Hey Folks,

This is going to be my first video blog. I’m trying out a new format. Please let me know which one you like better (written or video) in the comments!

A couple things I noticed on the video that I think could be improved: I’d like to keep it shorter and denser with information. Also I realized that I never sound very EXCITING when I talk. I think doing more video blogs over time I’ll get better. Probably a combination of video and some written outline or graphs could be a good combination. Let me know what you think!

Here is the written equivalent…

I’ve practiced this for a long time myself, but it just occurred to me again the other day and I thought I’d post about it: in general the mainstream news (television, radio, and print) is an utter waste of your time. And worse than that, it’s probably preventing you from becoming successful.

There are a few reasons why…

1. The News Is Full of Negative Stuff

The old saying in media is true that “if it bleeds it leads”. The news tends to overreport negative events like murders and crashes because it gets ratings. You can’t help but have these things affect you over time, and it slowly but surely starts to make you think the city is dangerous, or that the world is hostile, or that opportunity isn’t out there. All of course are incorrect, but whatever you spend time watching and reading becomes your reality.

2. The News Is Designed To Scare You As Entertainment

The story of the little girl who was kidnapped is addictive to watch. It robs you of your time. The story is designed just like an entertainment show, to keep you hooked waiting for what will happen next.

Some people would say its important to watch this because it gives you valuable safety information. We can prove to ourselves that this isn’t true by looking at the statistics.

Statistically, you are very unlikely to get kidnapped, die in a plane crash, or to choke on a small plastic toy. Yet this is what gets the media attention. I wrote about this a while back, how humans are bad at estimating risk. After 9/11 many people were scared to fly, and this perception caused about 1.4 million people to drive instead of fly to their holiday destination, effectively killing about 1000 people in additional auto fatalities (you’re much more likely to be killed in a car crash than a plane crash).

The news isn’t giving you valuable safety information on things that are likely to kill you (it’s boring to report on heart disease), its designed to scare and keep you watching.

3. It’s Biased

I couldn’t believe it the other day when I accidentally spent a few minutes on Fox News and then on CNN as I flipped through the channels. Fox news was essentially crucifying Obama while CNN was vigorously defending him. Of course not directly, but by the guests and hosts on the show.

I couldn’t believe how blatant it was. In theory the news should just report the facts and let us make up our own minds, but they (mainstream media) can’t even do that today it seems.

4. It’s For The Most Part, Irrelevant

99% of the stories you see on the news can never, and will never affect your life, period.

The reason is that its tailored to a wide audience. So you will have to wade through all sorts of junk you don’t care about that wastes you time to get 1 or 2 nuggets of useful information.

The Solution

So if mainstream news is a colossal waste of time that is polluting your brain with negative thoughts, what is the solution?

The first step is to spend as little time on it as possible. Reading a book on marketing could make you an extra $100,000 this year whereas watching a show on a tornado 1000 miles away will never affect your life one bit.

So, I spend about 20 seconds (literally) per day reading the news. This is no joke.

I do it with a new aggregator service that delivers articles to my inbox (I use Yahoo News, but Google News is great too). I just scan the first 5 headlines or so (they are ordered by importance) and delete. If I see something that is interesting or could really affect me (which is rare), I read deeper. This is better for a few reasons…

Its fast. With about 20 seconds per day of scanning headlines, you can know enough to know what’s happening in the world. At least as much as any reasonable, intelligent person needs to know.

Its unbiased. News aggregator services send out news based on what is being said in hundreds or thousands of news sources. You get the most important based on collective thought, not one person’s agenda.

Its more targeted. You can get email updates on specific areas like business, sports, or whatever is important to you.

Try it out. And with all your extra free time you should start reading and watching material that is WAY better than the news. You should be watching speeches by important innovative leaders in your field, blogs in areas that interest you, and listening to audio books in your car instead of the radio.

In fact, every morning while I’m eating breakfast I don’t read the newspaper. I read blogs (in Google Reader) like Signal vs. Noise, Seth Godin’s Blog, and The Four Hour Work Week to fill my mind with relevant, though provoking, educational, motivating material. And then I go take on the day. Because of this I’m much more effective during the day than if I’d started it by watching a story on Britney’s trip to rehab. Blogs in many ways are the new unbiased, educational, positive newspapers for successful people I think.

Hi Folks,

I’ve at times given this out as a bonus with some of my books, but I decided to make it available to everyone. Now when you subscribe to get weekly updates from StartBreakingFree.com by email, I’ll send you PDF copies of 3 of the best-selling books of all time on building wealth.

What’s great about these books is that they have stood the test of time and are now in the public domain, meaning their patent has expired and they can be given away for free.

