Issue #2550

• WEALTHY: How I met Greg Brady (Paul Lawrence)
• HEALTHY: A good fat gone bad (Shane Ellison)
• WISE: Denis Waitley on achievement

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:

• Why almost everyone struggles more than they should (Rich Schefren)
• Are you pronouncing these words correctly? (Don Hauptman)
• It’s Fun to Know… what’s cooler than cool (Suzanne Richardson)
• Add “horripilation” to your vocabulary

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How to Get Your Offers to Celebrities

By Paul Lawrence

When I was getting ready to promote the 2008 International Sketch Comedy Competition, I needed a celebrity host. I’d been producing this event for several years – but this time, I intended to market a video of it. And I knew that if I wanted to have a chance of doing that successfully, I needed a “name.”

Luckily, I knew how to reach almost any celebrity in film or television. In fact, I was able to secure the services of someone who was a household name and a heartthrob for millions of teenage girls some years ago… and still gets his name and pictures in the media. I’m talking about Barry Williams, who played Greg Brady in The Brady Bunch. While he’s not currently a star, his appearance in my production helped me get the attention of several major video distributors.

If you want to attract attention to an event you are holding – or to a product or service you are selling – having a celebrity attached to it gives you a huge marketing advantage. And it’s not hard to reach them if you know how. Virtually every celebrity has an agent and/or a manager.

IMDB.com has a program that is only about $10 a month and can be cancelled at any time. Once you sign on as a member, you can search for any celebrity and find a listing with their agent and/or manager, including phone numbers and sometimes even an e-mail address. If you contact the celebrity’s representative in a professional way, your offer will be taken seriously and passed along.

[Ed. Note: Getting a celebrity to "back" your product or event is a great way to get prospective customers' attention. For 12 other proven marketing strategies, pick up a copy of Michael Masterson and MaryEllen Tribby's Amazon.com best-seller, Changing the Channel.

Paul Lawrence is a screenwriter/producer with several feature-length film credits. For more information on his "Breaking Into Hollywood" course, click here.]

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“The most splendid achievement of all is the constant striving to surpass yourself and to be worthy of your own approval.”

Denis Waitley

Make 2009 Your Best Year Ever – Resolution #6: Take a Good Hard Look Behind You

By Rich Schefren

I discovered long ago that if I wanted to continually improve my company and my own performance I need to leverage my past experience for all it’s worth. Stated more simply – to make 2009 the best it can be, you need to analyze what took place in 2008.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of people and companies don’t learn enough from their mistakes or their accomplishments. It’s like they’re simply plugging along with their heads down – like Bill Murray’s character, Phil Connors, in the hilarious movie Groundhog Day. But instead of repeating the same day over and again, they repeat the same outlook, approach, and strategies.

Look, no matter how good or bad your results, you can always do better. Yet the single biggest key to improving both performance and results is ignored by almost everybody. If you want to be at the top of your game, you absolutely must learn from what has already happened. I am going to share with you how I do it. Follow my lead, and you can make 2009 your very best year (so far).

All you need to do is answer five questions. If you’re serious about your success, you should do this today! Ready, set, go…

Question 1: What were your greatest accomplishments in 2008?

Even if 2008 was the worst year of your life, odds are, if you look hard enough, there’s something somewhere to be proud of. If 2008 was a great year for you, that makes answering this question even easier.

After you’ve listed all your accomplishments, go back to them. This time through, identify several takeaways for each one – what you learned from or were reminded of by it.

Question 2: What were your biggest disappointments in 2008?

Practically every company and individual resists analyzing their mistakes. That’s a shame, because this is where the best learning comes from.

No matter how well everything is going, we all make mistakes. The trick here is to examine what preceded them, what you could have done differently, and how you can prevent making the same mistakes in the future. Even though 2008 was the best year of my life (so far), I still had my share of disappointments, both personally and professionally. I won’t bore you with the details.

As you did with your accomplishments in 2008, list your biggest disappointments – and then identify several takeaways for each one.

Question 3: How did you limit yourself last year, and how can you remove those limits in 2009?

