Then I add my secret ingredient that is one, or sometimes two, fresh vanilla beans. I split the vanilla bean down the middle, and scrape out the fresh black vanilla beans.

The trick to making great French Toast is to use a medium hot pan and unsalted butter. When the butter is frothy, but not burning, your pan is ready.

Dip your bread in the egg mixture, coating both sides, and place in the pan.

Cook your toast slowly. You only want to flip it once.

Serve the golden brown toast with pure maple syrup, fresh berries, and the absolute best quality bacon you can afford.

This is the breakfast recipe I make every Sunday morning when my in-laws spend the weekend with us. I’ve followed the recipe so many times, it’s now ingrained in my mind. It’s second nature. I’d be willing to say – it’s perfect.

Business success works the same way. The recipes, and nearly everything you need to succeed, are already out there. The recipes have already been tweaked and tested. Others have already worked out the kinks.

Baking, and I know French Toast isn’t really “baking”, but baking rarely works when you don’t follow a recipe.

Why do so many of us insist on trying something on our own without a recipe?

When you screw up your cooking recipe, though, you can go out and buy more ingredients and try again. Other things, important things, can’t be so easily replaced.

People will spend months reading, writing, preparing, assembling, designing, planning, tweaking, changing, editing, fixing, upgrading, testing, prototyping, meeting etc etc.

We often hear that the key to success is taking action.

They do all of this, but they never actually ship. I’m guilty of that. I’ve done that. I’ve lost the battle many times. The practice of taking action becomes a form of real and intense procrastination.

Some say the hardest part is starting; and many will argue that if we’re engaged in the steps above, we’ve already won the hardest part of the battle because we’ve started. Action has been taken.

Sometimes, I’d agree. When I procrastinate starting a Crossfit workout, it’s because of the intense pain I know I’ll experience shortly. But when I start, I know I’ll finish.

The opposite is the false start. It’s the feeling of accomplishment that we’ve actually started! We believe we’re taking strides in the right direction.

It’s a lot like signing up for a gym membership and never going.

It’s the endless pursuit of perfection without actually ever shipping your product out the door.

It’s like saying you want to start a blog, and you move forward by spending months researching how to actually do it. If you just start, it can be done in seconds and you can learn as you go.

The false start is a lot like the hamster in a cage. The wheel is spinning, but the hamster isn’t going anywhere.

What YOU need to figure out is, have you’ve actually started, or are you just spinning your wheels?

P.S. June 14th is Linchpin Day worldwide! On June 14th, in hundreds (maybe thousands) of cities Worldwide, Linchpins will unite.

What is Linchpin Day? Read this..

Are you a Linchpin?

I’ll be organizing a local linchpin meetup in Windsor/Essex County. You can find details here.

If you’re interested in attending and meeting up, please mark a spot on the list. I’ll be blogging more about this over the next couple of weeks.

Have you ever actually sat down and thought about what your life will look like five years from now?

Every self-help book or “how to make more money” book I’ve ever read suggests that you start with the endpoint in mind. They all say the exact same thing.

Set your goals and have an endpoint in mind. Take action and work towards that goal. They call it the secret.

But how many of us actually do it? I’d be willing to bet not very many. Yet how many people are unhappy with their current situation? I’d be willing to bet a lot.

I talk a lot about drudging through the work week because, quite frankly, we all know a lot of people who are just drudge along.

We all know people who aren’t excited about Monday’s. We all know people who hate their J.O.Bs (just over broke)

Yet they drudge on.

But where are they drudging to? Back in the river, as I worked my way upstream, I could really see no end in sight. It was a constant battle, and I was barely making any progress.

I have a feeling most people don’t do this exercise because most people assume they’ll be doing the exact same thing in five years they’re doing now.

Or, I’m guessing that people do the exercise halfheartedly and make up ridiculous life scenarios. They say things like “In five years, I’ll be sipping a drink in front of my beach hut in Thailand living off Lottery winnings.”

Here’s my suggestion:

Actually do the exercise and be honest about it. Map out your ideal life. Don’t be afraid to even map out what you would consider a perfect life.

What will you be doing for a living?

What will your family look like?

Where will you be living?

What new hobbies will you have?

Be as detailed as you want, but also be honest and realistic.

I’ll make a confession. I did the exercise a while back. I even wrote down the nitty-gritty details, like the size of our house and the color of our front door. I wrote about the relationships I would have with friends and family. I talked about my non-existent dream dog. I wrote down what I would do in my spare time.

The point I want to stress is that if you can look at a blank slate, and all you can muster up is endlessly drudging along for the next five years, you can bet you’ll still be drudging and get pretty damn good at it.

