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If someone isn’t making you stronger, they’re making you weaker.
6. Learn to ask, “If this is the only thing I accomplish today, will I be satisfied with my day?” Don’t ever arrive at the office or in front of your computer without a clear list of priorities. You’ll just read unassociated e-mail and scramble your brain for the day.
Wichtig
On a micro task level, limit the number of items on your to-do list and use impossibly short deadlines to force immediate action while ignoring minutiae.
Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace.
Do your own thinking independently. Be the chess player, not the chess piece. —RALPH CHARELL
Learn to be difficult when it counts. In school as in life, having a reputation for being assertive will help you receive preferential treatment without having to beg or fight for it every time.
The best defense is a good offense. —DAN GABLE,
Beg for forgiveness; don’t ask for permission.
Greetings, Friends [or Esteemed Colleagues], Due to high workload, I am currently checking and responding to e-mail twice daily at 12:00 P.M. ET [or your time zone] and 4:00 P.M. ET. If you require urgent assistance (please ensure it is urgent) that cannot wait until either 12:00 P.M. or 4:00 P.M., please contact me via phone at 555-555-5555. Thank you for understanding this move to more efficiency and effectiveness. It helps me accomplish more to serve you better. Sincerely, Tim Ferriss
The third step is to master the art of refusal and avoiding meetings.
“I am not here to make friends. I have been hired to build a sales team and sell product, and that’s what I intend to do. Thanks.”
Hard feelings pass. Don’t suffer fools or you’ll become one.
The vision is really about empowering workers, giving them all the information about what’s going on so they can do a lot more than they’ve done in the past. —BILL GATES, cofounder of Microsoft, richest man in the world
It’s amazing how someone’s IQ seems to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them.
People are smarter than you think. Give them a chance to prove themselves.
Realize that bosses are supervisors, not slave masters.
People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don’t realize how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world. —CALVIN, from Calvin and Hobbes
1. Create systems to limit your availability via e-mail and phone and deflect inappropriate contact. Get the autoresponse and voicemail script in place now, and master the various methods of evasion. Replace the habit of “How are you?” with “How can I help you?” Get specific and remember—no stories. Focus on immediate actions. Set and practice interruption-killing policies. Avoid meetings whenever possible: Use e-mail instead of face-to-face meetings to solve problems. Beg-off going (this can be accomplished through the Puppy Dog Close). If meetings are unavoidable, keep the following in
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Enter GrandCentral, which will give you a number with the area code of your choosing that then forwards to your own phone(s).
Copytalk (www.copytalk.com) Dictate any message up to four minutes and have the transcription e-mailed to you within hours. Excellent for brainstorming, and the accuracy is astounding.
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone. —HENRY DAVID THOREAU, naturalist
Dear All, Jacobs often receives mails from Colorado news, too often. They are definitely interesting topics. However, these topics are not suitable for “Esquire.” Further, we do understand that you have taken a lot of initiatives working on these articles and sending it to us. We understand. Unfortunately, these articles and mails are too time consuming to be read. Currently, these mails are not serving right purpose for both of us. Thus, we request to stop sending these mails. We do not mean to demean your research work by this. We hope you understand too. Thanking you, Honey K B
I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights. —BISHOP DESMOND TUTU, South African cleric and activist
India www.fourhourblog.com/asksunday ($20–60 per month for 24/7 concierge, free one-week trial). AskSunday is one of the sophisticated new kids on the personal outsourcing block. Their site was nominated the #2 website of the year in 2007 by Time magazine. Just dial a 212 (NYC) area code and get routed to well-spoken assistants in India and the Philippines. I use this service 80% of the time, as most tasks take less than 10 minutes to complete. For longer projects, there are teams available for $12/hour.
So first things first: cash flow and time. With these two currencies, all other things are possible. Without them, nothing is possible.
CREATING DEMAND IS hard. Filling demand is much easier. Don’t create a product, then seek someone to sell it to. Find a market—define your customers—then find or develop a product for them.
Start Small, Think Big Some people are just into lavish dwarf entertainment. —DANNY BLACK (4′2″), part-owner of Shortdwarf.comfn5
Genius is only a superior power of seeing. —JOHN RUSKIN, famed art and social critic
pricing means that we can sell fewer units—and thus manage fewer customers—and fulfill our dreamlines. It’s faster. Higher pricing attracts lower-maintenance customers (better credit, fewer complaints/questions, fewer returns, etc.). It’s less headache. This is HUGE. Higher pricing also creates higher profit margins. It’s safer.
