Reciprocity Principle In Music: Why 50 cent, Lil Wayne, Drake and Justin Bieber Are the Biggest Artists

Oct 18 2010

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In my last post, I talked extensively about the principles of marketing. I want to focus specifically on reciprocity in this post. I personally believe that reciprocity is the most powerful of all marketing principles. It is the foundation of everything. It is the most powerful secret to success in any endeavor.

I’ll use music as a case study, specifically modern pop music.  The record labels made a huge mistake when Napster came out. I don’t know about you, but I remember the absolute hysteria of the record labels when file sharing became a global phenomenon. They sued people left and right. Metallica came out all guns blazing condemning anyone who downloaded music as a thieves. Smart move Metallica. How are your record sales these days? To everyone trying to market a product, especially HEAVY ROCK MUSIC, where the majority of your audience has a bit of a rebel spirit, please don’t call your customers thieves. People don’t like being called thieves. It doesn’t encourage them to support your product, or a band.

What both artists and record labels failed to realize is that good will is far more important a commodity than anything else, besides the actual product. In many cases, especially with music, people will actually buy your product if they like you, even if what your actually selling isn’t even that good!

For an example, take a look at the rap artist Lil B: This guy makes completely nonsensical songs. He’s probably one of the whackest rappers ever to do it. Yet he’s doing shows all over the country, getting hundreds of thousands of views on youtube etc. And the interesting part is that he actually does have a few songs that show some skill and intelligence. What he’s doing is just being ridiculous and getting noticed because of it. People enjoy his wild personality and the ridiculous things he says. As long as people are entertained by you, your winning.

Make them like you, give them free stuff

The way into peoples hearts and minds is to make them think your a cool person. If you give them lots of free content, they will feel like they owe you. This is the concept of reciprocation. This is what artists like Lil Wayne, Drake and Justin Bieber did to make themselves into global phenomenons.

After releasing The Carter 2, the album before his latest album The Carter 3, which sold over a million copies in one week – Lil Wayne released around 7 mixtapes which were available free all over the internet. He publicly announced his intention to become “The Best Rapper in The World”. He started making music pretty much all day everyday and releasing all of it on mixtapes and on the internet. If you followed hip hop at the time, this was somewhat unprecedented. 50 cent was one of the first to get noticed from creating a huge following in new york from a mixtape, leading to getting a major label record deal with Interscope records after being noticed by Eminem. The tactic Lil Wayne was using was absolutely unheard of though. He released HUNDREDS of songs. He also did features on a few hundred other artists songs.

Starting in about 2008 you started to become unable to escape from hearing Lil Waynes voice. His music was blaring out of peoples cars everywhere. He was all over the radio on numerous artists songs. A lot of people that didn’t check for him started to become huge Lil Wayne fans. He made so much music that you were bound to love at least a couple tracks. This also served another purpose, greatly increasing his skills as a rapper.

All the while, his record label, Universal, expressed how nervous they were about his approach. They thought he would wear out his welcome. They were wrong. Instead his album became the only hip hop cd to sell over a million copies in one week since 50 cents second album, The Massacre.

The truth is, you can never release too much free content. Fans have an inexhaustible appetite for new content! People in general want desperately to be entertained. They want their attention to be occupied. They are constantly looking for something new to talk about, listen to, watch, etc. There is absolutely no limit!

The next artist to take advantage of this approach was the rapper/singer Drake. He released the mixtape So Far Gone for free on the internet. This was after having released a few other mixtapes and building an audiance. His So Far Gone mixtape was album level material. It was extremely high quality. One of the songs “Best I Ever Had”, became a massive radio that summer. He then released the album, which was available for free on the internet, onto itunes and into stores. It sold over 400,000 copies!

Justin Bieber took advantage of reciprocity for years, giving out tons of free performances on youtube. He performed a huge amount of covers of his favorite pop songs, getting hundreds of thousands of subscribers. It was a no-brainer for the labels to sign him. He was adored by his fans. They showed their appreciation by buying millions of copies of his album My World.

Focus on the Backend!

The moral of the story is simple. You shouldn’t try to make your money on the front end, by making a hard sell to an audience that feels they owe you nothing. You should give away LOTS of free content that people will LOVE you for. These people will become true, appreciative fans. They will become eager to support you by purchasing the products you release.
If you take a look at all the success stories, you’ll find this to be the case. This was happening far before the advent of file sharing with artists like sublime doing huge performances on a regular basis in California, free of charge.

