“Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg.com, has signed a deal with HarperStudio to write a book about “the secrets to his success.” It will be titled One to One Million.”

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/

I purchased this book from Amazon.com last week and it sat on my coffee table until today.  I can’t remember the last time I’ve picked up a book and read it all within a day, but that is what I did with The Unemployed Millionaire by Matt Morris (I started it at a coffee shop this morning and finished it at home tonight).  I think I liked it just as much as The 4-Hour Work Week.  If you are like me and don’t have any plans to “escape the rat race, fire your boss, and live life on YOUR terms”, this book can still help us all.  I took notes today and have posted them below in case you won’t have time to read the book.  If you do read the book I’d love to hear your thoughts and I’d love to compare my notes with your own.  Since it is getting late I need to head to bed but wanted to share as soon as I could so forgive any spelling or grammar errors as I am copying/pasting straight from my word processor.

• Introduction

  • When he turned four years old his parents divorced. A year later, his father broke into their home and murdered my mother’s boyfriend by shooting him dead right in front of her. After serving his time in prison, he returned to severed alcoholism while my mom raised me, working two jobs with no child support and on food stamps at times, while working to finish her degree. When he was 13 years old, his father committed suicide. When he turned 18, he decided to become an entrepreneur and by 21, he was such a miserable failure I ended up $30,000 in debt, homeless, and living out iof my little beat-up Honda Civic, bathing in gas station bathrooms.

• By age 21 he was a self made millionaire. By age 32 he has generated well over $20,0000,0000 for his companies and feels like he is just getting started.

• The book starts with Morris in a college Marketing class. The professor, Dr. Nguyen won’t let students go to the bathroom and if they do go to the bathroom they are considered “absent”. Additionally, for each class he has assigned seating.

• The professor said the only way to really “make it” in business is to have a degree. The only way to be “great” at business is to have a master’s degree. The only way to really climb the corporate ladder is to get a PhD. Morris has a desire to work and not hear theories from professors who have never stepped foot in the business world which leaves him to literally stand up and leave the Marketing class one day and never return to college.

• Started several businesses, all of them failing which left him $30,000 in debt.

• Next worked for a pool company where customers would buy a $400 above ground pool or a more expensive “elite” version. The job paid him $200 per week salary plus commissions. This job afforded him just enough to get a $30 hotel room a week and the rest of the time he was living out of his car.

• Would sleep in his car in church parking lots because he figured “criminals who might want to rob me (as if I had anything to take) might think twice doing it at a church”

• One night it was pouring rain so he decided to take a bar of soap and try bathing in the rain. He says “if you’ve .ever showed in the rain, you’ve learned as I did that even when it’s raining really hard, it takes a long time to shower because there’s no concentration of water like there is from a shower head. I said to myself, this is going to take all night! Then my second stroke of genius hit me. Looking over at the church, which had no gutters, there was a huge concentration of runoff from the roof pouring down onto the asphalt. I walked myself under the runoff and had my shower! After getting back in my car and drying off, I did some serious soul-searching. I was 21 years old, homeless, sleeping in my car, lonely, over $30,000 in debt, and bathing in gas station bathrooms – I even showered naked in a public church parking lot because I stunk so bad. That was my wake-up call. I committed that night, even though I had no idea how, that I was going to turn my life around and become a huge success.”

• Listened to Tony Robbins audiocassettes in his car and devoured hundreds of business and personal development books.

• “When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on.” – Ben Franklin

• Tony Robbins says that we are all motivated by two primary forces: the desire to gain pleasure and the desire to avoid pain.

• Here is my take on having a job:

  • First, your boss is going to pay you just enough so you don’t quit and hopefully, but not in most cases, just barely enough to motivate you to do well.

• Let me give you one warning though. Be careful not to get caught in the cycle of mediocrity. What happens when you’re comfortable is that you end up getting deeper and deeper into a “good” life that prevents you from living a “great “ life and accomplishing what you really dream about.

• Learned “there is no such thing as security in having a job” after getting laid off from a software development company.