And maybe you’re happy with your current life, but I still don’t think that exempts you from the exercise. Maybe your dream is to drudge along because of the shiny golden years of retirement that await. That’s fine. I’m not discounting that, but you still need a script.

We all have a chance to write our own script. Sure, things will change and be updated along the way, but without a script or a story to begin with, nothing’s going to change.

You can be guaranteed of that.

When making this decision, we also agreed upon a few guidelines.

1. A movie on Friday or Saturday night was perfectly acceptable.
2. The Olympics, of course, were exempt from all rules. Canada crushed it.
3. If one of us wanted to watch TV, that was fine. We wouldn’t judge each other.

   We weren’t creating the ten commandments of the Fleming Household, instead we just decided that there were other things we’d rather be doing with our limited free-time.

It’s now almost May, and I’m pleased to say that we haven’t watched TV since before Christmas of 2009.

So here’s a little about my experience living without television.

I’ve read close to 40 books since mid December. I used to say I didn’t have time to read. That was an excuse. I have gained more amazing and applicable business knowledge in the past four months than many people gain over the course of a year or two, or maybe more.

I believe an investment in myself and my own knowledge will rival that of a paid MBA degree over the course of a year.

I’ve blogged nearly 5-days a week since February.

I’ve blogged about  New York Times’ (NYT)  best-selling books like ReWork, and my review has even been included on their official reviews page.

I’ve been sent free, advanced copies of killer unreleased books, that will no doubt be on the NYT best seller list, for  my review on this blog.

I used to say I didn’t have time to blog.

My wife and I go for nice long walks each night. We used to forgo the walk to catch the latest episode of obese people trying to lose weight.

How ironic. We were watching severely overweight people in a desperate life-or-death struggle to lose weight caused by a static and sedentary lifestyle in the first place, the exact same activity we were engaging in while viewing.

Anyways, I’m not going to be preach to you about watching TV versus not watching TV, even though new research shows that TV not only causes ADD, but also increases the risk of mental health problems.

However, I do want to say this about the subject:

If you’re spending long drawn out days doing something you don’t absolutely friggin love, then why are you spending the little time you do have investing your energy into an activity that requires literally zero brain function?

TV requires the single simple skill of processing images and not much more. Most TV shows are created so we don’t need to think. It’s a sedentary activity that basically lulls your brain into a coma-like state.

Very basic memory and concentration skills are required to watch and understand TV shows, regardless of how smart and challenging we want to believe some new shows are.

I’m just saying… You’ve got a great brain that wants to be challenged and engaged and you’re doing it a disservice by plopping down on the sofa for four hours each night.

It’s begging you for the opportunity to grow!

It wants to try new things!

It wants to learn new hobbies!

It wants to read and be challenged to think!

It wants to expand the potential and possibilities of your life!

And deep down, it hates just sitting around and being sedated.

My suggestion is to choose wisely both where and how you invest the small amounts of free time you have. Your brain will thank you in so many ways.

Powerful stuff.

If you have seen my last post, you’ll know that I recently read the expanded and updated version of “The 4-Hour Work Week.” by Tim Ferriss. One interesting section was a little exercise in Chapter 5 called “How to Read 200% Faster in 10 Minutes.” A quick Google search led me to a similar post on Tim’s blog only this time it was called “Scientific Speed Reading: How to Read 300% Faster in 20 Minutes”

I’m not going to talk about the exercises here because you can read it in much more detail over on Tim’s blog but I want to share with you my results and findings.

In the article, Tim provided a quick synopsis on how we read using a sequence of saccadic movements. Interesting. I never knew this and Tim provided us with a way to understand how it works: “To demonstrate this, close one eye, place a fingertip on top of that eyelid, and then slowly scan a straight horizontal line with your other eye-you will feel distinct and separate movements and periods of fixation.”

To make a long story short, in less than a week and a half, I’ve become a much faster reader. Here are my results from following Tim’s exercises.

Day 1

• Initial Reading Speed: 305 words-per-minute (wpm) Average reading speed in the US is around 200-300 wpm and I’m guessing it’s somewhat similar in Canada. We’re maybe a bit faster here:-)
• After Test Reading Speed: 505 wpm – Amazing! A 65% Increase in reading speed the first time I did the exercises. I will admit that my comprehension of what I was  reading was terrible at this speed.

My results were not exactly 200 or 300% higher as Tim suggested but they weren’t bad either.

Day 2 – The very next day I decided to complete the exercises again. Using the same formula, I began the test by assessing my initial reading speed.

