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.

I like goals, and especially new years resolutions.

I went back and reviewed some of my 2007 new years resolutions. Some I had accomplished (buying my first investment property and making it cash flow) and some are still in progress (sale of a business). But in all honesty, the majority of them I had not accomplished, primarily because they are no longer goals. I guess my goals change often.

Nevertheless, I think its awfully worthwhile to write your goals down (and far more often than once a year!). Here are a few tips on your 2008 resolutions:

• Write them down
  Goals in your head are no more than ideas. Writing them forces you to get all the details. (Yes, typing counts)
• Make them measurable
  Saying “I want to earn more” isn’t measurable. You can never know if you actually achieved it or not. Saying “I want to earn $76,500 in the year 2008″ is measurable.
• Don’t forget the how
  Careful what you wish for. Saying “I want to weight 146 lbs” doesn’t specify how. There are some unhealthy ways to accomplish that, and you want to be specific.
• Keep it positive
  Focus on what you want, not what you don’t want. Instead of saying “I stop hating my boss”, try “I get a raise and promotion”.
• Use the present tense
  Saying “I’m going to…” or “I will try…” is weak. Write the goal as if it has already taken place. “I date Heidi Klum.”
• Make them ambitious yet possible
  Force yourself to reach, but if you make them too ambitious you’ll be disappointed. There should probably about a 50/50 chance of accomplishing it in your own mind.

• Make them public
  I don’t always recommend telling your goals to people who won’t be supportive, but making them public in a supportive place will help you stay on track. We’re more likely to follow through with peer pressure, which is why…

You have the opportunity to write your #1 goal to accomplish in 2008 below. Please leave a comment (sticking as best you can to the guidelines above, doesn’t have to be perfect). If you leave your email, I promise I’ll check up on you before the end of 2008 to see how things are going!

I like to think a lot about passive income. That’s the ultimate dream right? To just travel the world, focus on whatever you feel like, and pick up a check each month from your investments or business.

Robert Kiyosaki makes a great point about this in Cash Flow Quadrant (aff), as have many other authors, that just because you’re self-employed it doesn’t mean you are financially free. Many entrepreneurs end up buying themselves a job - sure they don’t have a boss, but they are still putting in 10-12 hours per day. (Typical examples include shop owners, or businesses where you are the primary talent, like consultants, etc).

But, I’m starting to realize that it’s not a clear answer most of the time whether income is passive or not. It typically exists along a spectrum, and I like to find out where it is on the spectrum by asking this question: If you were to disappear to Tahiti, how long would you continue to earn money?

Here are some examples along the spectrum…

• A blue collar job - only paid when you clock in, you don’t get paid for even 1 minute you aren’t there.
• A white collar job - you could sneak in late or take a long lunch (a few hours), but you also get time off for sick leave, and vacation…so a few weeks in some cases
• Mom & Pop shop owner - You’ve got to be there each day to open and to close, so typically no more than a day or two if you can get someone to cover for you.
• Mom & Pop shop owner with management (or kids) - once they get management, they make a lot less money, but could potentially disappear for a few weeks to a month. The problem is that if you leave for much longer than that, the business will start to deteriorate. Theft, dirt & grime, laziness of employees, etc start to creep in. Only what’s measured gets done.
• Self-employed business owner - this is like my tutoring business…it would continue to earn money for a month or so if I disappeared, but income would steadily decline as I wasn’t bringing in new clients, sending paychecks, etc.
• Owning real estate that you manage yourself - Could last six months probably without you doing anything, but it may not be prudent to do so. Tenants would call with repairs, could miss rent, etc. Some upkeep is required.
• Owning real estate with a management company - Could disappear for a year or so and the checks would continue to come in. You may need to be called once in a while for massive repairs, lawsuits, or insurance claims (fairly rare events).
• Passive investor - As a passive investor (think large appartment buildings, shopping centers, hedgefunds, REITS, stocks, LLC’s, LLP’s, etc) you could literally disappear for several years, having never seen the business, and you wouldn’t need to feel guilty. It’s someone else’s job to manage the project day to day.
• Handing all your money to a financial planner - again, several years.

This is part of the reason I’m transitioning more and more into real estate right now (it has other factors like rate of return and tax benefits that I think make it better than stocks or typical financial planner type investments too).

Some of the mentors I’m working with own apartment complexes that they literally haven’t been to in years. They don’t have a key to the place. They wouldn’t even know how to get on the property if they had to. Their phone number isn’t listed on any registry of people to call. And that’s exactly how they want it!