• Some calculations

  • 40 hours per week x 50 weeks per year x 40 years of your life = 80,000 hours

  • 1 hour a day commuting x 5 days a week x 50 weeks a year x 40 years of your life = 10,000 hours

  • 90,000 hours spent working and commuting ÷ 5,840 waking hours in a year = over 15 years of your life wasted!

• In research done by Iowa State University that analyzed the effect Wal-Mart has had on small business, researchers discovered that in a 10-year time frame, small towns alone lost more than 7,326 businesses because of competition. In this 10-year period, Iowa alone lost:

  • 555 grocery stores

  • 298 hardware stores

  • 293 building supply stores

  • 161 variety stores

  • 158 women’s apparel stores

  • 153 shoe stores

  • 116 drug stores

  • 111 men’s and boy’s apparel stores

• What will turn you into an Unemployed Millionaire is starting a business that fulfills the following criteria:

  • Doing something you love

  • Starting a business wherever you want to live

  • Starting a business that can run automatically

  • Starting a business you can manager without physically being there

• According to the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards, nearly one-third of lottery winners wind up bankrupt. They lose all of their money because of a lack of foundational knowledge on wealth and business.

• I firmly believe that if you took all of the world’s wealth and divided it equally among everyone, within 10 years those who were previously wealthy would again be wealthy. Those who were previously poor would again be poor.

• Far too many people live their lives with the belief that money is going to buy them happiness. Here’s what I’ve found to be true- money simply makes you more of what you already are.

• Most of us have gone to school for 12 to 20 years of our life to learn math, history, science, geography, and grammar, but we were never taught the most important subject of all – how to be successful. All the real life skills and principles that it takes to be successful are never taught in school. They are learned the hard way through trial and error, through failing in relationships, through failing in business, and through depression and desperation.

• Success is simple, but only if you know the formula.

• The major difference between successful people and the average person is that successful people believe in themselves, their abilities, and their faith so strongly that they know without a doubt that they’ll achieve their goals.

• The ONE and ONLY formula for success:

  • SUCCESS = Your Skill x Your Effort

  • (Your success is equal to your level of skill multiplied by your level of effort.)

• I’m here to tell you that whatever limiting beliefs you’ve created for yourself are absolute and total crap and are nothing more than a story you’ve made up about yourself.

• Look at the middle three letters of the word “beliefs” and you’ll see L-I-E – lie. What I suggest you accept is that any dis-empowering belief you have about yourself is nothing more than a life. It may be an opinion, but it’s never a fact.

• The most successful people in the world actually have more failures than the rest.

• Tom Watson, the founder of IBM, once said that if you want to greatly increase your chance of success, double your rate of failure.

• Celebrate your failures as successes.

• “Watch your thoughts, they become your words. Watch your words, they become your actions. Watch your actions, they become your habits. Watch your habits, they become your character. Watch your character for it will become your destiny.” – Frank Outlaw

• You will never live life beyond your wildest expectations until you first have some wild expectations. – Author Unknown

• Dream big dreams that inspire you. If your dream doesn’t scare you, it’s probably not big enough.

• “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” Lewis Carroll

• The key characteristics for achieving any goal are:

  • You must have a specific goal.

  • You must have a specific time frame to achieve your goal.

  • You must write your goal down.

  • You must determine a compelling purpose why you must achieve your goal.

  • You must develop an action plan to reach your goal.

  • You must think about and look at your goal every day.

• Simple Goal-Setting Sheet

  • Goal and Deadline

  • Purpose for Achieving Goal

  • Action Plan for Achieving Goal

• “Being rich is having money; being wealthy is having time.” – Margaret Bonnano

• Matt’s Action Management Strategy Summary

  • Allocate time every day (such as right before going to bed) where you plan the next day.)

  • Make a list of everything you want to get done the next day.

  • Prioritize your list into A, B, and C priorities

  • Arrange A, B, and C priorities in the order you want to complete them.

  • Define a time limit for each A and B priority. Add up the time to make sure you aren’t scheduling more than you could possibly complete in a day.

  • Set appointments in your schedule for accomplishing each A and b priority.

  • Schedule time to read and respond to e-mails.