Give, and you shall Recieve!

Check out this interview with Drake. He explains specifically that he realized in order to gain a lot of loyal fans he had to give away a lot of music.


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Infinite Reasons Why You Should Have Really Good Sales Copy/Advertising For Your Product Or Service

Sep 17 2010

Many of the concepts this article explains were found in one of the greatest books on advertising and writing copy ever.

Common objections to using effective sales/advertising techniques:

Why should I try to persuade the potential customer into buying from me when my product speaks for itself and my potential customers already trust me?

A lot of bloggers have already spent many months building up cues of influence with their blogs. They are liked by their readers, and they may even have a degree of authority in their niche. 

Because of this, they feel that if they use sales and advertising techniques to try to persuade their readers, they risk sabotaging the hard earned relationship of trust they have formed.

They feel that the value of their product should speak for themselves, and the testimonials of their friends in the blogosphere, who are also trusted, should vouch for what they have to offer.

Aren’t I insulting  my customers intelligence by using  “salesy techniques” to persuade them to purchase what i’m offering?

A lot of people think that by spending a lot of time trying to convince the customer of the features and benefits of their product, it’s as if they are assuming their potential customers are not intelligent enough to make decisions on their own.

Why should I care about sales copy?

The objections listed above do have a certain amount of truth to them. Yes, your right, your product or service should speak for itself!

The question is, how can your customer listen if they haven’t got the product in their sweaty, eager for solutions hands yet.

What you fail to realize is that you already are using persuasion techniques and psychological sales strategies without realizing it. You just have yet to arm yourself with the full set of weapons/tools available to help transform that on the fence customer who’s not quite sure 1. Exactly what your offering 2. Why he or she should seriously be interested and how it’s going to add value to their life.

Okay so, let’s get into the nitty gritty: The 8 Desires of Human Beings

1. Survival, enjoyment of life, life extension

2. Enjoyment of food and beverages

3. Freedom from fear, pain, and danger

4. Sexual companionship

5. Comfortable living conditions

6. To be superior, winning, keeping up with the Joneses

If alarm bells are sounding when you read this one, your not being honest with yourself. Everyone wants to win. The difference between “good” and “evil” winners is that “good” winners want everyone to win, “evil” winners only care if they win, and don’t mind making other people lose so they can win. (Although in the area of competition within an event, there has to be some losers for their to be a winner, which is an interesting discussion in itself, but beyond the scope of this article)

7. Care and protection of loved ones

8. Social approval

Why your customers want to know how your product can help satisfy those desires

In some way, your product will fit into one or more of these human desires. Now your job is to show the potential customer how your product or service will increase the quality of their life, by helping them achieve these desires.

Quite simply, unless you believe your product will not be able to offer any significant value as far as helping people to achieve one or more of these desires, why would you be afraid to clearly explain to the customer how what your offering can help them? If your product doesn’t actually offer any real ability to help someone achieve their desires, than why would you be selling it in the first place?

Step by step persuasion: Why you need to use all the steps more effectively.

Stage one: Precontemplation – People are ignorant of the existence of your product, or don’t know they need it

Stage two: Contemplation – They know of your product have though about the potential of using it

Stage three: Preparation –They are contemplating buying from you but they need more information about your products benefits and advantages. “Hmm this looks interesting but what do I have to gain from this?”

Stage four: Action – They decided to buy from you!

Stage five: Maintenance – They have made your product a part of their day to day lives and will continue to buy what your selling without needing much convincing.

All products go through these steps before your prospect becomes a customer. The problems arise at steps three and four, where the sales copy comes in and either saves the day and converts a high percentage of those contemplating to buyers, or keeps a high percentage of potential customers stuck at contemplation. Good sales copy is about conscious awareness of the need to prepare your customer to buy, and the need to incite them to action.

Central Route Processing vs. Peripheral Route Processing – The type of sales you need to be focusing on for the type of product your promoting, and why lots of people/businesses  half-ass what should be the focus of their sales efforts

Central Route Processing: Using facts, statistics, evidence, testimonials, studies, reports, and case histories to weave together a persuasive and effective sales argument.

Peripheral Route Processing: Using colorful and pleasant images, humor, the sponsorship of celebrities, and general “badassness” to make people interested in what your offering.