1. Think and Grow Rich Over 20 million copies sold and the best selling success book of all time!
2. The Way To Wealth Benjamin Franklin’s timeless advice from more than 150 years ago which is still as true today as ever.
3. The Richest Man In Babylon A delightful set of parables that explain the basics of money and a personal favorite of mine.

If you haven’t subscribed by email already please go here to get your free copies and feel free to forward this to any of your friends who may enjoy reading them as well.

Brian Armstrong

Derek Sivers discusses the exact point I made a few weeks ago (with a much better example than mine)

If you sell pens for a living and someone orders a million pens, no problem! You just place an order with your manufacturer for a million pens, get them to the customer, and celebrate.

But if you do hands-on massage for a living and a recent spot on Oprah gets you a waiting list of 10,000 people, “you’ll wish you were in the pen business.”

This is Why MLM and Network Marketing Don’t Work - ask yourself these before getting too far into a new business idea

Why are we doing this?
What problem are we solving?
Is this actually useful?
Are we adding value?

Don’t Listen To Negative People

I’m sure that the moment man discovered fire, there was some guy nearby saying, “Too smoky. Can burn you. Lame.”

Scott Adams at the Dilbert Blog Forgets the Best Option: Self Employment and Passive Income Streams

Sleep: 8 hours
Exercise: 1 hour
Work: 8 hours
Eating: 2 hours (leisurely)
Hygiene: 1 hour
Travel: 1 (Commute, errands)

That leaves you three hours for family time, sex, shopping, food preparation, chores, household repair, volunteering in the school, and so on. If you have a dentist appointment, or your talkative relative calls, or American Idol has a two-hour special, you’re tapped out.

37 Signals Celebrates People Who Quit Their Jobs

Five little companies were featured to showcase the owner’s decision to leave their daily rat dace of a life behind and dive into the uncertainty of following their dreams. Here’s the kicker: These 5 companies are some of the most mundane, normal, average little companies out there.

These companies aren’t going to beat Google, they aren’t building a better iPod or bread slicer. There’s no “the next Facebook” and not a mention of angel funding. These entrepreneurs are doing simple things they love and making a pretty decent living from it.

Oprah discusses: What should I do with my life?

Most of the time when we try something new we try to hide it.

We try not to make all the mistakes that we assume new people make. Once in a while (1 in 100) it works and we stumble upon something that we are a total natural at.

But for almost everything else in life, its pretty obvious that we are no expert the first time we try something. In fact, most of the time we downright suck at it for at least a year.

When I started doing brazilian jujitsu I was terrible at it. Every week for about 3 months I would go in and just get tapped out over and over again. It was pretty discouraging at times. I remember the first day I actually submitted an opponent (won) after about 3 months. He had just started and was even more inexperienced than me, and he promptly beat me again in the next round, but still…I had actually seen a little progress.

This is true for learning marketing, how to start a business, how to play the guitar, go on a date, throw a pitch, or dance salsa. Pretty much anything worth learning in life is like this.

A lot of people live their entire lives in a perpetual state of mediocrity at everything they want to learn just because they don’t want to admit to other people that they aren’t an expert. They aren’t ok being bad at something for a while.

They even get defensive if someone gives them advice. “Why would you even say what? I KNOW how to do that.”

I have the utmost respect a for totally clueless person who at least knows it and is eager to learn. I’ve been that person a bunch of times in my life.

But there is nothing more challenging to work with than a totally clueless person who argues with every suggestion.

I heard a cool parable one time about a man who wanted to learn from this old guru who lived on top of a mountain. He hiked up there, found the man, and told him his desire to learn. The old man said “very well, before our first lesson let us sit and have a cup of tea”. The old man began to pour the tea into the cup of his visitor. He kept pouring till it reached the top. He kept pouring and pouring until the tea had run over and was getting everywhere. The man leapt up from his chair and cried “stop! the cup is full!” And the guru said, “your first lesson is to know that I cannot add any more to a cup that is full. For me to teach you new ideas, you must clear your mind of what you already know”.

Do yourself a favor and admit when you’re clueless. If you’re not getting the results you want, let whatever ideas you have go and be willing to try anything that someone who IS getting the results suggests. You’re not fooling anyone anyway, they’ll admire the honesty, and you’re learning curve will go up drastically.

“Anything worth doing is worth doing badly at first.”
-Unknown

OUTSTANDING talk on creating successful companies online. Ignore this at your own peril.

P.S. To turn off the very annoying comments there is a button in the top right.

Watch it larger screen here.

For those in Houston, I’ll be speaking at the Double Tree Hotel (5353 Westheimer, One block west of the Galleria) this Tuesday from 6-8pm at the After Hours Network.