• There’s a saying that in order to be a good leader, you must first be a good follower. The challenge with that statement is that most people stay in the follower role for so long that they develop what I call a “sheep” mentality. A follower who stays in the shadow of his or her leader for too long falls into a comfort zone of mediocrity. By never stepping out of your comfort zone, you never develop your own leadership abilities and also violate the most important principle of leadership. This principle states that people will generally not follow a leader who has a lower level of leadership than their own. If you’re a 7 on the leadership scale of 1 to 10, you typically won’t follow someone who’s below a 7.

• Leadership Laws

  • # 1 – The leader always has a dream larger than those he or she leads.

  • #2 – The leader always conveys an inspiring vision.

  • #3 – The leader always has a superior attitude than those he or she leads.

  • #4 – The leader sets the bar high.

• “To be blind is bad, but worse is to have eyes and not see.” – Helen Keller

• Use a different carrot

  • In business, far too many leaders use mere dollars as the carrot to motivate their people to action. What happens when you use money as the biggest motivator is that people will leave you in a second if they can earn more money somewhere else.

• The speed of the group is determined by the speed of the leader.

• “Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.” – Albert Schweitzer

• Matt today makes much of his money from his network marketing businesses

• You may have heard that the Chinese symbol for crisis is actually made up of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity. The wealthy in the world realize that during this economic “crisis” there is an even greater “opportunity” for those who choose their business endeavors wisely.

I got to meet Gary Vaynerchuk who is one of my idols at a Book Tour in Berkeley tonight.  Tyler was really good for the first twenty minutes of his presentation but I decided to take him outside to play because I could tell I was pushing my luck.  In Gary’s book (only a quarter of the way through it) he talks about making family first so I was living that tonight!  Gary was extremely pleasant and very personable as one would expect.  He signed my book and was even nice enough to take a picture of us together.  I was able to get the entire presentation on video so I should have it up later tonight or first thing in the morning.

I just downloaded the free audio version of the book called “Free” by Chris Anderson (iTunes required). The premise of the book is eventually everything digital becomes free.  You can also see the text version of the book for free on Google Books.  I haven’t read or listened to it yet but I’ll follow up when I am done.

I discovered Tim Ferriss because of the vidcasts he has been doing with Kevin Rose.  I loved most of what Tim has to say and I find him completely fascinating.  One of the episodes mentioned Ferriss wrote the The 4-Hour Workweek and since I loved what he had to say I naturally wanted to read his book.  Now those of you who know me know I’m not an avid reader, I would much rather watch a movie or YouTube video synopsis as I don’t have much of an attention span to sit in one place for more than 5 minutes.  I have to tell you his book captivated me, I loved it and it made me do a lot of thinking about the way the world operates (and in my job communicates).  I took some notes and decided to type them up so anyone who read this post could benefit.  I highly recommend buying the book but if you aren’t going to buy the book here are some of the things I found interesting (note these are my notes so it may not all make sense to you).  Hope you find this useful and buy the book!