;-) being cute works too

Hello Kitty Makes Millions

This Cute Little Cartoon Cat Is Quite Rich

Central Route Processing is most effective when you need to logically explain why someone should choose your product. Attitudes and product choices based on Central Route processing are more resistant to counter-persuasion, creating loyal customers that keep coming to your product again and again because they have thought deeply enough about your product to arrive at a conclusion. They are quite hesitant to let anything harm their “brainchild” and will therefore defend their belief in your product.

Peripheral Route Processing is most effective for bypassing the customers logic in products where logic is not usually the deciding factor, for instance beer, underwear, clothing, smokes, etc. which use images of attractive people and fun, cool, or cute visuals to generate your interest.

Of course, the best advertising campaigns and sales copy make use of BOTH types of processing in an artful manner similar to the punch combinations of a professional boxer.

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. The sweet science of marketing. Lay your customers out flat, and knock out your competitors, with the persuasiveness of your sales copy/marketing.

muhammad-ali-sonny-liston-marketing

Let me give you some examples of great advertising appealing to peripheral route processing and great advertising appealing to central route processing.

image

image

notice how in the highlighted section, dual-role persuasion is being used – they are telling the customer why they shouldn’t buy what your selling, spurring an even greater desire to purchase your product if they are a true customer.

As you should be able to see, the most effective way to advertise using Central Route Processing is to make your well considered mental arguments are presented in a clear and simple manner through demonstrative examples of the benefits of what your selling. Your helping the customer relate your product to their personal experiences, and easily comprehend what your offering so it requires less mental effort to process. Of course, many people who create products they truly believe in, fail to understand how to take advantage of this because in their minds, since they were the creators of the product, the benefits are already clear and in little need of explanation or persuasion. In other words, you’ve already persuaded yourself so you forget that other people have yet to use your product and have no reason to believe it’s a good investment except via their relationship to you and how much they trust you. Isn’t it far more “insulting” to the customers intelligence that you believe they should buy your product based on faith and the testimony of other people?

Now let’s get back to to the examples, shall we?

A fantastic advertisement for a video game, taking advantage of peripheral processing:

This kind of advertisement doesn’t tell you a single benefit or feature of the game, but its carefully coreographed visuals in synch with edgy music from eminem certainly makes its audiance think “Damn – this is kickass”.

Of course, that’s not enough to convince the hardcore gamer, who being a savvy customer, uses mainly Central Route Processing in their descision to  purchase most of the games they own. For this the company blackop put out much longer and indepth trailers explaining the features and benefits of buying their lastest Call of Duty videogame.

Now let’s look at a company who have become true masters at using both Central Route Processing and Peripheral Processing to make people into loyal raving fans, as well as converting millions of new customers previously convinced, using Central Route Processing (and good ol fashioned market dominance) that the only choice is the Microsoft OS.

Of course, you already know what company i’m talking about. In this ad Apple uses a few different peripheral processing techniques to make one of their core Central Route Processing arguments simple and emotionally appealing.

“Phew, I see where your going with this…. but just what exactly are these Peripheral Processing thingamajigs”

The 6 “Cues of Influence” (from Robert Cialdinis books Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion)

1. Comparison: The power of your peers to influence your descisions – The bandwagon effect. If you see other people using something, wearing something, driving something etc. who are in a group you either aspire to be like, or consider yourself a part of, you have a natural tendency to want to do the same.

2. Liking: Because you like me, buy from me – Your a famous celebrity, millions of fans adore you, companies will pay millions to transfer your likeability to their product. Your a blogger, you’ve endeared yourself to thousands of people who subscribe to your RSS feed to find out what you have to say about things – they like you – so they are more likely to buy from you! Simple.

3. Authority: “That guy is wearing a white lab coat, I trust him” – Any symbol, status, or person that people either recognize or believe to be an authority, will make your product far easier to sell if you have their endorsement.

4. Reciprocation: You gave me something, now I feel like I owe you – This is an incredibly important one. The Spanish mystical author Paulo Coelho refers to this concept as “The Favor Bank”. The more you give away, the more you get.

5. Commitment/Consistency: The Four Walls – In your ad, pose four questions to your prospect. As you answer each question you lead to the next. At the end, the prospect should feel all but committed to the purchase. The reason this works is because once someone makes a stand on an issue, they feel cognitive dissonance if they do not remain consistent with their beliefs. By encouraging your customer to  “take a stand” by asking questions that stimulate the response you want, you elicit “yes” responses, creating a snowball of desire which lead to the customer concluding your product is the path to fulfillment of their desire.