• Initial Reading Speed: 370 wpm. While I hadn’t retained a speed of 505 wpm, I did come out of the gate faster and my comprehension was back at my normal level.
• After Test Reading Speed: 540 wpm. 35 wpm more than my best speed yesterday.

Day 3 – Here’s where things started to get interesting.

• Initial Reading Speed: 468 wpm! Today I came out guns blazing! I tested in at 468 wpm and comprehension was there! I managed to soak up everything with no back skipping.
• After Test Reading Speed: 612 wpm. Insane. And you know what? My comprehension level was way up – of course this is based on my own self-assessed comprehension level of what I could remember and recall about what I just read.

Just to be sure I wasn’t going berserk, I went home and went on a reading frenzy. Over the next 5 days, I read a ton of books, flying through them at a speed I’d never been able to even come close to before. Maybe that’s the reason I very rarely finished a book – I was reading too slow.

Over the next 5 days I read:

The Catcher In The Rye
The Four-Hour Work Week (again)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel
Bad Monkeys

I also limited myself to the following rules:

1. An hour to an hour and a half of fiction reading per night before bed
2. The non-fiction could be read whenever. I usually spent an hour or so reading after dinner while sipping a glass of red wine.

Day 4 – Five days later it was time to test myself again.

• Initial Reading Speed: 416 wpm. Interesting results. In the time away from training and completing the exercises, I had slowed down but I had also read 5 books at a speed and comprehension level faster than I’d ever read in my life.
• After Test Reading Speed: 624 wpm

The last test I did was three days ago. Since that time I’ve read a few other books and will continue to do so. My conclusion is that with daily training and practice anyone could easily double or perhaps triple their reading speed. I made a comment on Tim’s blog that I was having trouble finding any consistency in my results which you can see through my results. But I think it’s important to recognize that I’m getting faster, and with more practice and repetition I might find that consistent level.

Tim did mention that if your goal is to read at 900 wpm then you actually have to train at 1800 wpm, which is the equivalent of 10 seconds per page or 6 pages per minute. Could you imagine? 6 pages per minute!

If you decide to try the exercises, let me know your results and findings.

UPDATE

January 19th, 2009 update

I decided to re-test today as I felt I was slowing down with some books over the weekend but the tests said I was wrong.

• Initial Reading Speed: Came in at 424 wpm with solid comprehension
• After Test Testing Speed: 624 wpm – Funny exact same number I put up last time I did the test. I wonder if this is a max for me?

Yesterday I mentioned how I was beginning a small experiment on outsourcing. As I had said in my first post, I’ve been outsourcing a large majority of my work for years but I’ve been doing it privately through sites like Rentacoder.com and elance.com

After reading the 4-Hour Work Week, remember I mentioned I contacted the two companies that Timothy Ferriss mentions in his book, Brickwork and GetFriday.com
I still haven’t heard back from GetFriday in three days.

Brickwork did reply after a few hours. Actually, the CEO replied and said they were backlogged and it would be a while before they could look at my requests. I replied back and said “I’m a little pressed and need someone ASAP” Well, the CEO replied again and said they would have someone contact me today or tomorrow.

Within 5 minutes I did get a reply from a Brickwork executive asking me to meet and discuss exactly what I’m looking for. We could do this via skype at my convenience! What a world we live in…. I’ll follow up with more on brickwork after this.

I was still in a bind for some tasks I was looking to accomplish before my Northern Ontario vacation next week so I tried going to some authority forums and posting my jobs and said I’m looking to hire someone. I got hundreds of replies but one stood out to me, a guy named David messaged me.  Not only did he say he could do the work, but he provided about 15 links to various discussions on the site where he had helped people and they gave him great testimonials.

I decided to take a chance with Dave or David. Dave got on MSN and at first I noticed his English was good but not perfect. But without asking anything in particular we carried on. I gave him the tasks. The task was something that had been bugging me for three years. When I first got into working online I started by selling web hosting, then I needed my own hosting for my own sites and so on……

For 3 Years, I’ve been paying small bills at about 5 different companies… One for $89.95, another for $69.95, two at $34.95 and another at $9.95… These are MONTHLY fees! On top of that, over the past year I got fed up with using poor hosting that I now rent a handful of truly dedicated servers from liquidweb in Michigan and they are awesome! The problem was, to not lose all my hosting/sites (which equal my pay-day), everything would need to be transferred to the new servers. This is an easy task when you’ve got basic HTML. But it gets a LOT harder when you’ve got forums, database driven sites etc…

Anyways, I told David the predicament and how I wanted to bring a few hundred (yes hundred) websites onto the dedicated servers. I gave David the details and away he went.

