Expert Professional Advice

Rich and poor are concepts, representative of a number of factors, including luck and thought process. A lot of books cite the differences between the successful and the unsuccessful. It does us very little good, success comes in many forms, from a variety of sources, and studying people that have attained wealth in order to promote their chosen path as the common person’s way to wealth is distracting. There are many ways to succeed, limited only by our thought process, the next batch of millionaires won’t arise from studying millionaires, they will arise from discovering things, and implementing their experimental ideas in the marketplace. In other words, they’re wealth will arise from things or thoughts that aren’t in the minds of the already rich. What they bring to the market is off the mainstream radar, and they may obtain financial rewards for things that simply haven’t been thought of or acted upon. Books about creating wealth from studying the efforts of the already rich miss the point – they talk about real estate because a traditional mentality thinks real estate builds wealth due to some people having had success with it as a method to generating passive income. Second Life, the online community, changed my ideas about income generation, there are people in Second Life that bought virtual property within the game and now rent it out to other players. If this is producing all the benefits of stable income generation without actually having all the traditional problems of real estate then it is a superior method of income generation. Real estate, like anything else, is for fools and misguided individuals when there are supremely better alternatives. Real estate works because of a combination of leverage, tax breaks, depreciation, and the ability to borrow money to obtain it. Almost anything is a good investment if you can borrow money and put it into something reliable that earns you a higher rate of return that what it cost you to borrow. And the fact that information, when properly used, produces income seems to elude most people. There are businesses that people started that don’t seem to require a lot of capital, and yet, some of these individuals are earning a great return, above real estate, above traditional investments, and going where current millionaires have yet to go or are even knowledgeable about. That’s how ordinary people achieve extraordinary success.

It starts now. Don’t wait to live a passionate life… the timing is never perfect and if you wait to have everything lined up neatly, you just won’t get started. Life is composed of sleeping, working, avoiding work, eating, intercourse, and waiting on lines/searching for a parking spot. That’s about it for most of us. The best days give us that feeling that we can do anything. And maybe you find that in your work or in relaxing, but I have to conclude that most people are not working on something that they are committed to because they believe in it and love it. Well then, are you working on something that will lead toward or prepare you for the work you were meant to be doing? Each of us is limited to 168 hours per week. How we allocate that time determines the kind of life we lead. And if your focus is on the financial part of your existence, those hours can be dedicated to doing what makes money now, putting effort into what makes money in the near-term, and doing what makes money later. Time is the ultimate equalizer; each of us is only allocated 24 hours in a day. Well, plans fail, conditions change, interruptions occur, so the way to survive is to have each of these efforts in place to pay off when the economic situation shifts to less favorable results. I met a guy at a trade fair that didn’t seem to have much traffic at his custom printing booth so we had time to talk. He commented that he’ll keep moving forward, the early 1990s didn’t look good as shifts were occurring in his industry but within a few years there was a resurgence so the only thing that mattered in his view was to keep going forward somehow in those rough times, because any business operator that didn’t is now out of that business and missed the lucrative buildup. His laid back demeanor is a good lead-in to one last thought; ease up on the path to bliss. We might think about and seek enlightenment as some form of perpetual bliss, but life itself is composed of us, and so, it will never be flawless.

The first step, and this is a biggie, is to stop doing all the things that contribute to that false sense of self because if you change your thoughts you change your future. The way we live tends to be more like some low-budget horror film rather than us scripting a blockbuster life. We are immersed in our habits of thought and habits of behavior that result in… the same old results. We’re transmitting our thought patterns by wearing our thinking the way we wear our clothes. Gurus will tell you to act joyful and successful and that affirmations lead to success… well, maybe for some people it kind of works because it interrupts the negative thought process but it isn’t a formula to an extended state of awareness. Awareness will cut through a lot of false starts and misguided thinking. If we can remain aware in the moment we can get a sense of liberation because our thoughts almost always seem to hold us back.

So-called experts can write or talk as much as they want but their words do not change people’s lives for the better. Words don’t leap off the page well enough and wrap around us in order to apply the pressure we need… to meaningfully engage us and move us consistently in a better direction. Judging by the number of personal finance related books released into the market it appears that people have an affinity for a solution but they’re stuck with books that promise quick and easy riches and then these books rarely deliver on anything more than common sense. If you wake up each day and rethink 90% of what you thought yesterday you’re suffering in a semi-permanent anxiety unless those thoughts were some of the happiest you’ve had or contributed to a sense of contentment. Thinking rarely helps, people seek happiness but when have they thought themselves into happiness? If you think that 90% of your problems can be solved with money then you’re not fully aware or thinking in broad terms. Everybody thinks they have problems, the person with $10 in their bank account and the person with $10 million – they just have different problems. A perceived lack of anything can make a person feel miserable. Gurus love to preach that becoming rich is a matter of deciding to be rich and acting on it. Not so. Deciding on it and acting on it is nothing more than a symbol of your thinking… and your thinking may be rather limited. You have to tap into the market, meaning that you simply have to understand transactions, your net profit times the number of transactions will tell the story of your wealth, or you have to get one person to pay you seven figures.

I received an email offering a free conference call about “Secret Sellers” along with a quote from some guru like, “Entrepreneurs must not be deterred by the fear of making a mistake.” This email went on about how some man and lady were going to show me a “no-doubt-about-it” goldmine of untapped motivated sellers… handpicked leads delivered right to my computer! There are plenty of desperate real estate sellers now… the ad never delivered on the “secret sellers” and how am I going to make my real estate fortune, by taking advantage of the misfortune of others? That’s the game… but, even if it wasn’t, these real estate hucksters are annoying… can they show me, step-by-step, what deals they did? I need a good laugh… I want to hear about any real estate gurus that completely messed up.

