Daniel Roach.org

Working for yourself is great, don’t get me wrong – I love it. The only problem is that most entrepreneurs start out having to do everything themselves. And I do mean everything. I’ve held every job in my company from a web designer to a publicist.

I’m sure every Internet marketer knows the feeling.

With everything we need to be good at and with so little time to do it all in, we need all the shortcuts we can get. With that in mind, here are the top five Firefox add-ons every Internet marketer should know and love.

These add-ons will speed up everything from promotion and content creation to web design. And they’re all free which is always a plus.

1. The Twitter Bar – this add-on will allow you to post to Twitter directly from your address bar. And while that is a nice feature, it’s the speedlinking aspect that I really like.

   Any time you’re reading something you think your followers would enjoy, you can press a button and have it instantly tweeted to your feed. That’s instant Twitter content just by surfing the net. Ah, multi-tasking.

2. IE Tab – I started out online by building my own websites and teaching myself HTML for the fun of it, so I’ve been through a lot of code in my time. If you’re like me, you’ll know what an absolute pain in the ass Internet Explorer can be to code for.

   Having IE Tab doesn’t make that any easier, but it does let you check your page to see how Internet Explorer will load it up by creating an Internet Explorer Tab (clever name, huh?) within Firefox. This way checking your progress is instantaneous.

3. Zotero – this is a great add-on for content creation. Zotero is an add-on that allows you to store webpages, links, info and screenshots for easy access later. It makes reasearching articles and videos an absolute snap because all it takes is the press of one button to save and organize everything you’ll need for later use.

   Zotero and the Twitter Bar are two of my favorites because they integrate content creation with the normal, time-wasting web surfing I’m already inclined to do. Turning my normally unproductive time into “work” time is always something I’m after.

4. Firebug and Y-slow – these two work together to allow you to audit your web pages. Firebug allows you to not only inspect your HTML, CSS and Javascript live, it also lets you live edit the code and see an instant result on the screen. Y-Slow will load your site and audit the load speed, detailing things you can do to speed it up.

   What I like about these add-ons is that they allow me instant feedback and a blueprint to follow for web design. They let me head problems off before they ever have the chance to get too far and waste too much time.

5. SEO for Firefox – whenever you do a Google search with this add-on, you’ll see instant SEO-related info that can reveal weak spots in your competitions armor. You can discover the important steps that they may be missing and make sure your site is better covered.

   SEO for Firefox is like giving yourself a battle plan for getting organic traffic. You can see how your competition got there and follow in their foot steps. It’s like being shown the exact steps to take to get to a #1 ranking on Google.

Now of course there are a million more add-ons that would be perfect for entrepreneurs like us, but I chose these five because they are the ones I use the most frequently. I’m sure a second and third list will follow these.

But what add-ons do you use the most? Which Firefox add-ons help your marketing the most?

So, you’ve got the itch to start your own small business, but you don’t know where to start. Well, the good news is, you’ve got plenty of small business and start up opportunities open to you. Below you will find 8 ideas for small businesses that you can start right now. Sure, some of these will require more work than others and some will require more start up capital than others, but they can all make you your own boss.

1. Franchise – franchising isn’t half as hard as most people think it is. Franchise opportunities are everywhere and its a great small business idea because you don’t have to worry about starting your own product or building your own brand. You pick a company like Plato’s Closet, Pizza Hut or even Sprint and AT&T that have already established themselves in the market and you become a part of their success. You will have to do quite a bit of setup to get the business going and it does require a lot of capital to start, but the pay off could be great. If franchising interests you and you’d like to find out where to find small business franchise ideas and opportunities, you can go to Entrepreneur.com’s 2009 Franchise 500.

2. Wholesale - think of wholesale retail as franchising, without a parent company. You set up a retail location online or a physical storefront, you choose your products, buy them in bulk at reduced wholesale prices and resell them at retail price. Your business profits from what is left and you don’t have to create a product of your own. The only real drawback to wholesale is that you are responsible for dealing with the inventory, which means you need warehouse space or a fulfillment center (but more on that another time). And if your product doesn’t sell, you could be stuck with 1,000 crates of Pop-Tarts or something.

3. Dropshipping - of all the ways to retail online, dropshipping is the coolest. You don’t touch the product, you simply place the orders. You start an online store and, when someone places an order with you, you order the product from your dropshipper for a reduced price, they ship the product to the customer with your logo on it and you keep the difference. If online retail is your thing, dropshipping is definitely the way to get started. Be careful when finding dropshippers, however, there are scammers out there. If you’re interested in dropshipping or wholesale, I recommend signing up for a membership with Word Wide Brands. They have a huge database of dropshippers and wholesalers, along with tons of free ebooks and videos to help you get started. I personally use them for my online businesses and I highly recommend them.

4. Product Creation - if you’ve got a great idea for a product, you can always make something of your own. With all of the free audio and video editing software on the Internet these days it has never been easier to create your own information products to sell. The best part about information products is that they can cost next to nothing to make, which means each sale is nothing but profit. If you’d rather create a more tangible product, there are any number of companies who can help you. Just head over to ThomasNet to find a list of manufacturers for every product under the sun.

5. eBay Sales - Yeah, I know, it’s eBay. It may not be the noble profession you were thinking of, but, if you want to know a dirty little secret, this is my favorite method for getting start up capital for any small business. You can find products from World Wide Brands and sell them for a profit. Does it take some time and effort? A little. Mostly to learn what’s going to sell and what’s not. But if you’re dropshipping, you don’t even have to touch the product. List the information on eBay, order from your dropshipper and cash the check. Easy right?