An hour later David messaged me… First VPS all accounts backed up, restoring now.
An hour after that… All accounts restored, please check for errors. I did a brief check and everything was perfect.

A few hours later… Second server, all accounts backed up and restoring now.
An hour after that….All accounts restored.

This went on for a few hours. David started at around 12:00 Noon and by 8:00 PM . He was done! Not just done, it was perfect! In fact, David went on to help with some config issues, answered a bunch of other questions, took care of a few tasks and all this before requesting a payment!

I asked David what I owed. Let’s just say the price was more than reasonable and with that, David in one day saved me about $335 US Dollars Per Month which I had been paying for about 2 years.

I finally got around to asking David where he’s from. He said, “India.” I asked David if he worked for himself or a company. He said he worked for CliffSupport.com.

Anyways, David noticed another job I had posted and mentioned he and cliffsupport.com could handle this as well. He gave me a quote (again more than reasonable) and a list of references for companies in the US they were providing similar services for. I checked his references and they checked out. I’ve now hired David on a monthly basis to perform some tasks which used to take up a good chunk of my time.

Notice how I’ve been able to write two blog posts in two days!! What tasks are costing you time & money, which could be outsourced, to a company like cliffsupport.com, brickwork.com or getfriday.com? Don’t delay any more!

Remember, I paid $335 bucks per month for a job that took ONE day to get done!
Break out your calculator and do the math $335 X 24 = $8040 Bucks!

I got back to the cottage and dove right into it. I immediately became a big fan. It seemed to be a mirror image of my career minus all the crazy and far more exciting & eccentric things Timothy Ferriss is doing. The parts about Tim’s family or friends asking, “what do you do for a living?” or “where do you work?” really echoed to me.

Tim always had trouble explaining how and why he made an income online. He struggled to truly explain to people who while they were working 9-5 (plus overtime), he was working only 4 hours per week. I have this problem too. Day in and day out, I’m asked this question. Usually, I just say I do some marketing for people online. Most of the time this does leave them confused and curious.

I know my grandparents used to say “as long as Noah isn’t doing anything illegal!” So I immediately felt where Tim was coming from. Usually when he explained he earned his income online, they immediately just assumed things like “pornography.” Tim became eventually just too frustrated with answering this question he now answers, “I’m a drug dealer.”

In a way, there is a level or mystery with earning your entire income online. I mean, people see you’re not struggling and they are. People see you going on vacation and they aren’t. I can understand it too. If I had a friend who was me, I’d be intrigued. In a way, I believe people essentially want a piece of the pie! That’s fine too. But don’t beat around the bush!

Anyways…back to the topic on hand. Another part of Tim’s book I enjoyed was on how he outsourced so much of his work to Brickwork and GetFriday (He said “Your Man In India” in the book ~ he meant their outsourcing company getfriday.com) I was intrigued because much of my success has been largely due to outsourcing tasks I couldn’t normally do. I usually just use rentacoder.com. The problem here is you get sometimes hundreds of “bids” for your posted job. The bidders can be from anywhere in the world, some are brand new, poor English, or they didn’t even read your request, they are just replying to ever single posted job! In a way, this becomes very tiresome to go through.

So after reading The 4 Hour Work Week I thought I’d try Brickwork and/or GetFriday. I submitted my quote requests and am now waiting. I just received a message from Brickwork. Because of the book’s popularity, they are now SWAMPED! I did get a message from Vivek Kulkari the CEO of Brickwork. The email explained it would be a week before they get back to me. The email read…

“We apologize for this delay, but due to an unexpected increase in business, all our resources have been working overtime to meet our client demands. We are currently focusing on ramping up our team size, to minimize such delays and inconveniences caused to our prospective clients.”

I guess they didn’t know they were going to be the main focus of a New York Times Best Seller!!!

Imagine this company in India, overwhelmed to the point they will need to outsource to someone else. Maybe America….

As for GetFriday.com, I haven’t received a response yet but I did manage to find their company blog. The blog explained how due to the book, they are now taking up to 28 days to respond, work out details and begin performing tasks!!!! This same task took just 24-48 hours a few weeks ago.

We’ll see where I get. I’m going to investigate a few other companies. I think people may be focusing on these two companies primarily because Tim Ferriss mentions them as the companies he uses. Thus, people believe these are trusted and the only companies out there.

Over the next 6 weeks, I’ll be focusing on outsourcing and posting my experiences here.
We’ll also see if we can get some interesting tasks handled by them….

