)
And so there you have it, an example of an idea that isn’t rocket science. You don’t have to be quitting work or jumping into the free world just yet, but could you be more effective at what you do? Potentially freeing your time up to investigate other streams of income or just enjoying yourself a bit more?
You
You work hard (probably) and surely there’s a thing or two you could change around the workplace, or you’ve had one of those “I wish someone would invent such and such” moments. What are you waiting for?
There are some great free resources online, here are a mix of some great FREE eBooks and blogs to check out; The Middle Finger Project – a website from an alternate leader of the free world, Rejecting the Status Quo & Rebelling Against Mediocrity; Rules Optional – Andrew from RulesOptional explores on a sail boat, runs, kayaks, swims, manages his own ad agency and is an excellent writer; The Art of Non-Conformity – prepared to be jealous, a blog and travel journal of Chris Guillebeau, grab his brief guide to world domination; Through the Illusion – A very well written blog, in particular this article is a must read. And lastly the article that gave me the kick in the arse I needed, Steve Pavlina’s ’10 Reasons you shouldn’t get a job’, the king of the free world who has managed to decouple his time from his income and is a wealth of knowledge. I challenge you to read Steve’s article and not be pissed off at your current situation.
Is working for someone else, being employed and trading your time for money really the most effective way?
Related Articles
My Subscribers Quadrupled in a Day!
Amazing results! So I wanted to have my own website, somewhere to post a few articles and get a few ‘subscribers’, to try and get people out of their cubicle jail cells and to start doing what they actually want as opposed to sitting at work for the pay, and also to give everyone a bit of a forum to discuss our plans to break out of Alcatraz.
I’ve written half a dozen articles, plenty more to come, enough cynical rants to keep you amused and a few helpful ones in between. Then it got to actually putting up a website, ‘blogging’ and all that jazz…
This is what really opened my eyes, there’s a whole community of people ‘blogging’ for a living, and this is their ‘job’, for better use of the word. There are however hundreds of websites about creating websites, blogs about blogs, no one* is really ‘writing’ anything of value unless you want to learn about how to create your own little website or blog. *(there are few great exceptions that I’ll link to in a post soon enough)
So I followed all the instructions out there, and now leadersofthefreeworld.org is here, somewhere for you to check in and hopefully check-out of the ball and chain that is your ‘job’. I’m not saying we should all slack off and play a lot of xbox, just that being employed by someone else isn’t the answer.
All of these professional bloggers out of there, websites with subscriptions everywhere wouldn’t be able to claim their subscribers quadrupled in one day, amazing results!? That’s right, on Friday the 18th September my subscriber count went from…. 1… to 4. Take that professional bloggers!
So check back in as you please, feel free to sign-up for the emails as I’ll be posting plenty more articles with a bit of a balance between employed life tirades, some useful online resources that’ll blow your mind, some property and financial who-ha and hopefully a bit of a kick in the arse to help you help yourself.
Related Posts
i7zpn396h5
Obesity & Executive Management
Successful?
Have you ever seen a slim, fit, athletic manager, executive or director? Me neither. Have a good look around – news articles in the paper, online, always with a photo of ‘some’ CEO who just closed a big deal, no need to ask who ate all the pies.
And there it is, you’re that much of a success that you don’t have time to eat properly, exercise or get a ray of sunshine during the day? I think someone should evaluate how loosely we use the term ‘success’.
The corporate ladder is a funny one, its own little world. You’re a team player, a company man.
In my previous job, my next step up in a few years would have been a project manager; making the tough calls, running the job, reporting to my bosses about the project cash-flow, and ultimately being the first in line to be shot. Inspirational stuff.
Before I entered the working world, I decided I’d like to be a project manager – all that control, looking after the job, the smooth operation of things. I was quick to discover that it meant excessive responsibility, living the job, no time off and in the end devoting your life to the company and project.