6. Freelancing - if you’re one of those people with a demonstrable skill, like writing, video editing or website design, you can very easily turn that talent into your own small business and still get to work from home in your pajamas. Sign up with websites like Elance or Odesk and create a profile for yourself and your work and you can start bidding on freelance projects. If you can net some good reviews from customers and build up an impressive portfolio, you can make a great living doing what you love.

7. Affiliate Sales - of all the start up ideas this one will probably require the greatest work for the smallest gain. I include it here because there are still Internet marketers out there who swear by it. Affiliate programs, through sites like Clickbank and Commission Junction, will pay you a commission for bringing them sales. The problem with affiliate sales is that they are open to absolutely everyone. This means that when you find a product that you want to promote, there are probably another 10,000 people on the net already promoting it. The market gets saturated pretty fast, no matter what you’re promoting.

8. Licensing - ah, my father’s favorite option. If you have an idea for a product, but not the means or the desire to create and sell it yourself, you can always license it to another company and simply cash a check each month for a percentage of their sales. You may only make 5% or so of what the selling company will make but, heck, 5% for just having a good idea is a pretty good return. If you think you have what it takes, go check out Stephen Key’s website. Key is a master of licensing who knows exactly how to do it right.

So there you have it. More small business ideas than you can shake a stick at. Start up ideas for years. Check out all of the links above to get more information about each but, regardless of which one you choose, remember that none of these are get-rich-quick schemes and all will require some dedication on your part. But if you have the guts to get out of your current job and work for yourself, any of these can help you achieve your dreams.

When you’re an entrepreneur, time can be a serious enemy. You work for yourself now; you don’t have a clock to punch or a boss to impress. You can come into work whenever you want, leave whenever you want. Hell, watch TV while you do it! No one will care. Many of the newly liberated self employed have a hard time with this. Most entrepreneurs don’t have a problem getting motivated to work. They are hungry and ready to keep their noses down to the grindstone as hard and as long as it takes to succeed. But how do you know if you’re spending your time working on the right tasks?

Just because you are moving, doesn’t mean it’s in the right direction.

Generally being the only employee you have, it’s natural for a new small business owner to be Jack-of-All-Trades. You have to do book keeping at 3pm, then it’s on to graphic design at 4pm and sales calls tomorrow morning. It can be a madhouse trying to keep all the balls in the air and learn to be everything your new business needs you to be. But every once in a while, you have to stop and ask “Is what I’m doing right now making me money?”

More often than not, the answer is no, it’s only bogging you down.

The Time I’ve Wasted on Quantum Collectibles

I’ve been trying for weeks now to put together a website for one of my online retail stores, Quantum Collectibles. I’m very good at web development, but I’m horrible at design. I can code, but I have no style or soul in the visuals and layout of a site. Today, after having spent hours on the Internet trying to find answers to my more complicated of design problems, I realized what a waste this was! I could’ve paid someone else to do this for me and been done with it ages ago! Sure, I would’ve been down a few hundred bucks, but I also would’ve been selling product a few weeks earlier. I immediately went onto elance.com, posted a listing and started enlisting designers and programmers.

Can I code and create my website? Yes. Am I web designer? No. It was time to take a step back and ask myself if it was really worth it to work on such a time consuming task myself. As it turns out, it wasn’t. Sure, I may pay a little more upfront, but I’ll make more in sales by getting the site up and running.

Entrepreneurs and Specialization

A few years into medical school, every student learns that there is no such title as “doctor of everything.” You have to specialize. You can be an immunologist, a pediatrician, or even a neurologist. The choice is yours, but you must pick one as there is simply too much information to know it all. You can either be a mediocre “doctor of everything” or a highly skilled specialist. The same is true with entrepreneurs.

Not only do you have to ask, “Is this making me any money?” but also “What part of this business am I good at?” Whatever your answer is, start putting most of your effort behind that. If it’s graphic design that you do well, focus on the designs and find someone else to take care of copy writing. No sense in taking all that time to learn a new skill you’ve never touched before. Stick to what you do best or can pick up relatively quickly.

If you can’t hire a real employee yet, no big deal, try e-lance.com for great, cheap specialists who can do just about anything you need. If that’s still too expensive, just remember to work hard on what you do best and don’t get bogged down in the rest. If you can’t design a brilliant website and can’t afford a freelance designer, just design a mediocre site for now and let it go at that. Sure, it might not be all the splendor and glory you might have hoped it would be, but it’s getting your product out there and hopeful bringing in some profit, padding your account and getting you one step closer to that perfect business.

Just don’t get bogged down in “working.” Working doesn’t make you money. Results bring in the money. Focus on getting things done, not on doing things.

I’m not a financial expert and therefore my opinion of the current economic situation is the quintessential man-on-the-street view. Sure, I don’t understand all of the ins and outs of the market or the long term effects of a lot of the things that have taken place in the last year, but I do feel that economic laymen like me have a very important vantage point of this whole crisis. From up here in the nosebleed section, we have a crystal clear view of all of the players on the field. We see every missed call and fumbled ball. The players on the field may be doing all the work, but we get to see the big picture, like who’s playing great and who needs to retire.