Price high and then justify.
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Creation is a better means of self-expression than possession; it is through creating, not possessing, that life is revealed. —VIDA D. SCUDDER, The Life of the Spirit in the Modern English Poets
Information products are low-cost, fast to manufacture, and time-consuming for competitors to duplicate.
But I’m Not an Expert! IF YOU AREN’T an expert, don’t sweat it. First, “expert” in the context of selling product means that you know more about the topic than the purchaser. No more. It is not necessary to be the best—just better than a small target number of your prospective customers.
the content yourself, often via paraphrasing and combining points from several books on a topic. Repurpose content that is in the public domain and not subject to copyright protection, such as government documents and material that predates modern copyright law. License content or compensate an expert to help create content. Fees can be one-time and paid up front or royalty-based (5–10% of net revenue, for example).
IT’S TIME TO obliterate the cult of the expert. Let the PR world scorn me. First and foremost, there is a difference between being perceived as an expert and being one. In the context of business, the former is what sells product and the latter, relative to your “minimal customer base,” is what creates good products and prevents returns.
Last year she had an extreme challenge to deal with. The phrase from Apollo 13 “Failure is not an option” sort of became our motto.
Go niche or go broke.
Alibaba (www.alibaba.com) Based in China, Alibaba is the world’s largest business-to-business marketplace. From MP3 players for $9 each to red wine for $2 per bottle, this site is the source. If someone here doesn’t make it, it probably can’t be made.
ExpertClick (www.expertclick.com) This is another secret of the PR pros. Put up an expert profile for media to see, receive an up-to-date database of top media contacts, and send free press releases to 12,000 journalists, all on one website that gets more than 5 million hits per month. This is how I got on NBC and ended up developing a prime-time TV show. It works. Mention my name on the phone, or use “Tim Ferriss $100” online, to get a $100 discount.
New Rich Revisited: How Doug Did It REMEMBER DOUG FROM ProSoundEffects.com? How did he test the idea and go from $0 to $10,000 per month in the process? He followed these steps. 1. Market Selection He chose music and television producers as his market because he is a musician himself and has used these products. 2. Product Brainstorm He chose the most popular products available for resale from the largest manufacturers of sound libraries and arranged a wholesale purchase and drop-ship agreement with them. Many of these libraries cost well above $300 (up to $7,500), and this is precisely why he
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Get used to refusing offers and countering in person and—most importantly—on the phone.
Wufoo (www.wufoo.com) Wufoo does not offer a full-featured shopping cart, but it provides the cleanest, easiest-to-use forms on the web. Create a checkout page that connects to PayPal and you can (1) link to this checkout page from your site on Weebly, WordPress.com, or elsewhere, or (2) drop the code into your own website and have it hosted there.
Services for Selling Downloadable Products (e-books, videos, audio, etc., in descending order of reader preference)
Low-Cost Domain Registration Domains in Seconds (www.domainsinseconds.com) I have registered more than 100 domains through this service. Joker (www.joker.com) GoDaddy (www.fourhourblog.com/godaddy)
1and1 (www.1and1.com) BlueHost (www.fourhourblog.com/bluehost) RackSpace (www.fourhourblog.com/rackspace; known for dedicated and managed servers) Hosting.com (www.hosting.com; known for dedicated and managed servers)
Royalty-Free Photos and Materials iStockphoto (www.istockphoto.com) iStockphoto is the Internet’s original member-generated image and design site, which has more than 4 million photographs, vector illustrations, videos, audio tracks, and Flash files available for use. Getty Images (www.gettyimages.com) This is where the pros go. Stock photos and film of anything for a price. I pay $150–400 for most images I use in national print campaigns and the quality is outstanding.
E-mail Sign-up Tracking and Scheduled Autoresponders Both of these programs can be used to embed e-mail address sign-up forms on your site. AWeber (www.fourhourb...
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Authorize.net (www.fourhourblog.com/authorize) The Authorize.Net Payment Gateway can help you accept credit card and electronic check payments quickly and affordably. More than 230,000 merchants trust Authorize.net to manage their transactions, help prevent fraud, and grow their business. The fees per transaction are lower than PayPal or Google Checkout, but setup will require a merchant account, covered in the next chapter, and other time-consuming applications. I suggest setting up Authorize.net only after a product has tested successfully through one of the other two options above.