I’ll harp on about this, because I am so perplexed that someone who’s supposedly been educated can become so brainwashed and removed from reality. To be honest, I’m also so passionate about this work/life conundrum because I used to be so hell bent on a career path.
You’re special!
Working within a company structure, you’d be surprised to find that you’re just another name in an organisational chart, replaceable and interchangeable. The further you travel up the company ladder, the harder it will be to climb back down.
Now a lot of the guys I used to work with out on the construction sites were a good bunch of guys, but picture your typical construction workers. Not the healthiest brood around, it was the norm, work 11 hours, shovel in a couple of pies during the day and then head to the pub at night time, repeat. It was a social norm that most of the older hands were on heart medication, blood pressure tablets, and cholesterol medication. Not once was the thought to exercise, eat well and have a break from work. People (management, workers, anyone) are willing to put their own health and safety before stepping back and taking the pedal off the gas?
If you remember way back when you first enrolled in the joys of the working world, you worked to live, not the other way around. It will all become a grey mash-up of job/career/life/work. You stupid JERLK.
The ‘career’ might be fit for some of us, if you enjoy the job then why not. But if you want to climb the corporate ladder then don’t worry about the MBA or extra-curricular study, here’s an easy how-to;
- Carry several documents under one arm when walking through the office,
- Look slightly angry around the office, people will think you’re busy,
- If you work in front of a computer, shake your head a lot, the odd fist slamming against your desk won’t hurt,
- Casually greeting your bosses doesn’t hurt, a bit of bravado and confidence will get you everywhere,
- Most superiors/managers/executives are hot air factories, say yes a lot and stroke their ego’s,
- Don’t get caught playing solitaire too much,
- Learn a few ‘office buzzwords’ Refer to Corporate Fluff for the game ‘Wank-word Bingo’.
So there you have it, you could be a manager in no time at all. One thing that I won’t be forgetting too soon is the conversation I had with one of my managers when I resigned. A human resources ‘manager’ was also present. After explaining how I wanted to take a brief sabbatical from the working world, explore my options, maybe travel a bit etc. the HR manager present offered me counselling sessions! So the concept of taking an extended break from work is that far removed from the corporate world psych that I probably have a screw loose?
God help us all.
Financial Abundance
Millionaire Lifestyle
If only I could win lotto. The catch cry of millions, the catch cry of everyone really? I know I wouldn’t scoff at someone giving me a few million dollars. What would you do with a few millions bucks? Big house, car, holidays and maybe a new plasma TV? You’re chasing the ‘life’ of a millionaire, not to be a millionaire. Most of you would get bored not working, which disgusts me and motivates me to try and change your mind.
Here’s an exercise you can do right now; what’s your ideal lifestyle? You might be stuck in a rut at work, bills mounting, living in a dive, but just for a minute take some time to think about what you want. Not a million dollars, quantifiable things, real things.
I’ll give you a few of mine, for me to be ridiculously happy and even more smug than I am now; I want to be living in an apartment in continental Europe, put more time into photography, zooming from city to city on a nice old motorbike and enjoying the delights of Belgian beer with my girlfriend.
The Facts
Now here’s the next part, put some dollar figures to the running costs of your lifestyle; let’s have a look at mine. There’s the odd ‘purchases’ (like the motorbike) but the rest is a general cost of living. I worked out that my ideal lifestyle would cost around $250 per day. So now I’ve got a target and a goal to strive for. If I can generate $250 per day without being employed then as far as I’m concerned, I can live my dream lifestyle.
So let’s cut to the chase, what is financial abundance? I’ll spare you a fair bit of money and time in attending ‘wealth building’ seminars, motivational speaker conferences and trawling the internet for hours on end.
I’m the guy that’s spent thousands of dollars listening to ‘share trading’ gurus tell me that it’s never been a better time to get into the market! It only took me one seminar to realize the good money is in selling tickets to a seminar! (On a sidenote, educate yourself as much as you can)
Having a financially abundant mentality is believing that you’re not working for money, you’re there because you enjoy your job. If you want money you’ve got other resources & income streams up your sleeve. Multiple sources of income include; property, stock market, online marketing, businesses etc.