• The goal of the book is to free up time and automate your income
• Ferriss nearly fails kindergarten (begins his disdain for authority)
• Ferriss had a joy of baseless overconfidence
• Don’t be a “living dead”
• Would you tell me, please, which way I out to go from here?  That depends a good deal on where you want to get to, said the Cat.  I don’t much care where…said Alice.  Then it doesn’t matter which way you go, said the Cat.  – Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland.
• Have mini-retirements throughout life
• Focus on being productive instead of busy
• There is never a good time to have a baby just like there is never a good time to quit your job to do what you love
• Ask for forgiveness, not permission
• Emphasize strengths, don’t fix weaknesses
• Risks aren’t that scary once you take them
• Most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty
• Conquering fear = defining fear
• “Its lonely at the top.  Ninety nine percent of people in the world are convinced they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for the mediocre.  The level of competition is thus fiercest for “realistic” goals, paradoxically making them the most time and energy consuming.
• What would you like to do if there was no chance of failing?
• List 5 things you dream of having, being – great cook, doing = visiting Thailand
• What would you do day to day if you had $100 million in the bank?
• What would make you most excited to wake up in the morning to another day?
• Being effective vs. being efficient
• What you do is infinitely more important than how you do it.
• How is it possible that all the people of the world need exactly 8 hours to accomplish their work?
• Since we have 8 hours to fill, we fill 8 hours
• Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time alloted for its completion.  If I gave you 24 hours to complete a project, the time pressure forces you to focus on execution, and you have no choice but to do only the bare essentials.  If I give you a week to complete the same task, it’s six days of making a mountain out of a molehill.
• Am I being productive or just being active?
• Are you inventing things to do to avoid the important?
• “There is no difference between a pessimist who says, “Oh, it’s hopeless, so don’t bother doing anything,” and an optimist who says, “Don’t bother doing anything, it’s going to turn out fine anyway.” Either way, nothing happens.” – Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagoina
• Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind from its creative pursuits.  Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.  – Albert Einstein
• Think back to your days on the playground.  There was always a bully and countless victims, but there was also that one small kid who fought like hell, thrashing and swinging for the fences.  He or she might not have won, but after one or two exhausting exchanges, the bully chose not to bother him or her.  It was easier to find someone else.  Be that kid.
• My contacts now know that I don’t respond to emergencies, so the emergencies some who don’t exist o don’t come to be.  Problems, as a rule, solve themselves, or disappear if you remove yourself as an information bottleneck and empower others.
• Emergencies are seldom that.  People are poor judges of important and inflate minutiae to fill time and feel important.
• Timothy@brainquicken.com (send that address an email to see his “canned response” to getting back to you)
• Turn off the audible alert in Outlook
• Check email twice a day at 10am and 2pm
• Use 2 telephone numbers
  • One for the office
  • One for cell phone (emergencies)
• Order of preference for communication
  • E-mail, phone, in-person meetings

  Respond to voice-mail with an email

• If someone proposes a meeting, request resolution via email instead.
• Meetings should only be held to make decisions about a pre-defined situation.
• 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.
• It’s amazing how someone’s IQ seems to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them
• The bottom line is you only have the rights you fight for
• Never automate something that can be eliminated
• The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficent operation will magnify the efficiency.  The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.  – Bill Gates
• Take the Google Adwords tutorial
• http://www.google.com/onlinebusiness/
• Wordtracker.com
• no-ip.com – can redirect traffic (DNS) in 5 mins instead of 24-40 hours
• Freestockphotos.com
• Getty.com – professional photos
• tollfreemax.com
• A company is stronger if it is bound by love rather than by fear.  If the employees come first, then they’re happy.  – Herb Keller, co founder of Southwest Airlines
• Angel.com – get an 800# with professional voice menu
• Last but not least my favorite quote from the book
  • Slow Dance
    • Have you ever watched kids on a merry-go-round?  Or listened to the rain slapping on the ground?  Ever followed a butterfly’s erratic flight?  Or gazed at the sun into the fading night?  You better slow down.  Don’t dance so fast.  Time is short.  The music won’t last.  Do you run through each day on the fly?  When you ask: “how are you?” do you hear the reply?  When the day is done, do you lie in your bed with the next hundred chores running through your head?  You’d better slow down.  Don’t dance so fast.  Time is short.  The music won’t last.  Ever told your child, we’ll do it tomorrow?  And in your haste not see his sorrow?  Ever lost touch, let a good friendship die cause you never had time to call and say “hi”?  You’d better slow down, don’t dance so fast.  Time is short.  The music won’t last.  When you run so fast to get somewhere you miss half the fun of getting there.  When you worry and hurry through your day, it is like an unopened gift thrown away.  Life is not a race.  Do take it slower.  Hear the music before the song is over.

Tara Hunt presented The Whuffie Factor and is selling the book in the WordCamp lobby.  I would have bought a copy but it looks like it is cheaper on Amazon.  She had a great presentation so check out her website / book.

