A Head Full of Good Business Ideas
Issue #2159
- WEALTHY: A good company in Germany isn’t the same as a good company in China (Andrew Gordon)
- HEALTHY: Why you should follow "Bridget Jones’s" lead (Jon Benson)
- WISE: F. W. Nichol on the meaning of the word succeed
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:
- All the good ideas in the world won’t help you, unless you do this… (Michael Masterson)
- Why you shouldn’t let your interns do busy work (Jason Holland)
- It’s Good to Know… about "Big Ben"
- Add "congeries" to your vocabulary
Revealed: Probably the Biggest Red Herring in History!
While the world’s been stock watching (and losing!), the elite quietly play a different game with different rules…
Feeling cheated and disillusioned by the stock market? Sure, you may have made a good trade here… but then lost on another. The people dutifully pour their hard-earned cash into investment banks to put into the stock market for them… and those investment banks gladly oblige, for a fat fee… which they invest somewhere else! I’m no conspiracy theorist, but in my opinion the stock market is really a diversion for the masses… a distraction from where the BIG and consistent money is made… in the world’s money mountain. And when I say “Money Mountain,” I speak quite literally… the BIGGEST mountain of money on the planet. Click here to read more…
Where You Invest Matters Most
When you invest in U.S. companies, you can’t diversify by location. But it should be the first thing you consider when investing overseas.
Take Europe, where the markets vary wildly from country to country. For example, Germany’s 30-company index is up 17 percent so far this year, while Italy’s 30-company index is down over four percent.
Almost everywhere in Asia, the markets are up this year. (Sri Lanka is one of a few exceptions. Its market is down six percent.) But the range of how well countries are doing is huge - from China’s 101 percent rise to the Philippines’ 15 percent increase.
The odds of an average Chinese company doing much better than an outstanding Philippine company are very high. The lesson? When you invest in overseas stocks, pick your overseas market before picking the company.
[Ed. Note: ETR’s Investment Director Andrew Gordon is the author of almost a dozen books on energy markets, global countertrade practices, and the hot growth sectors of China and Russia. He’s the editor of INCOME, a monthly financial advisory service that uncovers income-generating stocks that promise safety (first and foremost), along with much-higher-than-average profit potential.]
"When you get right down to the root of the meaning of the word ’succeed,’ you find that it simply means to follow through."
F. W. Nichol
A Head Full of Good Business Ideas… and Nothing Else?
ETR’s Info Marketing Bootcamp is just over a week away, and some ETR readers are still on the fence about whether or not they should attend. James Hennis, a reader from Waynesboro, MO, wrote to tell me why he’s hesitating. "Will I truly come away with a new and unique and complete business - or at least the ideal way to expand an existing business?" James asks. "I do not want to waste my time and money to get there only to find out that all we get is a head full of ideas and no follow-up leadership to help bring them to life. Please, be honest and let me know the whole truth."
I’m glad James asked this question, because I’m betting that quite a few ETR readers are wondering the same thing. If you haven’t reserved a spot at Bootcamp because you aren’t sure if it’s worth it, pay close attention.
James is right. If you attend ETR’s Info Marketing Bootcamp, you will come away with a head full of good business ideas. And he is right, too, about the follow-up. Nobody will be assigned to you to direct you and make sure you take advantage of those good ideas.
Business seminars don’t work that way.
You assemble 100 or 200 fledgling entrepreneurs. Then you put a dozen qualified experts in front of them, and they spill their guts, telling everything they know. If you can do that, you’ve put on a hell of a good seminar.
Self-motivated individuals follow up on their own. It happens every year. We get testimonials from people who take the ideas they’ve been given at our seminars and use them to create or build their businesses. (You can find some of these testimonials here.)
But we have noticed that many people never follow up. We’ve offered free follow-up via networking and forums, but, as we’ve told you many times in ETR, people often don’t value what they can get for free.