6. Scarcity: We want we can’t have/has limited availability – This is another one of those marketing psychology observations that sends alarm bells ringing in the mind of the ethical and value oriented person selling a product. Surely, it’s not right to trick your customers with false scarcity in an obvious play at their psychology/emotions. I agree. However you can easily use real scarcity to sell your products and benefit your most eager customers.

It’s simple. When you launch your product, or if it’s already launched, right now, you can offer a genuine sale of the product to customers who act fast. This has two effects. 1. Your rewarding the customers who are already loyal to you and like you endearing them to you even further. 2. Your creating urgency that will compel people on the fence to jump over, take action, and purchase your product. Another method you could use is to offer a series of bonuses that fast actors will receive which will be removed one by one as either time goes by, or you sell a certain number of copies of the product. Those bonuses could include additional informational products, other products your selling, free coaching from you etc. Use your imagination.

The Final Verdict: Why your doing your customers a huge favor by creating fantastic sales copy and/or advertisements

They may not know it, but customers both want and need great marketing to help persuade them to buy your product amongst the endless sea of choices available to them.

Let’s imagine your a single mom who knows very little about cars. Could you imagine going to a dealership, you walk in, and a friendly receptionist tells you “hey, all the salespeople are sick today, go ahead and check out the cars yourself and if you find one you like tell me and i’ll write up the paperwork.” Or even worse, the receptionist, who knows nothing about cars or persuasion, tries to sell you a car. It’d be a horror story.

Or another example would be mattresses. I used to work as a salesman at mattress giant. Believe me, there’s a hell of a lot more to know about mattresses than you would think, and a customer will be FAR more satisfied if they try a variety of mattresses and purchase a mattress which has a quality construction and materials. Of course what they don’t tell you is that if you demand they lower the price up to %50, they will as that’s the sales price floor, but that’s another story (hey, I might have just saved you upto thousands of dollars next time your out mattress shopping).

Your customers want you to be persuaded. If your not able to persuade them, they assume the product must not be for them. They assume the benefits of your products were not good enough to compel them to buy.

Remember that as the creator of your product, you are already convinced of it’s value. As the customer of the product, you need to convince me.

So that’s the paradox of marketing. It’s counter intuitive, but your actually complimenting the intelligence of your prospects by giving them the most detailed, passionate, persuasive and (I hope) authentic, sales copy/advertisement you can possibly create.

Make sure you check out Cashvertising, I highly recommend it – and so do a lot of other people as you’ll see when you read the amazon reviews.

This post took about five hours to write, 59 minutes of which were spent editing the formatting. Damn you HTML! What you see is NOT what you get :-)

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Imagine You Fully Expressed Yourself, With No Fear Of The Consequences

Sep 16 2010

Not Afraid Eminem

I'm Not Afraid. To Take A Stand

Have you ever wondered what your life could be like if you expressed yourself to the fullest with unshakeable  confidence?

Can you imagine if you stood up for who you were, said what was really on your mind, and gave the world the true you? Imagine you said what you felt, without wondering what others would think. Imagine you put your foot forward without reservation. Imagine you said I love you to the people you care about, and stood up for yourself against the people who disrespected you.

Can you imagine if you said hello to whoever you felt like, asked for friendship from anyone you wanted to, looked people in the eye without fear of rejection. Can you imagine if any beautiful person you were attracted to,  you walked up to with confidence and conviction introducing yourself with no fear of rejection. Can you imagine if rejection didn’t bother you and you never compromised the full expression of who you are because you knew “i’m not for them, but someone else will love who I am”.

Can you imagine if you had faith that whatever you want to do with your life, if you just put your mind and soul into accomplishing it, it would come to fruition as a beautiful extension of the person you are?

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Everyone Is Wrong – Trust No One

Sep 15 2010

Sounds very cynical doesn’t it. That’s not my objective. The point is that everyone is wrong about something, and no one can be fully trusted with anything.

Truth is a very subjective thing. A thing that’s true in one case becomes false when applied in another scenario. What works for one person may bring disastrous results for another.

Most people already put very little trust in what most people around them say. You might be discussing how your going to try a new diet with your friend. Your friend tells you that it’s a bad idea and you have it all wrong. Chances are, most people are going to shrug off what they’re friend says. Now your friend could very well have information that would be of benefit for you. Or, he could be completely misinformed.