Were there certain actions you took or didn’t take that came back to haunt you? You need to bring these self-defeating actions to the surface, shine light on them, and, most important, determine what you must do differently to make sure you don’t limit yourself the same way all over again. Here are just a few of mine…

• Not reviewing my goals daily

• Not sticking to a daily sleep schedule

• Hoping things would work out well in a few situations where my gut told me not to

Once again, make a list and identify the takeaways. For example, one of the self-defeating actions on my list was not reviewing my goals on a daily basis (even though I know better). And when I don’t review my goals daily, I get sucked into what’s currently happening and distracted from what’s most important. That caused me to miss the mark on a few goals I had set for myself in 2008. The takeaway: I’m determined not to make the same mistake in 2009.

Question 4: What did you learn from your answers to the first three questions?

This is where it gets interesting. Remember, the purpose of this exercise is not simply to know yourself and your business better but to actually to use what you learn to make certain that 2009 trumps 2008.

What are your main takeaways from the first three questions? What do you now know about yourself or your business that you didn’t realize or weren’t thinking about before? Here are two random nuggets from my complete list of 62…

• Creating products, programs, and free material to help entrepreneurs and their businesses grow consistently gives me my greatest feeling of accomplishment. Therefore, I need to spend time daily on creating these materials and not let the fast growth of our business – Strategic Profits – pull me too far away from what I do best.

• For Strategic Profits to positively impact even more small-business owners, we have to religiously stick to our schedule of introducing new front-end products. We cannot allow ourselves to deviate from the schedule, no matter how well things are going, because client acquisition is the lifeblood of any business.

You should shoot for as many takeaways as possible, because it’s here that the rubber meets the road. It’s these takeaways that’ll practically guarantee that 2009 will be the best year of your life.

Of course, it’s not enough to just make your list (although that, by itself, will get you partway there). You still need to take this information and USE IT!

And that’s where our final question comes in…

Question 5: How can you use this information to make 2009 your best year yet?

The idea is to take everything that surfaced in your answer to Question 4 and build it in to your schedule, your interactions, your management style, and so on. For example, I’ve already scheduled on my calendar two hours a day of content creation and 10 minutes every morning to review my goals. Plus, I’ve slotted a weekly 20-minute appointment with myself to surface and then analyze whatever concerns I have.

There’s lots more on my list – but you get the point. And besides, what’s important here is not what I am going to do to make 2009 great for me… it’s what you are going to do to make 2009 great for you.

[Ed. Note: Making 2009 the best year of your life starts with answering the 5 simple questions Rich Schefren recommends. But you may need a little extra help to get moving and keep yourself motivated. Get year-round success strategies, motivational resources, and goal-achieving tools right here.

Rich Schefren, known in marketing circles as "The Guru's Guru," is an online business exploder whose clients rake in more than $500 million every year - piling up more than $1 billion in sales every two years. Visit his blog to learn how to streamline your business while skyrocketing profits.]

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Your Special Holiday Gift from Early to Rise

It’s easy to hit “information overload”. Rich Schefren (www.StrategicProfits.com) reveals how you can prevent yourself from getting bogged down in too much information, and only take in the most relevant, valuable advice you can find.

Comment on this video

== Highly Recommended ==

How a Simple Internet Mistake Can Make You $3,012 in Just Two Days

Actually, you could make more, even faster.  By complete accident, one of my colleagues discovered a “back door” to online money-making that is faster and easier than you may imagine…

You don’t have to be pinching pennies anymore because this new online program for raking in some good money works in almost no time flat. That $3,012? My colleague made that in only an hour. No hype, no kidding. Read on to discover how you could do the same starting right now.

Are You Risking Cancer With This Fat?

By Shane “The People’s Chemist” Ellison

You know by now that there are “good” fats and “bad” fats. And you’ve probably heard that small amounts of omega-6 fatty acids from seeds and plants are essential for your body. When combined with omega-3 fatty acids from fish, omega-6s appear to play an integral role in maintaining health. Together, these two fats can help regulate brain development, energy production, and immune function, and control inflammation.

However, large quantities of omega-6s promote oxidative stress by disabling the body’s second defense against cancer: the antioxidant. Adding insult to injury, they increase inflammation within skin cells. And inflammation can be a driving force behind the growth of skin cancer and its ability to spread to nearby tissues and organs.

This omega-6 threat did not exist 100 years ago. Our ancestors consumed only small quantities of omega-6 in the form of whole corn, seeds, and legumes. Their ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 was about 1:1. Today, a large segment of the population consumes a ratio of at least 20:1.