I bring this up, not to criticize any certain businesses, or banks, or political parties, but simply to point out that there is one serious problem with world-wide economics right now: the large corporation. I know, there are a lot of benefits to large corporations and a lot things that they can do for society as whole. I’m not arguing that large companies are evil, only that they are not as effective as small business. I am arguing that it’s people like me and the readers of this website that are going to change the economic crisis for the better. It’s the small businessman and the college dorm startups that are going to bring about few more years of economic stability.

Why is that? For 3 good reasons:

1. Agility -

small businesses are fast and agile in changing times. They can spot trends occurring and act on them fast, be they good or bad. They can shift when they need to with relatively little effort. Large corporations have rules and bi-laws and channels of communications. You have to get the approval of 10 to 12 different people to make even mid-level decisions and if even one of those people disagrees you, or is simply in a pissy mood that day, the company is stuck floundering in a changing marketplace that very quickly passes it by.

This wouldn’t be so bad except that when large businesses suffer, so do consumers, as there are usually very few products that can replace those of large businesses. Small businesses also tend to be able to avoid the traps of tradition. If you’re the CEO of Macy’s there’s a lot of tradition on your shoulders; you have something to live up to. You will be less likely to go out on a limb and take a risk for fear hurting your brand or destroying over 100 years of work. It’s an understandable fear, but not one that leads to a healthy capitalistic market.

We need small companies that are going to be able to not only read current trends, but react to them quickly enough to provide the services and products required by society. With fewer corporations, we might not have found ourselves in the trouble we’re in right now. Economic downturn is inevitable, that’s just the nature of capitalism, but I firmly believe that small businesses could’ve reacted quickly enough to do away with detrimental practices. They also would’ve been less likely to participate in those practices in the first place, but I digress.

2. Hunger and Competition -

small business owners have to stay hungry, they have to have Rocky’s Eye of the Tiger. There are so many other small businesses out there that are doing the same things and providing the same services, small business owners have to constantly struggle to be the best; to do something bigger and better. This competition is great for the consumer because they are given a wide variety of products and services to choose from as well as products that they can be sure are the absolute best available.

The economy doesn’t need a handful of large corporations that control 90% of the wealth and business in the country. It’s detrimental to the consumer and to the market. There isn’t enough money flowing back and forth and these sole providers can charge whatever price they want, as their product or service has no equal replacement. Look at oil companies for a prime example.

3. High Turnover Rate -

I know it may not seem like it in the face of the federal bailouts that have occurred and all that the U.S. government has said on the subject, but businesses dying off is actually a good thing. Small businesses are notorious for dying quickly. Nearly 50% of small businesses don’t make it past the five year mark. I know that on the surface that sounds bad, but you have to remember that a large factor in the death of these businesses is that they didn’t provide social value in a large enough quantity to warrant the public keeping them around. They were largely useless and capitalism tends to be quick to let you know of your uselessness. We must also remember that this number doesn’t mean that these business owners simply faded into obscurity with their tails between their legs. It doesn’t reflect the amount of small business owners who went out and simply started another company.

High turnover is a good thing because it’s like weeding the economic garden. We tend to run into trouble when we keep around businesses that should have failed, a la the bailout. Sure, we would’ve had harder times if many of these businesses had failed, but the economic long run would’ve been far healthier. If you have a hard time with the concept of healthy turnover, just think of these small businesses as the cell in your body. On a minute by minute basis, your cells are dying and being swept away and replaced by brand new, healthy cells, which will in turn die off within a few months or years. If this constant replacement didn’t occur, you’d be stuck in a cesspool of dead and decaying cells, too sick to do their jobs and standing in the way of newer, healthier cells that could save you.

This is the economy as it stands today.

I’m not advocating the overthrow of large corporations, that wouldn’t lead to a healthy market either. We can’t simply toss them out and think it will solve our problems. Large corporations aren’t actually the cause of the problem, they are simply a symptom. What we need to start focusing on is the building up of small businesses that can actually challenge the way that large corporations do business. The forming of a new marketplace that can force these large companies into becoming more agile, progressive and competitive.

We need the entrepreneur and the small businessman more than ever. When I started Daniel Roach LLC, there were people who thought I was crazy to try to start something right now. “People aren’t buying anything!” they said. “The economy is bad, even big companies are suffering right now. If they can’t survive, neither can you.” I haven’t listened to them and I don’t plan to. The very things that are killing large businesses are also the very things that can keep my little tugboat of a company alive.

I encourage all of you self-employed and self-empowered readers out there to rise up and start your small businesses. Now is the best time, as the competition is thin at the moment and everyone will underestimate you. We need you out there on the field playing with and challenging the big players. Let’s go score a few goals for the home team and see if we can’t change some things in this world.

One year ago today, I wrote about whether life had a purpose. While it wasn’t my most popular post, it is probably the most contested and polarizing of all that I’ve written. When I discussed it with others, their responses were wild. They went from “God always has a purpose for us,” to “You’re right, anarchy rules!” The more I’ve thought about this, the more I’ve discovered about my own life’s purpose and the more apparent it has become that a follow up post is long overdue. So let’s take a little time and clarify what your life’s purpose is and how to find it.

Let’s take a few talking points from my last article and clarify them a little bit:

We Do Have a Purpose, Though It’s Not What You Think

A lot of people misunderstood that first article. We do have a purpose to our lives, it just isn’t divinely ordained. We aren’t destined to play some specific role. From my searching, I’ve found that our purpose in life is more akin to game of “this, not that.” Our purpose is to figure out what we will and won’t stand for and we learn to act accordingly. Life is a very long process of experiment, experience and choice. In the time you have, your purpose is to find out who you are and become the best version of that person that you can.