Too often I’ve had the following conversation with a co-worker;
Me – *usually ranting on about money/life/work etc…*
Co-worker - “Nah I’m pretty comfortable with where I’m at financially”
Me – “So what’d you get out of bed this morning for? Wouldn’t rather a sleep in?”
Co-worker - “Well yeah but there’s bills to pay, you know”
Sometimes, more often than not, the light bulb goes off at this point and they realise what I’m on about. If not then I’m usually wasting my time. People become either complacent or conditioned to what they are used to, don’t forget to dream and look at the bigger picture.
Getting Ahead of the Pack
Once you dive into the rabbit hole, good luck coming out and returning to the working world. As a bit of a background; I thought I was years ahead of the game – I saved all of my pennies from my first job and brought a rental apartment at age 18, went to university, brought my second house at 23 and now I’m ‘stuck’ (if you believe the masses) with half a million dollars of property debt and a 25 year mortgage hanging over my head. And all this by trying to ‘get ahead’ of the pack!
The attempted solution – Over the past couple of years I’ve tried the lot; Google adwords, affiliate marketing, online clickbank sales, selling an online eBook, share trading etc. And I’m sad to say everything failed. I can honestly say that each of these schemes failed, not because I didn’t know what I was doing or flew blindly into a new ‘scheme’, the number one reason was that I just didn’t have the time. I was too busy with ‘work’ (for someone else) and I didn’t have the time to develop these other sources of income. Now that I’ve made the jump and landed in the free world I’m going to be focusing all of my efforts on trying something new and putting a lot more time into my own ‘research and development’ department.
The solution – I’m currently involved in month 7 of a lengthy project. A friend and I who were both working in the backward industry I mentioned in ‘The work life balance’ realised our industry was run by the old school and that the implementation of a bit of software would increase efficiency and simplify the whole operation. Not to bore you with the details, but we’ve invested some money and over the past year have been involved in; designing a new software product from the ground up, drafting a patent specification, dealing with overseas subcontractors, graphic design, company branding, business plans and website design. In the near future we’ll become heavily involved in importing, packaging, logistics and sales. It makes you laugh just a bit when the bank manager looks across the table at two scruffy guys and says “And sorry what are your current positions within the company?” to which we both look at each other a bit bewildered and answer “Uhh.. Company Directors?” Our friends look at us both a bit strangely, usually asking ….’how’. Sure we didn’t know how to set up a company, but I knew how to pick up a phone book and book an appointment with an accountant to ask him?
So there you have it, a director of a company. Once you know what’s involved and how easy it is to setup, you’ll be less impressed the next time you meet a ‘company director’.
Your Next Move
I can’t recommend this highly enough, in your next lunch break head to Steve Pavlina’s website and trawl through some of his articles. It’s from Steve that I’m going to ‘borrow’ his advice; with all of the get-rich-quick schemes and investments you can make, your best bet is yourself. Invest some money in yourself. If you’re confused by this read on.
“Pay” yourself $500 per week (possibly out of your savings) and now you’ve got 8 hours a day to delve heavily into research and development. Buy up on eBooks, there’s also plenty of free resources online & in libraries. If you can’t make the big jump, as some of us will have financial commitments we won’t be able to avoid, have a look at what you’re currently doing. Look around, look above you, who are you paying for; your boss, his boss, the admin girl, the payroll lady, the tax man, your superannuation (401k) fund? Everyone is taking a cut out of what you’re earning as a ‘total’ figure. Once everyone has been paid by your potential earnings, then they’ll pay you your $26 per hour. Feeling ripped off yet? Try and apply your skills and the value you add directly to your customer.
If you try and fail, what’s the worst that can happen? You’ll be back at work in another few months, doing the same job, reading my next article?
You’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain! You have plenty of options; no one is going do this for you!