Either way, most people aren’t going to listen to their friends advice. There’s a very simple reason behind this.

Authority:

You don’t see your friend as having any authority as a diet expert. Your much more inclined to trust the person you got the new diet your about to try, from, because he or she is known as an authority in their niche. It could be a Dr. Atkins, Dr. Oz, or a Dr. Phil, either way, most people are not persuaded because they’ve seen logical superiority in the theories of the authorities they trust. It’s not because they’ve done thorough independent research that they believe authorities.

It’s social proof and credentials, as well as the emotional appeal of the personalities and theories of these individuals, that persuades people to believe they are the ones that are right.

Why you can’t just assume someone’s right because they have an M.D. or a P.h.d after their names.

There’s a huge fallacy behind the conventional idea that because someone had the intelligence and/or determination to go through a significant amount of schooling to complete a degree, they can then be trusted to have all the answers.

Many people assume that because these people are intelligent, perhaps more intelligent than we are (or so we assume), they must have found the right answers for everything. And when you’ve already resigned yourself to being less intelligent than the authorities, you tend to believe what they say regardless of it’s scientific or intellectual merit.

If people learned to think critically, they would start to see that amongst the pinnacles of learned achievement and scientific distinction, their are considerable differences in philosophy and opinion on matters the general public believes are in the realm of “fact”.

Most people fail to realize that science is theoretical. The only facts are things that can be directly observed. The fact is limited to the observation itself. Once you go beyond the actual observation into how it applies to anything, you have entered the realm of theory. That’s not to say that scientific theory is wild conjecture. Much of it is repeatable observation of statistical patterns. However it’s far from bulletproof.

How many times have drugs been put on the market in which billions of dollars were spent doing extensive studies to prove their effectiveness, only to find in later studies that the placebo effect was proving to have a higher rate of success at the intended result?

How many times has a food previously thought to be healthy been the victim of a study showing that it is now to be regarded as cancer risk, or heart disease risk, only for the tables to turn yet again with another study emerging a few years later showing the opposite results? If you’ve been paying any attention at all, you would have noticed this.

So you start to wonder, who can you really trust. Who has the “right answers”?

No one has all the right answers, and you should never trust anyone fully

Think carefully about what anyone says, no more how much authority they have, and don’t take take things at face value. The reason ideologues tend to be so destructive to progress and so ignorant of logic, is because they put a great deal of trust in authority. They are more concerned with rationalizing the ideas which make up the backbone of their worldview, than the continued examination of a constantly emerging “truth”.

That’s the trouble with truth: reality is constantly changing, ALL the variables in the real world constantly change, and life is far too unpredictable for us to nail things down and hand out the correct answer on the best way to do anything.

You have to realize that people who have attained authority are human beings just like you. They may have considerably more expertise, but they are prone to error the same as anyone else.

The approach that makes sense is to exercise your power of discernment and to keep your position flexible.

Don’t rush to join the rigid camps that arise around the various sources of authority. The true pioneers of thought are the ones who allow the knowledge they have to be radically altered by new information. The seekers who understand that society, life, and science are constantly emergent and yesterdays notion that was accepted as common sense, is tommorows laughable idea rejected by everyone.

There’s bound to be many more times when we discover that the world we thought was flat, does indeed turn out to be round – and that the man we threw in jail for heresy against the conventional zeitgeist, was right all along.

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How to Find Your Passion (s) in 15 minutes

Sep 14 2010

It’s common advice. It’s so common as to become redundant. Follow your passion, and everything else will fall into place. You might have heard it at your college graduation, you’ve probably heard it from millionaires and billionaires, and your guidance counselor might have clued you in on this little gem of wisdom.

When you hear this piece of the advice, if you haven’t already found your passion, then the first thing that pops into your mind is “well that’s cool, but how the hell do I find my passion!? Maybe I don’t even have a passion. OMG I’m doomed”

I’m here to tell you that finding your passion isn’t going to take you years of soul searching, if you just make one key distinction that most people have yet to understand, and then start narrowing down your options.

Here’s where most people go wrong.

For some reason, people think that their passion should be something they should stumble upon after trekking through the Peruvian jungle, drinking ayahuasca and experiencing a brief moment of enlightenment and realization, informing them of their purpose here on this earth.