I had a discussion with a fellow from DC who said, “Is John Edwards kicking himself?” He claimed if John Edwards didn’t drop out he might be seen as the most reasonable candidate for the Presidential office. If he had stayed in perhaps people would have eventually gravitated to him as the best candidate to face and overcome McCain.

***update***

Or not, since his personal actions outside of politics became a negative focal point.

Women start businesses at around twice the rate of men. Single women are buying houses at twice the rate of single men. Women are helping other women advance in corporations. Perhaps when there weren’t as many women employed in influential positions there wasn’t enough traction, but now, women are running things. And if it continues, as it should, women will soon own most of the wealth (they already control almost all the consumer spending and control some business spending). Women are in touch with the pulse of business, so men, you no longer matter in the way that you used to matter as consumers… you go with other things as an accessory, and can act as an accessory to women moving through their ambitions.

It seems like that sometimes, doesn’t it? All these books by gurus, all this supposedly important collective knowledge and it seems we should all be better off… but it gets harder to find information that really matters. Everything is a sales pitch… but I know something inherently valuable… nobody knows the exact answers. They simply do not know what you think they know… they’ve just figured out that you’ll pay for what you believe they know. These so-called experts and gurus are lining people up to worship their religion… and charging admission for worship. Salvation is free; it’s the freedom to live as you please without devoting time to sales pitches from authors and speakers.

Although Ferriss would like to say something that will help increase the fun factor in your life the book falls short of addressing cash flow. There are only two examples of people testing products to sell online, and they are not realistically going to fulfill the four hour work week dream.

Although the author likes to think of the book as dense with information, it is slivers of things you have heard about before, with the twist of embracing an international lifestyle of mini-vacations. Sure, I embrace the mini-vacations concept, however, that fits best when you have the ability to travel based on revenues from your freelance and project work.

The idea that you are going to “sell” a trial arrangement of working remotely is a bit silly – you would need to be very rehearsed and considering that most folks don’t have any sales skills I suspect they are not going to be able to negotiate or sell much of anything, even if it is a good product/idea. But, his point is to try because his claim is that event leads to unlocking your freedom.

What is missed here is that the people who have the greatest ability to have this lifestyle are the rare individuals who have something of considerable value to offer an employer or company – and this rare skill and ability is sought after and highly compensated.

The approach to this book, exclusive to the free yourself from your desk so you can enjoy living and learning around the globe, is merely one of saying try this and try that and try this other thing until you find a market that can support you in this lifestyle ~ and the tool for doing this is testing via Google Adwords.

Testing with Adwords has been the number one thing anyone can do to explore the marketplace and advertise effectively, and it is not unique to this book. It is a small part of the book but everything hinges on being able to obtain proficiency in Adwords, although Ferriss doesn’t mention how difficult this is and that most readers would be better off exploring this option by hiring someone to run various campaigns and report back to them. He covers outsourcing of office and other personal errand and number crunching tasks to free your time, but does not advocate hiring someone to handle the biggest component of the research, and the necessary website sales pitch to actually convert traffic into paying customers.

He offers very little details on the scope of building his dietary supplement business (other than stating, “Turns out you can outsource everything from manufacturing to ad design.” pg 16), although he stated he gets customers and web traffic from magazine advertisements. I know that offline prospects can often be of higher quality than online prospects, but regardless, all the author is saying is “test, test, test” but it must be difficult because all he has is one business – yet the claim is that he has all this time and cash flow, so why isn’t he running and discovering more businesses to put on “auto-pilot?”

He mentions a contact of his who sells a catalogue of sound effects by acting as the middle man and achieving a huge markup. Why isn’t he doing this if there’s no risk? It is just a matter of selling it to a customer online, then purchasing it from a wholesaler and providing it to your client. But I don’t recall any examples of Ferriss actually doing something successful like this.

If you are considering buying the book to achieve the claim of a four hour work week, then browse the book if you must, otherwise you might find the purchase disappointing. After reviewing everything in the book I would not purchase it. My favorite part of the book is a reprinted article from Esquire about an Esquire editor’s humorous experiment with outsourcing.

Ferriss does have a certain energy in his writing, or momentum I should say, I don’t recall if he spoke the book/transcribed it, but he doesn’t appear boring, and the most interesting passages don’t have much to do with business but are about Ferriss and his life experience, or life experiments I should say. He comes across as someone you would want as a friend. And it would probably be a productive friendship where he reminds you to automate and get off email and to choose productive tasks and take calculated risks. His saving grace is he never advertises himself as perfect, shares his interests, which make him interesting, and tries to get his audience to think in terms of projects, or dreamlines, as he phrased it… but what is lacking is a good framework for using action steps as the basis for any achievement, for daily life management, and for projects. I think action steps are what will make all the difference in being productive on meaningful matters, exclusive of luck, and will provide the compass and reminder to navigate toward your desired port.

Perhaps the book might be considered dense with information, but information is just information. There’s no fast track or realistic unique proposition to accumulating revenues. I could have made the claim that a data entry/coding medical billing business or medical transcription service offers the same kind of freedom ~ being able to work remotely.

***Update:

Six to eight months later by the end of 2008 the job marketplace changed and the economy continued to worsen to historic joblessness making the main premise of the book ~ asking to work remotely, very silly indeed.

Sure, you can find a million people that do one thing and a million people that do the opposite. What can you expect from the book?