The omega-6 overdose exists thanks to the advent of technology – chemical extraction methods, to be exact. Instead of getting omega-6 in its natural state – from plants and seeds – our primary sources are now plant and seed oils (corn, safflower, and sunflower). A single tablespoon of omega-6-laden corn oil is derived from a whopping 12 to 18 ears of corn.

The ideal ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids has not yet been determined. One thing is certain, the overdose of omega-6 manifests into poor health as well as dry, brittle skin that predisposes us to skin cancer.

The best thing you can do to protect against skin cancer is rid your diet of omega-6-laden plant and seed oils while consuming more protective omega-3 fatty acids.

[Ed. Note: Shane Ellison is a two-time recipient of the prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute Research Grant for his research in biochemistry and physiology and is a best-selling author. He holds a master's degree in organic chemistry and has firsthand experience in drug design. Get the benefit of his knowledge and insight with his no-BS practical guide to living young naturally without dangerous, prescription drugs.

For more natural ways to stay healthy and live longer, sign up for ETR's free natural health newsletter.]

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The Language Perfectionist: More Mispronunciations

By Don Hauptman

In an earlier installment of “The Language Perfectionist,” I presented a list of the most commonly mispronounced words, courtesy of Charles Harrington Elster, a leading expert on pronunciation. In that column, I pointed out that if you don’t pronounce words properly, your image and reputation could suffer.

That Top Ten list, however, hardly exhausted the roster of words that are frequently mangled. So I asked Charlie for a sequel. He emphasizes that the following list, like the previous one, isn’t necessarily in order of offensiveness.

• Pronouncing the “t” in often. Say AWF-in, not AWF-tin.

• Rhyming assuage with massage. Correct: uh-SWAYJ (rhymes with “a sage”), not uh-SWAHZH.

• Putting a spurious “beast” in bestial. Say BES-chul, not BEES-chul or BEES-chee-ul. The word has two syllables, not three.

• Inserting an extraneous “moment” in memento. Pronounce it muh-MEN-toh, not moh-MEN-toh.

• Pronouncing height as if it were highth or height-th. The word rhymes with “right.”

• Stressing the “par” instead of the “dis” in disparate. It’s DIS-puh-rit, not dis-PAR-it.

• Putting a “he” or a “he nee” in heinous. Say HAY-nus, not HEE-nus or HEE-nee-us.

• Finally, two pronunciation crimes often committed in courtrooms: saying “or” at the end of juror and “ant” at the end of defendant. It’s JOOR-ur, not JOOR-or and dih-FEN-dint, not dih-FEN-dant.

Charles Harrington Elster is the author of the quintessential guide, The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations. The current paperback second edition contains 200 new entries.

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Thanks again, Charlie. You have our GRAT-uh-tood!

[Ed Note: For more than three decades, Don Hauptman was an award-winning independent direct-response copywriter and creative consultant. He is author of The Versatile Freelancer, an e-book recently published by AWAI that shows writers and other creative professionals how to diversify their careers into speaking, consulting, training, and critiquing.]

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It’s Fun to Know: What’s Cooler Than Cool?

By Suzanne Richardson

Driving through Montana on a recent visit to my family, my car’s thermometer hit a number I haven’t seen in years: 24 degrees… below zero.

As a Montana native, I’m no stranger to severe dips below freezing. But there are places where it gets even colder than my home state.

In the U.S., the coldest temperature recorded was minus 79.8 degrees Fahrenheit in the Endicott Mountains of northern Alaska. Worldwide, the coldest temperature recorded was in Vostok, Antarctica – minus 129 degrees Fahrenheit.

But that’s nothing compared to what physicist Wolfgang Ketterle has cooked up. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Ketterle and his team “created” the lowest temperature ever recorded: 810 trillionths of a degree Fahrenheit above absolute zero. (Absolute zero is minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit.)

(Source: LiveScience, InfoPlease, and SmithsonianMag.com)

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== Highly Recommended ==

Is This All There Is to Life?

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Word to the Wise: Horripilation

“Horripilation” (haw-rip-uh-LAY-shun) – from the Latin for “to bristle” + “hair” – is goose bumps.

Example (as used by the Washington Times in an article about Social Security): “There are a few things capable of sending an icy horripilation through even the bravest man.”

Copyright ETR, LLC, 2008

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This entry was posted on Saturday, December 27th, 2008 at 5:10 am and is filed under Daily Issues .