So at this upcoming Bootcamp, we’ll be taking an exciting new approach that will nearly guarantee attendees will stay motivated afterward: a continuing-education program that will explore, on an ongoing basis, all the latest, best, and most profitable marketing strategies. And we’ll show you exactly how YOU can use them to build a very substantial business of your own.
We’ll be revealing more details about this new program at Bootcamp.
During my Bootcamp presentation, I plan to talk about the importance of taking action. I will also give a preliminary presentation of my soon-to-be-released book, Ready, Fire, Aim, in which I identify four stages of business growth and explain the likely problems, challenges, and opportunities that arise at each one. I’ll also tell attendees what specific skills they need to acquire to effectively take their businesses through those stages to get to the next level.
I can do all that - and whether you are a wannabe entrepreneur, an experienced business owner, or a profit center manager, that should help you a great deal. But I cannot force you to learn those skills or even to believe that what I’m telling you is worth listening to.
Every time I write an essay or publish a book or give a speech, I share my best ideas and most relevant experiences. I hold nothing back and present my thoughts as clearly as I can. The suggestions I make are always those that have worked for me many times over and have also worked for people I have mentored. I am, therefore, usually 90 percent confident that they will work for others. But I have learned, sadly, that most of those who read or hear my suggestions don’t follow through with them.
That’s okay. Everyone must chart his own path in life. But why, I wonder, do these same people keep asking for advice?
Is it because they are lazy or stupid or foolish? I don’t think so. In fact, having spoken to many of them, I have the impression that they are just as intelligent and motivated as those who succeed.
Some of them do nothing because they don’t believe my advice has any value. These are the people who criticize me, saying, "This is nothing new. I’ve heard all of this before. Tell me something I don’t know." As if the key to their future success were some piece of information that is brand-new.
Think about that line of thinking. It’s a dictionary definition for specious. Brand-new advice sounds like just the right thing - but when you apply logic to this idea, you can quickly see that it is ludicrous. The reason why these people say they have heard my advice before is because they have - from other successful businesspeople and entrepreneurs. Read my writing or hear me talk and you will get many of the same ideas that you get from people like Robert Ringer, Jack Welch, Jay Abraham, Robert Kiyosaki, Dale Carnegie, and Donald Trump. Why? Because at some deeper level, there are just a handful of fundamental truths about success.
One of the most important truths about success, by the way (and this you’ll hear from all of the above-mentioned people) is that it is a formula: 10 percent good ideas and 90 percent action. (Read Robert Ringer’s book Action for much more about this.)
Let’s get back to James and his question about attending our upcoming Bootcamp. James is not like those who disguise their refusal to sign up - to act - by criticizing the ideas they expect to get. He acknowledges that when he goes to business seminars he leaves with a "head full of good ideas." He understands something important that the knee-jerk critics don’t: that - for some reason - he has trouble putting the good ideas he gets at business seminars into action.
I haven’t yet done enough thinking on this subject to claim I have an answer for him. But here are a few admissions and thoughts that might get us closer to where we need to go.
1. I understand what it’s like to want to do something, yet fail to take the appropriate action. This is a problem I haven’t yet personally fixed. (If it were fixed, I’d weigh 10 pounds less than I do.)
2. I believe that there are other areas of James’ life where he does take action. If he thinks about what he does well and consistently, he’ll see that is true.
3. If he does have the capacity to take action in some areas, he has to discover why he hasn’t been able to do so in the realm of entrepreneurship
4. Based on my own experience, I’d have to guess that James won’t ever break through as an entrepreneur on his own, because he hasn’t had the experience of succeeding on his own and he needs that to feel confident.
That’s how I was and still am: confident and productive in some areas and afraid and incapable of action in others. My salvation in business was "chicken entrepreneurship" - becoming so good as an employee that I was able to "force" my boss to cut me in on the action. James should do that now.