It isn’t about finding your life’s purpose, but finding your life’s message.

Photo by gudmd.haralds

Your life’s message is rooted in your values and values rarely change. Think about all of the things you thought were evil, dishonest and wrong 10 years ago. Chances are good that you still think they’re evil, dishonest and wrong. You still feel a stirring of unease in your emotional senses when you think about those things. Intellectual beliefs change all the time, what you feel in your emotional core is right and wrong will rarely, if ever, change. The message of your life isn’t what you want to do with your time, but what mark you want your actions to leave. What will they say about you and your world?

Life’s Purposes are Vague

I have found that the idea of a specific purpose never seems to work. Who says, “My life’s purpose is to be an accountant!”? Yeah, right. You may love being an accountant, but isn’t their more to you than that? What if you want to read a book on physics instead of accounting? Are you denying your purpose? Using a specific job, or a specific belief, limits where you can go and what you can do with your life. Living from your life’s purpose is like being an artist. You always know what you want to create, but the medium that you choose is an ever evolving process. You may use charcoal, crayons or oil paint, but your creation remains.

You may be a great accountant, but what if one day you decided to try your hand at investment banking? Has your essential message of who you are and what you stand for changed with your job? Probably not. The difference is in the medium you use to express this message.

What Medium Will You Use?

One of my great passions in life is to explore human emotions. I love emotions and I love feeling the ebb and flow of them. I love getting caught up them, like riding a tide into shore. I followed this passion into acting, where I could experience any range of emotions on any given night. I explore my emotions through writing about my personal growth and journaling. I’ve also written novels, screenplays and directed independent films, all just to explore humanity in all our glorious complications. My mediums have changed many times and will continue to change, but my messages never will.

Photo by racoles

Looked at from this angle your life’s purpose become devilishly simple: find what you care about. Discover what your message is. Discover what you want to devote your life to communicating to others. Is it ‘Give Peace a Chance’ or is it ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’? Are you for equal rights, or devoting yourself to deity? It doesn’t have to be a cause, more often than not you’ll find it’s simply a value you hold. Do you believe in fairness? Would you protest against unfairness? Would you devote your life to seeing people treated fairly?

Once you find your message, you may choose any medium to express it. You can be a productive member of society if it fits your message or you can be a mooch. If mooching serves your message, let it be that way. I would argue that, when looked at from this angle, there is no medium that could ever be innately ?unpurposeful?. Even killing yourself with drugs sends a message; a message of the importance of freedom to that person and the desire to feel that freedom. It isn’t expressed healthily, but it is expressed.

How to Discover Your Life’s Message:

Last time I told you that to find your life’s purpose you had only to experience your life as it comes to you. That was, I admit, a very flip answer on my part. I still believe it’s a valid answer, but flip nonetheless. To make up for that, here is a method for discovering your life’s message. It is simple, but it isn’t easy. It will take a great deal of time, a great deal of practice and copious amounts of honesty and courage to discover.

Sit quietly and answer these questions:
1. What would you fight for?
2. What would you die for?

How will you know when you’ve found your message? Your message is like falling in love; when you find it, you’ll know. If you have to ask, you haven’t found it yet.

It will take time. For most people it takes years to discover and you may never see the entire message. It will come to you in bits and pieces and will evolve and become clearer as your life unfolds before you. Take it slowly and align yourself with the parts of your message that are clear at this moment. Hold fast to your patience, you will be rewarded with a purposeful and driven life.

Would say you think about money often during the course of the day? Would you say that money was one of your ultimate goals? If you answered yes to those two questions, you probably have very little money at the moment. This is because, paradoxically, the pursuit of money is a distraction from all the things money can bring. In other words, focusing on making money keeps you poor.

Photo by anomalous4

Riding the Money-Mindset Choo-Choo

To illustrate what I mean, imagine that you are riding on a train for your vacation. You decided to take the train so that you could see all the pretty scenery of the country side on the way. As you get on the train you notice that there are no free window seats. Sure you can see the windows okay from another seat, but you wanted a full view so you set off up and down the cars in search of a free seat by the window. You search for hours, find nothing and finally give up by the time the train rolls into the station.

The point is this: you could’ve seen the scenery just fine, which was your original goal, but you became obsessed with finding the seat, which is just a means of looking out the window. This is what tends to happen with money. We want the freedom and the peace that having ample money can give us, but we get caught up in the process of trying to get more money instead of trying to get more peace. We miss the forest for the seats, so to speak.

You Need Outcome, Not Goals

This is one of the fundamental differences between how the rich and the poor view their money. For the rich, money is rarely ever a goal unto itself. More often than not the actual goal they work toward is what the money brings them. They focus on the outcome and the money comes to fill in the blanks when needed. Poor people focus on not having enough money and wanting more. They do not focus on attaining more, they focus on how they WANT more. This just breeds a mindset of lack that keeps them in debt and unhappy.

In my last article, How to Sell Yourself, I talked about what I call “selling from the end.” I’ve spent some time as a salesman and I’ve learned that people do not respond to talking about what you are selling unless you sell them an outcome. People don’t give a damn what your product is or why it’s a good product, all they care about is the end of the story; the bottom line. No matter what your product is, or how good it may be, the question is always: “What will it do for me?” Bells and whistles are always fun, but outcomes are what sell.

So What’s Your Money Going to Do For You?