You see, all a passion is, is a more deep form of interest. Let’s say you’ve taken a liking to a particular woman or man. When you first start liking them or being attracted to them, unless your an idiot, you don’t start telling people how passionate you are for them. You are interested. Once you get into a relationship with them and start really getting to know them you can then develop a passion for them.

It’s the same way with everything. Let’s say you want to find a passion to pursue as a career. Let’s say your favorite things to do are listen to music, watch movies, and play golf.

If you just, like most people, listen to your favorite bands and go to the occasional concert, your at the level of interest. If however you start to go to all the shows in the area to the point where perhaps you could review bands for a newspaper, or start to really learn a musical instrument, or start developing your vocal skills, your starting to move toward the level of passion. If you start to watch as many movies as Siskel and Ebert and writing reviews about them, or you start getting into creating your own scripts or directing your own short films, you’ll start developing a passion for movies. If you start going to the golf course everyday and reading books about how to improve your swing, spending lots of money on clubs etc. your starting to develop a passion for golf.

So now let’s skip straight to the finding your passion part.

Here’s what you need to do. If your like most people, you could probably list 20 to thousands of interests you have. I want you to quickly write down up to 100 interests you have immediately. If you start running out of interests to write down without thinking hard, stop.

Now take however many interests you have written down and narrow those down to your top 20 interests. Imagine that your writing your interests down on a dating site and you just want to put down the interests that say something about who you are and are close to your heart.

Now take those 20 interests and narrow them down to the top three interests that you wouldn’t mind, or wouldn’t hate to be immersed in the entire day. I mean hardcore immersed in for the entire day, doing nothing else.

Those three interest are potential passions. To find the best passion to start developing, use your intuition. Or you can pick randomly if you really can’t decide. Or you can go to Google Adwords Keyword Tool and find the one that gets the most searches per month. That’s the passion that the general market has the most interest in, and thus has the most chance of being highly profitable. However keep in mind that if you want it to be easier for you to beat the competition than you might want your passion to be in something that has less competition so check out the google adwords competition. I believe though that if your passion is strong enough you can destroy 95% of the competition in any field.

Now that you’ve discovered the interest of yours with the most POP (Potential Of Passion) all you have to do is turn your interest into a passion.

How do you do that? It’s simple. Anything that you fully immerse yourself in and learn enough about you can start to develop a passion for. Buy the 3 or 4 most highly reviewed books on your new POP interest. Take a class on it. Read about it obsessively. Start taking action on the interest. Since I don’t know what your POP will be, I can’t define what those actions should be, but you can figure it out. Some of you won’t even be willing to take enough action to figure out what actions you should take – but such is life.

Don’t be one of those losers who keeps on reading and reading good advice but never take a bit of action on any of it.

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How to Achieve Greatness

Sep 12 2010

  • This post may or may not be channeled from a higher entity from the fifth dimension. ;-)

To achieve greatness, you must become great. You may be wondering at this moment, if i’m not great now, how can I achieve greatness if I need to become great first. There is your first mistake. You are already great. Every human being is great. You are remarkable work of art greater than anything ever imagined in your plane of existence. You are human. Being human is great.

Your problem lies in believing that you need to somehow do something special to become great, then once you do something special you are qualified to join the club of greatness. You are already in the club, you just don’t know it yet, you, the world just doesn’t know it yet.

If you currently feel like your not in the club, well here’s your invitation. You’ve just been formally invited. Now it’s time to get to business.

You’ve thought all your life that you deserve some special destiny, that you are not meant for normal things, that you are not meant to live out societies plan for you. You were right. The problem is that you denied this repeatedly because you gave in to fear. You believed the naysayers. The naysayers were there to make you stronger, to illustrate for you what you should be doing with your life. The more someone says you can’t do something, the more inclined you should be to take on the challenge. This doesn’t apply to shoplifting, murder, or rape. Sometimes naysayers are right, use some damn discretion, your not a nitwit are you?

You already intuitively know this, but you are lacking in courage. You are not connected to the confidence you have a natural right to. The worst part about it is that the further you go with your pursuit of things unworthy of your greatness, the less courage you will cultivate. You will find yourself unable to perform with any sort of exceptionalness in activities which you aren’t inclined to and you don’t have any business doing, but you continually persist in trying to do things you shouldn’t be wasting a precious second of your time on earth pursuing.

Stop making excuses. Immediately remove yourself from your comfort zone and begin the dreams that inspire you. Shoot for something outrageous and break it down into simple steps that you can begin on at this very moment. The first step is beginning the process of breaking down what your trying to achieve into a series of smaller goals.