5. If James wants to be in the information-publishing business, he should get a job with an information-publishing company and do everything he can to become a superstar employee. (I explained exactly how to do this in my book Automatic Wealth for Grads… and Anyone Else Just Starting Out But be forewarned: If you’re one of those looking for some never-heard-before solution, you will be disappointed. The book is filled with practical, proven, and therefore heard-before ideas.) Once James has superstar status, he’ll either get the incentive-based compensation he’s hoping for or he will finally have the confidence to take action on his own.
6. As anyone knows who has read my bio on the ETR website or in one of my books, I wanted to become successful in business for many years before I actually did. What spurred me into action was a 14-session Dale Carnegie program. It was very expensive for me at the time. I was making about $35,000 a year and it cost, I think, about $1,500. But it changed my life. And guess what? Nobody at Dale Carnegie held my hand or coached me. I had to do it myself.
The one thing the Dale Carnegie program did offer - and this came from the fact that it was organized as a series of 14 weekly meetings - was the chance to "report" my actions… or lack of action… to my fellow students. That made a difference, because I didn’t want to embarrass myself by doing nothing.
Bottom line: Success is determined by a combination of ideas and action. You will get the ideas you need at Bootcamp - but we can’t force you to take action. The people at ETR are, as I said, working on a program that can help motivate you to act on all the good ideas you’ll hear at Bootcamp. But, in the end, YOU must be responsible for following through.
If you are motivated to start a business and you have invested time and money toward that goal but you find that you haven’t kept at it after your initial effort, then you should NOT come to Bootcamp. We can’t make you take action. All we can do is to point out ways that will make success come easier and faster if you DO take action.
And if you have any ideas about what we could do to help people like you be more tenacious, please tell the people at ETR. They would love to be able to "force" each and every person who takes one of our business-building programs or attends one of our seminars to follow through. Send your ideas to ReaderFeedback@gmail.com and - if they make sense - they’ll be instituted. If you can’t think of anything, though, it’s probably better to abandon your dreams for a better life and learn to enjoy the life that you are destined to live out.
I’m in your corner - whatever you do.
[Ed. Note: If you want to hear Michael’s Ready, Fire, Aim strategies in person, this is your last chance to do so. He - and a group of the world’s leading marketing and business-building experts - will be revealing dozens of proven business-building strategies and sales-boosting techniques at ETR’s Info Marketing Bootcamp: Making a Fast Fortune on the "Other Side" of the Internet. Bootcamp begins on October 7, so sign up today.
To get on our exclusive hotlist for ETR’s brand-new direct-marketing and entrepreneurship program - where you’ll learn the latest, best, and most profitable marketing strategies that are working in the industry today - click here.]
Get $1,000 of Real Estate Training - FREE
I’ve just returned from a fascinating three-day conference where more than 250 people spent $3,000 apiece to learn real estate wealth-building secrets from “Apartment House King” Dave Lindahl.
Dave is the real deal. He knows his stuff and teaches every bit of it in his training events. How do I know? Because I’ve learned a great deal from him myself, and I’ve seen it boost my own profits! So when I tell you that just one day of hands-on teaching is worth at least $1,000, I could very well be underestimating it.
But Dave and I have worked closely together for a while, so we called him up to negotiate a deal. We’ve arranged to pay him a substantial sum so that you can have a full day with him at our upcoming real estate seminar absolutely free!
All you have to do is be one of the first to say you’ll be there.
Picking the Superstar Out of the Crowd
Superstar employees, as you know from reading Early to Rise, are the key to growing your company to the next level. They have the enthusiasm, ambition, and skills that ordinary employees will never possess.
But how do you go about finding superstars?
They’re hiding everywhere - at conferences, industry events, even among your current employees. But unless your superstar comes highly recommended from a colleague or industry expert, you may not recognize his true potential.
One way to pick out a fledgling superstar from a pool of mediocre employees is to offer him an internship. Michael Masterson often advocates internships as a kind of trial period where you can learn about each other.