If you want to make more money you have to start from the end of your goal, not the beginning. Describing all the money you want and why you want it are all bells and whistles. The bottom line is what you want that money to do for you. Most people haven’t thought of a concrete reason for wanting more money. Or at least a concrete reason that isn’t “because I don’t have enough.” That’s not a reason, that’s a worry and a mindset of lack. Learn to sell yourself from the end and you’ll start to understand what all this means.

Instead of thinking about how much you need money to pay the bills, imagine how good it would feel to never have to worry about the bills again. Imagine what it would be like if your bank account was so robust that you could set your bills to automatically draft without noticing the missing cash. You’d never have to see another bill in the mail again! How would that make you feel? That feeling is an outcome. That’s not a thing, it’s a mindset, a lifestyle, a habit.

Outcomes Are Always Intangible

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that things are outcomes, that’s a common misconception. Things, material possessions, are not the bottom line. Outcomes are always intangible and ethereal. They are feelings and lifestyles instead of cars and jewelry. Jewelry, cars, televisions and toys are what accountants call liquid assets, meaning that they are easily turned into cash. These toys are great and fun to have but they are just another form of money, which means chasing after material things is going to lead down the same path of lack as chasing after cash. You’ll end up disappointed at how little you seem to have and you’ll just keep getting more ?not-enough.?

So, with all this in mind, how do you cultivate your making-more-money mindset?

photo by luismi1985

1. Sit quietly and comfortably and close your eyes. Yes, you have to do this.

2. Imagine being in your favorite room of your dream house. Imagine it in the greatest detail you can. Imagine the lighting in the room, the smell, the sounds. Run through these details until you forget where your body really is. You should feel calm, confident and energetic in this room.

3. Now run through scenarios like checking your bank account, or paying your bills just the way you expect to perform these tasks when you are in that physical reality. Notice that you do not feel frightened or tense around your money in this fantasy. If you do not feel free, just keep practicing. Freedom and peace are the feelings we’re trying to cultivate.

4. Now imagine any other part of your day you wish to experience in that reality.

5. Lather, rinse, repeat, as many times a day as you can stand it.

The point of this exercise is to get you thinking about how you want to feel instead of what you want to have. We need to get you into your outcome and away from the pursuit of cash and material things. Materials things and cash will come as a natural result. Give them little to no thought.

So how do you imagine your life to be? What are your outcomes? Leave a comment below and share your ideas.

You are a salesman whether you know it, believe it, want it or not. Every day you have to sell everyone you meet on everything you have to offer as a person. You have to sell new clients or customers on the fact that you are the best person to do business with. You must convince new friends that you are the right person to be friends with. Heck, you even have to convince cab drivers to pick you up. Every day you are going to be selling yourself to any number of people in any number of ways, which means that if this isn’t an area of improvement that you are currently giving a lot of thought to, you may be missing out on a lot of life’s opportunities.

I’d love to be one of those people who tells you that looks and first impressions don’t matter, but I can’t. They do matter and they matter a great deal, whether we like it or not. People are judging you every second you are in their sight and it isn’t really a bad thing. We have evolved to discern whether or not new people pose a threat to our well being. If our new acquaintances make us uncomfortable, we make a judgment that might lead us away from future danger. This survival tactic can be a very handy strength if you realize that first impressions are usually based on looks.

It really is 90% how you look.

If you were walking through a hospital and saw a man in a white coat walk by, would you question the fact that he was a doctor? Of course you wouldn’t, but why not? Did you see his diplomas? No, but he had a white coat. He looked like a doctor and that was good enough information to make that determination. The same goes for every other area of your life. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s a by-god duck. Now your goal is to learn how to look like a duck.

There are universal standards for looks which is a great thing for you because it means that making yourself look a certain way is relatively easy. We all know what “professional” looks like, for instance, and it’s an easy look to imitate. We also know what “suspicious-and-shifty” looks like, which makes it a relatively easy look to avoid.

This brings up a few stories I probably shouldn’t tell but, like everyone, I did a few things back during my younger years that I probably shouldn’t have. Nothing majorly illegal, mind you, but when you’re in high school there are always a few nighttime trespasses to be had. My friends and I were, and probably still are , very good at getting away with these night time shenanigans. We knew never to dress all in black because that was a look that screamed “up-to-no-good.” We always dressed in jeans and t-shirts and sneakers, a very “all-American-kid” type of look, that way if we were ever caught it was easier to plead innocent. And it always worked. If we looked like were up to no good people assumed we were. If we looked like good, clean-cut kids, people assumed we were.

And there you have my misspent youth.

All this plays into stereotypes that everyone have. We know what a “trouble-maker” looks like and we all have the image of the “boy-next-door” and that means that we can play off of those images. Stereotypes aren’t necessarily bad if you’re smart enough to use them to your advantage.

I’m not saying you have to trick people.

You don’t have to pretend to be someone you aren’t, that’s not what I want you to come away with. What you need to know is that wearing a t-shirt and baggy jeans to a job interview is a good way to get turned down flat. That is unless you want to work for Google, then you’re their man. If you want that non-Google job, you need to play on the stereotype of the “successful-professional” by wearing a suit, a tie and running a comb through your hair. You aren’t lying, you’re simply not shooting yourself in the foot.

Photo by dogfrog

Sell Yourself from The End

The greatest salesmen in the world will tell you that you never, ever sell from the beginning, you always sell from the end. You never tell the customer why your product is better than everyone else’s and how low your price is until you tell them what your product can do for their business. People don’t care about what you’re selling unless you show them how it affects their bottom line. If you want to sell yourself, you must sell yourself from the end; sell yourself from the position of their bottom line and your affect on it.