Now is the time to awaken to your potential. You can do literally anything you set your mind to. There is nothing you can conceive that is impossible to achieve, within the limits of your universes laws.

Believe in your core, in the deepest parts of your soul, that what you have to say, what you have to express, what you have to contribute to the world has merit and can lead you the most wild success you can possibly imagine. Stop looking for a how-to for everything in life. The manual is within you. There is no manual, but the analogy is effective to describe to you what is being conveyed. All you need to begin and to decide and to accomplish is within your spirit. You must stop doubting and start pushing yourself toward things with force and without hesitation. You don’t stand there and strategize about how to impress her. You simply allow the words to flow through you and trust that you are great, and that if she is a match for you at that time, she will be attracted to what you have to say, and the energy you project.

It is the same with any human enterprise. If you want to be great at something, JUST DO IT. Don’t spend endless hours stuck in strategy and brainstorming. Get to the core of what your trying to do, actively seek solutions, write down your basic plan, and start on something. If your trying to build an online business, find a niche your interested in, and register the domain name. Do it! Right now! After you finish this post that is :-) You’ll find that with every step you take toward what you wish to achieve, your vision becomes clearer. Insight begins to come into focus.

insight

“How often it does seem that it’s the highly creative child who is having the greatest struggles in the conventional classroom! It’s nice finding research that backs up the association. From this Harvard study, a diffuse attentional style was much more common among individuals with high lifetime levels of creative achievement.” Ref.

“This study by Northwestern researchers concludes with a final interesting finding that differences in this attentional style might account for why high IQ beyond a certain point doesn’t correlate with higher levels of creative achievement”

Diffuse attention does not mean you should not be focused. It’s just means that you should focus on what will make you great, what inspires you. You must use your analytical mind only for its purpose. To generate structure. Once you have generated the faintest resemblance of structure, begin. When things become to structure the structure you have created becomes a limiting prison that will stifle your creativity and leave you saying  phrases of disillusionment “Fuck it…. Rich people are lucky or crooks” “This whole internet marketing thing is probably just a scam anyway” “Those people are just lucky”

Or worst of all, the true kiss of death for being anything great in life.

“It’s time I grow up and start being realistic”


Life, is but a dream within a dream, don’t make yours boring.

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Become A Player: All The World is Your Stage

Sep 10 2010

“And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts”

I certainly hope you know who wrote that, but if you don’t, it was the magnificent playwright and actor William Shakespeare. Those words best describe the idea of this blog. You could call this a blog about lifestyle design, personal development, internet marketing, health and fitness, traveling, music, and much more but the main idea is that we are each characters in this play called Life.

The question is, are we content to simply play bit-parts or will we strive to be memorable characters capturing the hearts of an audience, whoever they may be. I am not a person content with being a supporting cast member. In the deepest part of my soul, I wish to be recognized for greatness, to be applauded for riveting performances, to stir the emotion of those who watch as I masterfully manifest a destiny that I have written, directed, and performed.

Some say “just be yourself” but I believe we are always ourselves inside, but we can be fake when we imitate instead of acting. To act is to truly allow ourselves to feel the role we are playing, to become it. There are many roles you may wish to play in your life, but none will be satisfying unless you truly allow yourself to become the person you wish to be, to do the things you wish to do. If you’d like to be a musician, don’t think of great musicians as special people doings thing you could only dream to do. Cultivate the greatness inside of you. Your present environment in life doesn’t matter in the slightest, your current skill doesn’t matter in the slightest. When a good actor is on stage  playing some great king in a castle, everyone knows he is simply standing on a stage, perhaps with a set surround him. He does not think about the fact that he’s on a stage, that is irrelevant, in that moment he IS in that castle, he IS that king. If you have talent and inclination, it is only a matter of time and practice before you become great. It is only a matter of enough rehearsal before you inhabit the role of greatness.

I’m sure there are many others who will not settle for a small and uninspiring role in Life. My mission is to inspire others as they follow my journey in the pursuit of creativity, art, passion, adventure, romance, the many things the world has to offer if only you would dare to dream of them, and do more than dream, create, and do more than create, share your creations.

My promise to you is that I will write with uncompromising honesty and without censorship. I will not curse to be edgy, but because cursing will result in truthful expression.

At present, there is nothing more to say, except – may peace be in your hearts, but fire in your eyes.

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