The talk will be titled Fire Your Boss and Double Your Income and will include…

• 10 simple tips you can implement in the next week that will get you on the path toward financial freedom running your own business
• How you can get 3 of the top ten books ever written on building wealth for free
• Real life case studies of how you can test out any business idea for about $100 in a month to see if it works

I’ll also be at the SCORE Small Business Owner’s conference on Wednesday April 23, 2008 in Dallas/Ft. Worth, Texas.

Hope to see you at one of these events!
Brian

Great video from Eben Pagan’s Altitude program which already took place.

About a year ago I walked into the local SCORE office in Houston and was very impressed. I waited only a few minutes for my appointment (which I’d made on their website) and was soon sitting across from an elderly retired gentleman in full suit & tie who was once the CEO of his own large successful company with over 100 employees (before he sold it and retired). We talked for several hours, he listened to my good ideas and my bad, was respectful and asked lots of questions, and occasionally offered sage like advice.

After this we kept in touch by email, I can go back for more meetings whenever I wanted (he volunteered about one day per week) and it was all free.

SCORE is an outstanding and under utilized resource for would be entrepreneurs. The volunteers are all former entrepreneurs themselves - which you know if you’ve been reading this blog for a while is very important to me. You should only get advice from people who have actually accomplished what you’re trying to do!

Whether you have an existing business, or have no idea where to start, SCORE is highly recommended. If you are lucky enough to live in a city where they have an office, do yourself a favor and go make an appointment right now: http://www.score.org

Also worth reading: Maverick’s At Work

Old version: work hard (for a very long time), achieve success, earn freedom (to retire and do all the things you missed out on while you were working)

New version: find work that affords you freedom = success

Thank you Manuel for letting me know that the audio player not working correctly in Internet Explorer. You probably saw all sorts of songs that could be played instead of the actual interview.

I apologize for the error and it has been fixed now. Here are the links if you’d like to try again:

Interview With A Self Made Millionaire - Kevin Morgan
Interview With A Self Made Millionaire - Howard Rambin
Interview With A Self Made Millionaire - Steve Davis

People tell me their business ideas all the time. They usually want to start a restaurant, or sell something they made, or give their advice as a consultant or coach.

But those businesses don’t scale. The only way people get rich is by developing a product or service that can help a LOT of people, not just a few.

If each person that you help requires your personal time then there’s only so many you can help, and you probably won’t get rich doing it. (Even if you don’t care about getting rich and just want to help people, helping individuals is still an inefficient use of your time, more on this later.)

Sure you can make quite a bit of money in the right job working hourly. Doctors and lawyers get a high hourly wage. But they still have to help each person individually which is why they can never be as rich as someone like Bill Gates who has a scaleable business. His software gets written once, and then distributed to millions of people with very little additional effort for each person who is helped. Bill Gates makes money from his software while he sleeps, whereas doctors and lawyers still have to keep putting in the hours to get paid.

Scaleable businesses require much more work up front, but once they are off and running they require little or no additional time per person. That’s power because once your business system is in place, your time is still “preserved” for you to work on your next business idea and help even more people.

Compare each of the following. Which one scales better?

• Giving a speech to a group of people vs. making a recording of that speech to distribute
• Flipping houses vs. building a real estate portfolio over time
• Cooking for a bake sale vs. licensing your recipe
• Your band playing at a local festival vs. selling songs on iTunes
• Talking to customers over the phone vs. taking taking orders through your website
• Accepting checks vs. accepting credit cards
• One-on-one coaching sessions vs. selling a book
• Keeping in touch with friends by email vs. writing to your blog
• Being a freelance programmer for one client vs. selling subscriptions to your software to many clients

Even if you don’t care about making money and just want to help people, I’d still argue that you need a system that scales. You can do the same kind of comparison for non-profit work…

• Volunteering your time at a homeless shelter vs. developing a city wide program to help thousands of homeless
• Feeding a hungry family vs. improving education/changing legislation/etc

It might give you a warm fuzzy feeling to help an individual, but in general I think you’re setting the bar too low when you do that and selling yourself short. Spend your time on something that will really have an impact.

Making a scaleable business is not easy (otherwise everyone would do it).

While working hourly, you can see a paycheck in as little as a few days or weeks. It’s dependable. But while building a scaleable business, you can see zero return for months or years (or maybe never). All the work is up front.

It’s the old linear vs. exponential growth. That’s why most people don’t get rich. They don’t want to put the time in up front to see the big payoff down the road.

The next time you have a business idea, try to think about how it will scale and if it could ever really help a TON of people. If not, is it really worth pursuing?