When you’re going in for a job interview, don’t harp on about your people skills and organizational prowess. Don’t tell the interviewer that you’re a hard worker who gives 110%, they don’t care about that.

You’re speaking your language when you need to be speaking theirs.

Want to get that job? Talk about all of things you’re going to do for that company. Talk about how you’re going to raises profits and how your organizational skills can make it happen. Tell them about how you’re going get them 1,000,000 new customers this year with your amazing people skills. Now you’re speaking the right language because you’re talking in terms the other side understands. You’re selling yourself from their bottom line. Show them what you bring and make it impossible for them to turn you down.

So how do you sell yourself? When you go out into the world every day, how do you present yourself? How do you sell yourself to new customers, new friends and new employers?

“The story of Ivan Ilych’s life was of the simplest, most ordinary and therefore most terrible.”
–Leo Tolstoy

I do not believe that anyone has ever risen with the bright morning sun, stretched beneath their soft warm blankets and said to themselves, “My God, I hope this day is as dull as they come!” I can’t quite grasp that anyone could be so complacent as to view this wide world as “the hand they were dealt” and to continue playing such a dull game of cards. The quote above by Leo Tolstoy just seems to say it all, doesn’t it? It says that a life defined as ordinary is a life of the most terrible nature. If that seems strange to you, I would ask you this: are you one of those who feels that life is just a game of chance you have already lost?

The ordinary life can come in many guises and is hard to recognize by those on the outside. If however, you live one every day, I do not need to point out what it feels like or how you know. You just know. You feel in your bones that there is more to you and more to life than you have ever felt or seen. You may also feel that these desires are beyond you, that you could never achieve them. You may feel you are too old, too young, too fat, too thin; there are always a million reasons not to do something. You simply feel that your desires are not a good use of your time and that you should be doing something “useful.”

Stop Trying to Be Useful.

I hate that word, useful. It implies that you could ever do or be something that serves no purpose at all. But how could this ever be? How could you never serve some sort of purpose in the greater scheme of the world? This world and this universe are nothing if they are not purposeful. They work by laws that are unerring and undeniable. Things that go up always come down, opposites always attract. There are reasons and rhymes and there always have been. So how could it be that you or anyone else living and creating within this universe could act in a way that wasn’t of some use?

It will serve you greatly in the future if you realize that everything has its purpose. Not some things, not most things. All things. Perhaps you feel alone, or helpless, or that life is something you are trapped underneath. All of these are warning signs and all of the desires and the dreams that you are denying on a daily basis are the very things that exist to save you from yourself. If you do not accept this fact, you are not yet ready to move on. Your dreams and your desires are the cavalry that are coming to your rescue. To deny them or ignore them is to choose one more minute and one more day in this ordinary and most terrible life.

The NEED for the Material

We ignore them because our wants and our needs have been corrupted by the ego and the self-help community in conjunction. So many books tell you that wanting something more than you have only supports a mind-set of lack. What they meant to say is that the wanting of more MATERIAL THINGS supports a mind-set of lack. Your desires are meant to point you toward the betterment of yourself and your life, but more often than not they point you toward the nearest shiny new toy. Why, because your ego’s fear has stepped in the way. Your true desire is to change your life and begin to operate in a new way. Your ego sees failure written all over that idea and heads it off at the pass. “You don’t want a new job,” it says. “Too risky. Might not work out. You just need a bigger TV. That’ll make you feel better.” But it never does. Your desire for material things is not born from a desire to better your life, but from the need to distract yourself from real improvement.

The things themselves aren’t evil and neither is wanting them. What is detrimental to you is your obsession with material things and the putting of these things before your true urges. Material possessions need to be kept in their place. See them for what they really are: toys to be played with and discarded. They hold no more importance than that. Play with them while you have them and want for nothing more than you have in this moment.

Our true desires involve not the gaining of something new or something we never had, but the betterment of what we already posses. They raise us up and make us feel like more than we ever dreamed we could be. The desires of the ego feel like lack. They make us feel as if we are one step behind in keeping up with the Joneses.

Finding Your Flow

When you feel the pull of true desire there will be no mistaking it. You will feel a rush, a surge of energy. You won’t feel like sleeping, you’ll barely think of eating. It is a frenzied kind of creation that will make you feel electric. It will wash away the old feelings of despair and neglect and replace them with confidence and unwavering focus. You will feel, in a word, inspired.

Many spiritual teachers have written and spoken about the flow of energy through our bodies and that cutting off that energy is what leads to things like lack and unhappiness. I don’t know about that, I’ve never seen this energy and have never seen it blocked, but I think the idea is essentially correct. Rather than your ordinary life being caused by some blockage of energy, it occurs when you block yourself. If we could get you out of your own way, you would experience a world that was entirely new and far more interesting.

When I was a fresh-faced theater student, my mentor used to give me private lessons in Alexander Technique. This involved bringing your awareness to your body and allowing yourself to release unneeded tension. The main point of Alexander Technique is to get out of your body’s way. Your body, when left to its own devices, will return itself to its natural state of balance poise and equilibrium. Most people are so cut off from their own kinesthetic awareness that we have back, neck and many other physicals maladies. Believe me, once you get into AT, you look around at everyone around you, and down at yourself, to realize we’re all just getting in our own way every minute of the day.

