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Dear Early to Riser, As a member of Early to Rise you've already gotten a full week of powerful, actionable advice that will change the way you work, run your business, set and achieve goals, and more. And now Michael Masterson wants to give you something special on Saturdays. It's totally free and part of your subscription to Early to Rise. The Michael Masterson Journal comes direct from Michael, and only Michael. In his off-the-cuff, informal style you'll get even more strategies, tips, and techniques for jumpstarting your wealth, health, and success. You get his no holds barred guidance, plus first crack at his latest breakthrough business ideas and marketing strategies. He gives you both specific recommendations in the world of wealth-building and investing and in-depth explorations of economic issues. If a myth needs busting, Michael is there… if the Wall Street Journal got it wrong, he'll expose it… if the Fed needs to be knocked down a peg, he'll be ready… and if there is something you should be doing right now to accelerate your success, Michael will tell you about it. The Michael Masterson Journal will arrive in your inbox each Saturday. Don't miss it! Enjoy! Cheers, Publisher and CEO, Early to Rise "I'm too old to start over and too young to lie down and die." That's how Lou, a recently unemployed bond salesman, summed up his life to me and Joe last night at Joe's cigar bar, The Cigar Connoisseur. The man was 54 years old – four years younger than I am, but he looked 65. He was overweight, out of shape, and pale. His face was the mask of a beaten man. Lou had made good money selling for 30 years. But then, last month, he lost his job. He had spent a week angry and blaming others. Spent another weak blaming himself. Then made some phone calls and got two interviews with former competitors. "But they didn't pan out," he said. "Every brokerage room lobby is crowded with unemployed guys like me." Joe and I looked at each other. "And so that's all you did?" I asked. "You gave up after that?" "Don't you watch the news?" he barked. "There's a recession going on!" We were silent for a while. "Maybe you should think about starting a new business," I suggested as nicely as I could. That's when he said, "Hey. Get real. I'm too old to start over and too young to lie down and die." "Well that's exactly what you are doing," I thought. I remember the moment when I almost gave into the concept of aging. I was in a swimming pool at the edge and pushed myself up to get out. But instead of putting a foot on the coping, I put my knee on the tile instead. I realized instantly that (a) this was the first time I had ever done that and (b) if I kept doing that before too long I'd be slithering out of the pool on my belly like a sea lion. So I went back into the water and got out the youthful way. And to this day, I still thrust myself out of a pool like a young man. Aging may be inevitable, but giving into it is the fastest way to grow old. Joe himself was a good example. He had a full career in the casino business and then retired and started his two cigar clubs in South Florida. He's been at them now for less than six years and he is very successful and very happy with his new lifestyle. I mentioned this to Lou but he had an answer for that too. "Joe stared over when he was 45," he said. "Six years from now, I'll be 60." And now finally I had an answer for him. "And how old will you be in six years if you do nothing?" I said. Are you looking for a philosophy that will guide you to a better life? Don't look to the modern philosophers, warns Alex Green, writing in Spiritual Wealth. "Modern philosophy has evolved into a specialized academic discipline that pursues arcane questions of no real interest to the general public. When was the last time you read or heard anything from a living philosopher?" Green suggests looking to the ancient Greeks and Romans. In particular, he recommends the Stoics. I've recommended the Stoic philosophy in a recent issue of ETR because I liked their many of their tenets, including these:
Living like a Stoic today would take some courage. Our society is all about consumption and geocentricism. Our goals are dictated by Hollywood movie makers and sold to us by brokers and TV executives. The problem with doing what everyone else is doing, Green says, is that you might "wake up one day to find that… you've squandered your one precious life." Jim, a VIP ETR customer, wrote in last week saying he was going to start an information publishing business. He wanted to know where he could find venture capital. First, I want to congratulate him on picking a great industry to get into. It's not as easy to break into information publishing as it was five or 10 years ago, but the barriers of entry are still pretty low. And the potential is still very large. Information products are easy to produce, you can repurpose the same content into multiple products at different price points, they are easily deliverable, and with electronic products like e-books, the storage costs are near zero. But funding his plan with venture capital? I don't like that idea for about a dozen reasons. But the most compelling is this: it's not necessary. You can become an information publisher without quitting your job and without raising a ton of money. American Writers & Artists, Inc. was started on a $15,000 budget. ETR on a budget of less than $50,000. The first thing this gentleman should do is find a niche in an active area of info publishing. Then he should do the research to find out how others are making money and use that to create a plan. He can develop his first product very cheaply. He can test it by making deals with affiliates or doing a pay-per-click campaign or by doing a blog and collecting readers slowly until he has enough to take the next step. Once he finds a product that sells, money will start coming in. First a little, then more and more each month. At that point, he can ramp up his business -- with more products, a better website, better equipment (only if he needs it), and a few employees. He can let his business grow naturally. It won't be a business just because he managed to get venture capital -- it will be a business because he has products that sell. The lowest cost (and easiest) way to start an information publishing business is online. And ETR has developed, in my opinion, a really thorough and easy-to-follow program tailor-made for people like Jim who want to start from scratch without spending a lot of dough. From website design to e-mail list building to search engine optimization, it's all in the Internet Money Club: Independent Learner