To see exactly what a superstar can do, you need to give him "real" work that will let his skills shine. That’s how Joel Spolsky, CEO of Fog Creek Software, sorts out potential superstars from run-of-the mill job applicants.
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, Spolsky has some mistaken notions about recruiting - but when it comes to hiring, he does some things right. Interns at Fog Creek aren’t relegated to making coffee or doing busy work. Like full-time employees, they are expected to contribute to important projects, including the software applications the company sells. With this trial-by-fire approach, Spolsky gets a good idea of his interns’ work ethics and skills, and is able to figure out which ones will get coveted post-graduation job offers.
That’s the approach Michael recommends: Give your interns responsibility and step back to see what they do with it.
With your guidance, true superstars will eventually exceed your expectations. They’ll take your vision to the next level. Your business will grow with minimal input from you, and before long you’ll be putting in just a couple of hours of "work" a week while making more money than ever.
Ed. Note: Learn more about superstars in Michael Masterson’s soon-to-be-published book on business building, Ready, Fire, Aim: Zero to $100 Million in No Time Flat.]
Low-Carb Rules
By Jon Benson
What do the following have in common?
- Renee Zellweger
- Epileptic children
- Yours truly
- Most bodybuilding and fitness competitors
They all recommend or follow a low-carb diet, popularized by the late Dr. Atkins.
Researchers have found that an Atkins-type nutrition plan reduces the number of seizures in epileptic children. And most people with lean physiques get that way with a low-carb, higher-protein diet.
A low-carb diet works for three reasons:
1. It works because of the way the body processes fuel. And for those of us fortunate enough to have grown up on whole grains and low-sugar meal plans, a moderate- to higher-carb nutrition plan may work just fine.
But most Americans grew up eating processed foods, fast foods, and downright junk. After years of such abuse, the body becomes resistant to carbohydrates, and the insulin this produces can cause all sorts of health issues, fat-burning problems, and more. When you eliminate carbs, the body has time to re-adjust. In some cases, you can go back to a moderate-carb plan with whole grains and fruits after a few months or years. In others, you are a "low-carber" for life.
2. It also works because you tend to eat less. Fat is very satiating, and most low-carb plans are fairly high in dietary fat.
3. Finally, a low-carb diet works because it is the easiest nutrition plan to follow when you’re busy. Any plan that is not simple is one that very few people will stick to - and a low-carb, high-protein diet is not only easy, it will help you eat less and get lean.
[Ed. Note: Jon Benson, a lifecoach and nutrition counselor who specializes in helping individuals discover a life-altering mind/body connection, is a contributing writer for ETR’s FREE natural health e-letter. His work in the field of post-40 fitness and mental empowerment has helped countless thousands. Learn how you can do the same at www.fitover40.com or www.mpowerfitness.com.]
It’s Good to Know: About "Big Ben"
In case you’re not already aware of the many accomplishments of Ben Franklin, ETR’s "patron saint," here’s a quick review: He invented the Franklin stove, bifocals, and the lightning rod… established the first (or almost the first) library, fire department, hospital, and insurance company… and helped negotiate the treaty with France that allowed America to win independence. He was the most famous American of the 18th century (after George Washington) and the closest we’ve ever had to a renaissance man.
Wow!
(Source: An Incomplete Education)
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- Patrick Coffey
Word to the Wise: Congeries
"Congeries" (KON-juh-reez) - from the Latin for "heap" - is a collection or aggregation.
Example (as used by Peter F. Drucker in The Atlantic Monthly): "As the great French historian Fernand Braudel pointed out in his last major work, The Identity of France (1986), it was the railroad that made France into one nation and one culture. It had previously been a congeries of self-contained regions, held together only politically."
[Ed. Note: Become a more persuasive writer and speaker … build your self-confidence and intellect … increase your attractiveness to others … just by spending 10 VERY enjoyable minutes a day with ETR’s new Words to the Wise CD Library.]
Michael Masterson
Copyright ETR, LLC, 2007