It is when you get out of your own way that you get into what we call “the flow” or “the groove” or “the zone.” You feel as if that energy that was blocked is now flowing freely. You feel as if you could conquer the world and indeed, you could. This you see is what the world feels like when you are not twisting yourself into an ordinary wreck. Instead of looking at your desires as things that are meant for others but never for you, you will begin to realize that your natural state is that of the creator. You will no longer stand in your own way when it comes to the successes in your life. You will learn to step back and allow your natural processes to take you to a life less ordinary. From here you will create miracles that will dazzle others but you will know that what you do is the simplest and easiest thing the world.

I encourage you to tap into your playful side when you feel that you life is becoming stagnant. Your desire for change doesn’t need to be earth-shaking in it profundity. It simply needs to be allowed to flow freely through you. This desire might be to drive the scenic route home from work. This isn’t exactly ground-breaking, but it is a new and exciting experience. If you give into it in a playful manner you will discover the magic that lives in that moment. If, however, you keep your focus on how little time you have today and all that important work that awaits you, you will stay grounded in the ordinary.

Return to that bliss you felt as a child when everything seemed to have some mystical importance. You looked at an empty box and saw nothing but its possibilities. It is this type of playfulness that you must reconnect with. Take the seriousness out of life and have more fun with it. Let go of your ego’s need to be DOING something. Release yourself from the DOING of things and learn to connect with the BEING of things. Do your laundry in a deliberate way or feel the tiny movements in your arms as you drive. This is the being of an action. It is the playful acceptance of a task. Return to this sense of wonder and magic and release your need for seriousness. Life was never serious, that was a lie your parents told you. You came into this world screaming and naked, why so serious?

The key to changing a seemingly ordinary existence into a fulfilled and magical one is a shift in how you approach the world. If you learn to approach your tasks with acceptance and fun, you will create magic. If you learn to approach your desires with dedication and step out of your own way, you will find that doors for change open for you where you never expected. You will find help where you never dreamed it could appear.

The universe will begin to work with you, just as soon as you begin to work for yourself.

Now that you have identified whether or not your life is in major need of a change, you can begin to take the necessary steps. On this path of change, however, you cannot forget the skills that brought you to this realization. You must be ever-vigilant of your own thoughts and destructive patterns. Catch yourself when you begin to spiral into thoughts of negativity, break the pattern before it becomes too much to control, and continue to be honest with yourself. The good news is that half the battle is won. You have decided that a change is needed and that you deserve to make it. That is a big decision! You’ve had the courage to say that you have been wasting the precious time you’ve been given on something that doesn’t suite you. You’ve decided that you will no longer do that. It sounds so simple and yet takes so much dedication. The bad news is that only half the battle is won. You will spend the rest of you life fighting the other half, for the other half IS life.

I don’t want you to make the mistake of thinking that once you make these changes your life will start coming up roses. It doesn’t work that way. There will always be new things to try and those new things will cause uncertainty and sometimes fear. You will try and fail and you will spend countless hours wondering how to do it better next time. Many people call this state of being, unhappiness. Its real name is LIFE. That trepidation you feel when trying something new, that is life. That failure you experience when attempting to succeed? Life. The excitement of success? LIFE. Those emotions are life. Not one or two of them. All of them.

It is when we stop finding things to be excited about that we become depressed and dissatisfied.

Embrace the joy of life in all its wonderful, happy, annoying and downright crappy ways. Learn to see the perfection of it all, for it is all perfect. Learn to internalize the saying “all is as it should be” and you will find that while life may not always come up roses, you will certainly enjoy its not-so-rosy moments more.

Finding You Calling

I do not believe in a life’s purpose. I find the whole notion to be far too simplistic and foolhardy on the part of a creator. Why give us all a purpose at which we could fail, or simply choose not to fulfill? Seems like a tricky proposition for the fate of the universe, wouldn’t you say? The idea of a life’s purpose is a relic from childhood Sunday schools where they taught that God had a special plan for all of us. I’m not saying we’re not all special or distinct, but I don’t think God was dealing out hands in the great card game of life.

All that said, dedicating your life to a purpose is different from a divinely ordained purpose. One was given by a mysterious creator who wanted you to figure it out before the time bomb of life ran out. The other is a personal passion that you have turned into a life’s work. Don’t worry about whether or not you are doing “God’s Work.” If it was so important, God would have been more straight forward about it in the first place. When you find something you wish to do that makes you happy and gives you an inner feeling of peace, you are doing God’s work.

Now you just have to find what you want to do . . . well crap. Not as easy as you were expecting, huh? For most of us, it isn’t. When we were kids it was all too easy to come up with thousands of things that we wanted to have, be and do. Now we struggle to come up with anything at all. Part of this difficulty comes from a fear of failure. Most of it, however, is simply a loss of imagination. When you were a child it was easier to stare out at the world and see it, not in it’s physical form, but in its unmanifested form. There’s a reason.

In EEG studies, Dr. Ervin Lazlo has found that children under the age of five stay in a constant state of alpha brainwaves. These are the same brainwaves that occur in adults when we meditate and connect with the universe. Children are in a constant state of connection and a constant state of imagination. They see the world not as it is, but as it could be. And that’s not some feel-good, Bobby Kennedy-esque slogan, I mean it literally. Children see the world in its unmanifested form! The reason adults feel as if they lose their imaginations as they get older is because of the shift in their brainwaves. As we grow up, our brains no longer work solely in an alpha state, but shift permanently into beta waves. It wasn’t that we fell out of practice or that the world took it away from us. It was a shift in consciousness, or away from consciousness, as we grew.