How long could you disappear from you current (or ideal) job, and continue to earn money?

A few days ago I told you about the secret I use to get more learning done each week than most people do in a month: audio books.

Well today, I’m going to share the second secret I use to getting more learning done, and this one works well even if you aren’t an “audio learner”. If you learn best by actually seeing words on a page, instead of hearing someone speak, then this will work well for you.

The secret is: speed reading. Yes, it is real and it works. In fact, it’s not just speed reading, but speed comprehension too.

Before I learned this, I always had the assumption that speed reading was bogus, or that people were basically skimming the material without getting full comprehension.

Well, I’m here to tell you that it in fact is real, and it does work.

Here’s a simple explanation of how:

Read the rest of this entry »

In Breaking Free, I talk at length about the importance of developing good habits. I do so with good reason, because habits can simultaneously be your greatest strength (if they are good) and your greatest weakness (if they are bad). What’s remarkable is just how dependent we are on habits as human beings.

Generally speaking, PEOPLE DON’T CHANGE.

You can beg them, plead with them, argue logically with them, appeal emotionally to them, and threaten them, but at the end of the day those people will fall back on their old habits. In fact, you could say that human beings are little more than habit forming machines! The only way we can change is from within. By deciding we will change for ourselves, not because someone else wants us to.

I remember reading a story about a martial arts master who had studied and taught for more than 30 years. After getting his black belt in judo at a young age, he went on to study many other disciplines including Tae Kwon Doe, Thai Kickboxing, Brazilian Jujitsu, and Kung Fu. One day he was leaving his house when a carjacker ran up to him and waved a knife in his face, demanding his wallet and keys. Instinctively, the master disarmed the man and threw him to the ground in one perfectly executed judo throw. The police were called, the carjacker was arrested, and the master took a moment to let his adrenaline subside. It was then that he realized what had happened. Despite studying martial arts for 30 years, it was his oldest habit of judo that his brain reverted back to in his moment of need.
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Have you ever had a tough decision to make? If you’re anything like me you were probably flip flopping back and forth all day, trying to get some more information, and generally being really STRESSED OUT. Finally, your brain just gives up and creatively came up with a way to distract you, by filling your day with little tasks…check your email, read some articles, make some calls, etc.

I call this “creative avoidance” (I don’t think I came up with this, but I can’t remember where I saw it first). The stress of making this important decision is painful, and since our minds are designed to avoid pain, it will “invent” small easy tasks to fill your time.

The problem with tough decisions and creative avoidance is that they can be huge time wasters. The decision causing you all that stress is typically the most important thing you need to get done that day, but it’s also the only thing you aren’t making progress on!

About a year ago I was starting a new company. I had made lots of progress by incorporating, developing the product, deciding on a name, and plenty of other things, but I just couldn’t decide on a logo. I had hired someone to make some sketches, but none of them came back great. Then I designed a bunch on my own, but none of them looked quite right. Finally, I had a few of my graphic artist friends put together some sketches, and still nothing was jumping out at me as being perfect!

As I sat there will all these sketches in front of me (actually they were thumbnails on my computer), I just couldn’t make a decision. I narrowed it down to about 5 designs, and asked the opinion of some friends. Their comments varied so much that there wasn’t a clear winner. This was starting to really stress me out, and my creative avoidance kicked in! I tried working on other things like the website, press releases, and the final revisions to the product, but everywhere I turned the logo was holding me back. I couldn’t launch the website without a logo, I couldn’t send out a press release without a logo, and I couldn’t engrave the product with my logo!
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Probably one of the best things about working for yourself is the health benefits. Many people are surprised to hear this but it really can have a profound effect on your life and it was really one of those totally unexpected ëbonuses’ that came as a result of quitting my job.

How does quitting your job improve your health? Here are a few ways:

1. You Actually Get Enough Sleep
   If you’re like most Americans, you don’t get enough sleep. Many factors contribute to this, such as the long hours many companies require, rush hour traffic requiring you to leave earlier and earlier, and all those great programs on late night television (just kidding!).In all seriousness though, sleep deprivation is a big problem. As a result, many employees ending up drinking many cups of coffee or drinking caffeinated soda every morning to try and stay awake. It usually doesn’t work and can take it’s toll on your body.While caffeine can make it difficult to fall asleep, it sure doesn’t make it fun (or productive) to be awake. The National Commission on Sleep Disorders estimates that sleep deprivation costs U.S. companies $150 Billion each year. Terrible disasters such as the Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown and the Exxon Valdez oil spill were both linked to extremely sleep deprived workers. Read the rest of this entry »