Man, it creeped me out. We ended up having a huge discussion about the comment on my own site and in the end, I decided it wasn’t worth much more than a discussion. Getting really fired up about it only creates more confrontation and problems to which would end up with the thread being deleted (it was anyways). The arguments are also bad for Internet Marketers on a whole.

For the guy who said it, he literally wiped out a few hundred customers in one full swoop.

Now, I’m a reader of everything Dan Kennedy has published and to a large extent he teaches and stresses “what matters are results.” I’ve heard him say this numerous times. Leave branding to the big companies. What you want is results. Plain and simple. But he places this in the context of your marketing efforts and asking the question “Did you profit or not?” He also places this in the context of direct mail advertising.

When it comes to newsletter/site/member management, I believe it’s a different story…

One of the things I’ve always strived to do, is get to know my members. You know what you find with 99% of your members. You’ll find these are real humans with real problems, real stresses, real dreams and real desires. They aren’t just atm machines that can be tapped, they aren’t oil reserves to be drilled and sucked of every last drop. I can just imagine (after seeing the latest transformer movie) the way some marketers see this. Picture an ATM machine, it transforms into your customer, dispenses cash and then transforms back into a person. This isn’t the way to treat your customers, clients or members.

Granted, we all have customers that are like aliens, but in the end they are all human.

I’ve learned some amazing things about members, clients and newsletter subscribers! This especially applies to the Internet Marketing industry. We’ve got doctors making 100k a year, looking to get out of the profession and into IM. Teachers, Professors, University Students….

Then we’ve got construction workers, waitresses and waiters, or people working 10-12 hour days at brutal jobs…

But then we’ve also got another group. We’ve got people who are burdened with illness. We’ve got people here with disabilities, people with problems that many of us couldn’t even fathom. These are people who are struggling and putting their faith into you.

And you know what the beauty is with Internet Marketing? There is room for every single one of these people to literally make a living online. In fact, there is room for every one of these people to make a living they couldn’t have dreamed of in those previous careers.

Anyways, I’m not trying to be a Debbie Downer. Just something that was on my mind this morning after another discussion with another member.

One of my members said this yesterday and I thought it was quite fitting…

There is such beauty in the Internet Marketing industry that everyone should be able to go to work in swim shorts.

Treat your subscribers and members with respect and they will do the same for you. You’ll also make some great friends along the way.

Cheers folks have a great day!

First, I got an invite to be an Ether Beta Tester. Ether is pretty cool. It’s a pay-per-call phone service where you can pay to call and actually speak to people on various topics. My topics are Google Adsense, Adwords and E-Commerce. The way it works is people will pay to call me for a certain length of time. During that time, I’ll answer questions, talk to the person and hopefully give sound advice.

Ether then takes a cut of my “cost-per-call.” They ask you to set your own fees. I set my time at $49.95 for a 15-minute phone call. I chose this price point for 2 reasons. First, I think that’s a good amount of time to quickly go through Adsense placement or look at your website and give you some helpful tips on how to improve things. We don’t need an hour. Secondly, if I give you even 1, 2, or 3 tips that you take into consideration and it boosts your Adsense income from .10 a day to $1.00 a day! Then you’ve made a wise investment!

I may try different price points and times in the future but for now I thought this would be a decent starting point. I’ve found various “experts” charging much, much, more. I was able to find one guy charging a few hundred for an hour of time. I guess if you could get totally sound advice that actually paid off, it would be a wise investment!

Anyways, if you’re interested in calling me to discuss your Adsense sites or E-Commerce efforts, all you need to do is click the “call-me” link in the right hand menu.

The other opportunity I’m trying out is Lulu.com
I read about Lulu.com is the most recent copy of Business 2.0. The idea is cool. Essentially, if you’ve written a book, you can instantly publish a paperback, hardcopy or digital copy for no cost. Lulu.com will store your book and when it’s ordered, they will bind, create and ship your book. You are paid about 85% of the cost at which you set. The other costs are provided to Lulu for shipping and binding costs. Pretty cool right?

I think so! There are others doing similar things but I find Lulu.com is way ahead of the rest of them. Lulu.com is essentially a self-publishing warehouse. You can become a published author in about 5 minutes (after you’ve written the content) I like the way it works especially for Digital Products. If you create an e-book and need another avenue to get it out there then Lulu.com is the answer. I’m tempted to order my own bound copy of my own book just to see the finished product.

I’m also excited since I have so many books, documents and reports that I plan to get up on Lulu.com in the coming days. I’ll share the links with you. You may be interested in purchasing.

[tags] lulu, ether, adsense, adwords, internet marketing, revenue, income, e-business, ebiz [/tags]