But the important question is, can we get our imaginations back again? The answer is undoubtedly yes, but it will take some time and effort to relearn what we forgot. I have devised a list, short but sweet, of ways to do just that:

1. Meditate - I have spent, and am still spending, a lot of time on the subject of meditation as I have yet to fully understand and utilize it. There have been times however, when my meditations have been wonderfully powerful tools. Learning to quiet the inner chatter of the mind and sit with rapt attention given to the Universe is invigorating. You come away from the experience witnessing brighter colors and heightened awareness. What also follows is a period of greater creativity. I personally find that my writing comes with limitless ease when I can relax my mind into this state.

Meditation is a means of stepping out of your own way and returning your brain naturally to its child-like state of alpha waves. It moves you from the world of manifested reality into the world of pure potential. It moves you, in essence, from the here and there into the everywhere. You connect into the Zero Point Field of possibility.

I wish I could tell you the best way to meditate, but I have yet to find it for myself. There are, however, no shortages of books and Internet articles that would be glad to detail any number of methods. Pick one and go with it. If it doesn’t do anything for you, try something new. Personally I enjoy sitting comfortably, closing my eyes and actively listening to the silence around me. When you actively listen, your mind cannot interject thoughts or judgments, it’s too busy listening to the unmanifested silence. There is power in that silence.

2. Seek To See Everything Differently - Every day, look around you and start to find ways in which the world could be other than it is. Right now, I’m sitting at my desk look over my computer at the ?Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban? poster I brought back from London. Before I started this article, I took a moment to envision how it could be otherwise. Harry could grow horns, Hermione a mustache. I imagined the poster as painted by Dali. It was great fun and it only took a few seconds.

If you can make a habit of this sort of playful thinking in your free moments, it will become like weight training for your imagination; the more you use it, the stronger it will become. Don’t bog yourself down with trying to imagine your life getting better, or visualizing piles of money. That will come later, for now just have fun making the world a strange and wonderful place. No one has to know what you’re doing, just have a good time and see what you can come up with. You will probably surprise yourself with the level of clarity and creativity you will achieve.

3. Suspend Your Disbelief ? It was Samuel Taylor Coleridge who described poetic faith as ?that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment? and I couldn’t put it better. The world has grown more and more cynical with the passing years and that has stunted our collective imagination. We no longer look around at our world and wonder what impossibilities we might make possible. Just think if man had accepted that we could never fly! Or that the atom was the smallest thing! Disbelief is like a virus that can infect you slowly but surely. Squash it now and reconnect with your childish side.

Next time someone tells you their idea, take a moment and suspend your disbelief even for the briefest of moments. Regardless of whether or not it changes your opinion of the situation, wonder what life would be like it their idea would work. Imagine all of the ways in which it could succeed and then make you judgment on its viability. The idea might indeed be ludicrous, but the seconds that you have taken to imagine it differently will change you drastically.

Once you can bring your imagination back to the forefront of your mind, you’ll have no trouble finding your passion. It will seem so clear, it will be ridiculous that you hadn’t thought of it earlier. This may take some time, so be prepared. Let yourself feel easy and free, let your passion flow to you in its own perfect time. I know that this is easier said than done, but no one said living your life on purpose was easy. It will come only when you relinquish your need for it.

Letting It Be

Now that you know what you wish to pursue, at least what you want to pursue right now, let it happen. This is by far the hardest thing you will ever do, but it will seem so easy once you’ve done it. If your goal and passion is to become an oil painter, you must let yourself paint not for the fame or the glory of it, but for the joy of painting. Let your talents flow from you with nothing else in mind but to give them perfect form to give them away to others.

It is when we become attached to the outcome of our works that we find them to be ineffective. When your mind gets bogged down in the ideas of money and success and fame while you’re trying to create something beautiful, this cannot help but taint it. When you focus on the outcome of your actions, you live in the future and seek something better than you already have. You struggle for something you feel you need, which demonstrates a lack. This only brings you more things to struggle over and more things to lack. Remember, that which you think about expands. If you keep your mind focused upon the joy of creation and sheer simplicity of your work, you avoid these thoughts of need and lack. When you accept your now as it is, see it as absolutely perfect and want nothing more from it, you will suddenly being to receive more.

To being to work from this mindset, you must first ask the question, “what good may I do with this project?” If it is a painting, imagine who you are painting it for and the point of painting it for them. What do you wish to give to them? This is important because it is in the giving that you will see your creation come to life. For me, my creation is this website. I offer up these writings because I enjoy writing them and I feel that I might be able to help those who feel lost or trapped in their own lives. When you stop your resistance to your life as it is and your fears as they are, you open up the door for genuine miracle making.

Embrace the passion that you have found as an act of selfless creation and begin to ask nothing of your work but simply to flow through you with ease and joy. Beyond that, let it go where it will. What you give will always come back to you in greater numbers than you empowered it with.

A Life on Purpose

Your life doesn’t have to be lived by the rules of some unseen fate. You have the choice to live your life any way you feel. If you want to deny your passions or refuse to seek them out, there is nothing wrong with that. Your life will continue on the way it is now. There will always be good times, they will never leave you. You will always have enough to get by and you may never feel you lack for anything. But if you are one of Us, who cannot conceive of an ordinary life, then I encourage you to follow me down the path of passionate creation and unabashed giving. It is not always an easy road and it is not always a pleasant road, but you will find that you can create real magic in your life by tapping into the power of your pure potential and living it every day to its fullest.