Review
“Embrace the chaos! The Whuffie Factor weaves stories from Moleskine, 37Signals, Threadless, Willitblend, and Gary Vaynerchuk into a compelling story of the way business is now done. Tara doesn’t just talk about it, of course, she does it herself.”
—Seth Godin, author of Meatball Sundae

I am hearing some good things about Friendman’s book and hope to some day get a chance to read it.  Wikipedia has a summary of the ten “flatteners” that Friedman sees as leveling the global playing field:

• #1: Collapse of Berlin Wall–11/’89: The event not only symbolized the end of the Cold war, it allowed people from other side of the wall to join the economic mainstream. (11/09/1989)
• #2: Netscape: Netscape and the Web broadened the audience for the Internet from its roots as a communications medium used primarily by ‘early adopters and geeks’ to something that made the Internet accessible to everyone from five-year-olds to ninety-five-year olds. (8/9/1995). The digitization that took place meant that everyday occurrences such as words, files, films, music and pictures could be accessed and manipulated on a computer screen by all people across the world.
• #3: Workflow software: The ability of machines to talk to other machines with no humans involved. Friedman believes these first three forces have become a “crude foundation of a whole new global platform for collaboration.”
• #4: Open sourcing: Communities uploading and collaborating on online projects. Examples include open source software, blogs, and Wikipedia. Friedman considers the phenomenon “the most disruptive force of all.”
• #5: Outsourcing: Friedman argues that outsourcing has allowed companies to split service and manufacturing activities into components which can be subcontracted and performed in the most efficient, cost-effective way.
• #6: Offshoring: The internal relocation of a company’s manufacturing or other processes to a foreign land in order to take advantage of less costly operations there. China’s entrance in the WTO allowed for greater competition in the playing field. Now countries such as Malaysia, Mexico, Brazil must compete against China and each other to have businesses offshore to them.
• #7: Supply chaining: Friedman compares the modern retail supply chain to a river, and points to Wal-Mart as the best example of a company using technology to streamline item sales, distribution, and shipping.
• #8: Insourcing: Friedman uses UPS as a prime example for insourcing, in which the company’s employees perform services–beyond shipping–for another company. For example, UPS repairs Toshiba computers on behalf of Toshiba. The work is done at the UPS hub, by UPS employees.
• #9: In-forming: Google and other search engines are the prime example. “Never before in the history of the planet have so many people-on their own-had the ability to find so much information about so many things and about so many other people”, writes Friedman. The growth of search engines is tremendous; for example take Google, in which Friedman states that it is “now processing roughly one billion searches per day, up from 150 million just three years ago”.
• #10: “The Steroids”: Personal digital devices like mobile phones, iPods, personal digital assistants, instant messaging, and voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).

“The New Age of Innovation reveals that the key to creating value and the future growth of every business depends on accessing a global network of resources to co-create unique experiences with customers, one at a time. To achieve this, CEOs, executives, and managers at every level must transform their business processes, technical systems, and supply chain management, implementing key social and technological infrastructure requirements to create an ongoing innovation advantage.

In this landmark work, Prahalad and Krishnan explain how to accomplish this shift–one where IT and the management architecture form the corporation’s fundamental foundation. This book provides strategies for

• Redesigning systems to co-create value with customers and connect all parts of a firm to this process
• Measuring individual behavior through smart analytics
• Ceaselessly improving the flexibility and efficiency in all customer-facing and back-end processes
• Treating all involved individuals–customers, employees, investors, suppliers–as unique
• Working across cultures and time-zones in a seamless global network
• Building teams that are capable of providing high-quality, low-cost solutions rapidly

To successfully compete on the battlefields of 21st-century business, companies must reinvent their processes and culture in order to sustain innovative solutions. The New Age of Innovation is a complete program for achieving this transformation to meet the needs of the end consumer of the future.”  >> Amazon.com

“Although Erickson admits that her own Generation Y son informed her that he would prefer to consult a blog for career advice rather than dead-tree technology, her effort—chock-full of demographic data and a portrait of the generation’s collective aspirations—is certainly worthy of the effort required of literally turning pages. An author and researcher in demographics and organizational behavior, Erickson has the ability to customize career strategies for this newest generation entering the workforce in a way designed to be immediately useful. The author’s thoroughness in translating generic advice—such as the importance of developing good communications skills—into Gen Y–speak makes the book informative and appealingly fresh. Despite gearing her message to younger workers, Erickson’s effort speaks to a much broader audience: her examination of what influences and motivates this emerging generation would be of interest to potential employers and marketers.”  Source: www.amazon.com