Edition. If you decide to try info-publishing yourself, consider this: Your long-term success will depend most heavily on the quality of the thinking you publish. Ordinary thinking will get you ordinary results. Extraordinary thinking makes everything soar. Years ago, I had a discussion with Bill Bonner, founder and CEO of Agora. We were talking about what sort of people to hire to head up Agora's direct-mail publishing businesses. I favored marketers, because marketing is what drives publishing. Bill preferred "idea" people (i.e., writers) because, as he pointed out, publishers sell ideas. It was an academic discussion. In practice -- as is always the case in business -- we looked for people who could do both. But we never found them. So we hired some marketers and some idea people. What we found was that the marketers who succeeded were those who partnered with idea people. And the writers who succeeded were those who hooked up with marketers. Still, in looking back, I have come to the conclusion that Bill's original point was very wise. Of the dozens of information publishing businesses I've consulted with, those that had the surest and strongest growth were those that gave top priority to the production of quality ideas. The publishers who believed "ideas are cheap" (as one said to me) and focused almost entirely on aggressive marketing struggled and eventually failed. Matt Furey has good advice about how to get motivated to work out when you don't want to. "All I do," he says, "is live life in the smallest chunks I can." Here's an example of what he means: Matt hates long flights. But when he must take one, he asks himself if he can stay sane for one minute. Of course, he can do that. So he gets through that one minute and then goes on to the next. Before he knows it, he is calm and enjoying himself. He uses the same technique with his morning exercises. Instead of getting agitated over the thought of 60 minutes of hard work, he asks himself if he can do 60 seconds of wall chair. The answer, of course, is yes. After he's done a minute of wall chair, he challenges himself to do a minute holding the push-up position. As the minutes go by, his resistance diminishes. This is exactly how I get books written. I write and publish at least two books a year writing them in small chunks, sometimes as small as 100 words at a time. This is also the way Bob Bly has become so successful, writing one breakthrough marketing package at a time for several clients and writing books on the side. "Use this method," Matt says, "and I assure you that you'll be kicking butt in no time flat." I'm not an expert in stock investing. And options and futures are definitely out of my realm. But I have accumulated a lot of wealth through off Wall Street investments. For example:
I do have a portion of my passive assets in stocks. And I've done pretty well with those investments in the last few months – as everyone else has. But what I count on is my off-Wall Street income. If you'd like to have more of that in your life, check out an exciting new Early to Rise service. It's called The Liberty Street League. The editors seek out "against the grain" market trends that provide above-average ROIs with greatly reduced risk. Right now, for example, they are looking at property in some of the world's hottest tourist areas -- for pennies on the dollar. They're teaching direct marketing on the Internet -- no technical knowledge required! They're talking about investing in gold and precious metals. It's all covered. And all these moneymaking opportunities have one thing in common: low cost of entry and the potential for huge returns. If we advertised our businesses the way the medical establishment promotes some of its most popular "cures," we'd be thrown in jail. Misleading advertising is verboten in most of the business world. Except, that is, when it comes to selling bypass surgery, statin drugs, and other so-called miracles of modern medicine. That's the conclusion you'll come to if you read Worried Sick by Nortin M. Handler. I ordered the book after I heard Handler speaking on National Public Radio. He was explaining how deceptive medical statistics can be. Example: A recent study to determine whether a new drug could lower the risk of non-fatal heart attack in healthy, middle-aged men. The study itself was properly done. The results, though, were expressed in confusing terms. And the conclusion - that it lowered the risk of heart attack by 29 percent - was erroneous. The men who took the drug had a 4.6 percent chance of having a non-fatal heart attack over the next five years. The men who took placebos (i.e., the control group) had a 6.5 percent chance. The difference between the group that took the drug and the group that didn't was, indeed, 29 percent. But the actual difference was only 1.9 percent - the difference between 6.5 percent and 4.6 percent. The researchers concluded that the drug worked. Thus, it was recommended as an effective way for middle-aged men to reduce the risk of heart attack. Ka-ching! Add another billion dollars to America's legal drug cartel. Here's another way of expressing the same data. If you are a middle-aged man, your chances of NOT getting a non-fatal heart attack in the next five years are 94 percent. (Your chances of NOT getting a fatal heart attack are even greater.) If you wanted to spend money to take a drug -- a drug that has some potentially dangerous side effects -- then your chances of NOT getting a non-fatal heart attack would increase to 95.9 percent. If the results were expressed that way, would you take the drug? Of course you wouldn't. Pharmaceutical companies, who sponsor most of these "objective" drug tests, insist on using relative risk percentages. And the mainstream press parrots them - probably because they don't understand what they mean. Early to Rise Is a Gift to the World Early to Riser D.F. of Washington, Illinois writes in to say she loves us, no matter what: "Hi to all! Just wanted to finally send in a note. Hadn't before because I figured you were getting plenty of comments from people more in-the-know. For me, I am going to read ETR no matter what. You change what you have to change to be the best at what you do. ETR is free of charge to me. It is a gift. A really nice one. So, you just keep doing what you are doing. Thanks for ETR and all that goes into it! Best wishes for your continued success!" [Ed. Note: Michael Masterson welcomes your questions and comments. Send him a message at AskMichael@ETRFeedback.com.] |
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Saturday, September 12, 2009
ETR: Too Old to Start Over?
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