The Steve Pavlina Method

Lean into action in spite of your doubts. It’s unreasonable to expect perfect clarity in advance. A fuzzy idea is good enough. Ideas don’t normally become crystal clear when you’re standing still and pondering them. In fact, they rarely become crystal clear even after you’ve implemented them. If you’re waiting for clarity before you get moving into action, you’re being very silly. That kind of clarity isn’t going to come, and even if it did, it may be wrong anyway. http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2012/08/are-you-playing-the-waiting-game/

If you accept a job, a relationship, or a lifestyle that you merely tolerate — but don’t appreciate — you’re putting other concerns ahead of your own happiness. Social conditioning may have convinced you that sacrificing your happiness to maintain a certain bank balance, to send timely payments to corporations to which you’re indebted, or to pay for someone else’s needs and expenses is the proper way to live. Perhaps your parents played a role in this conditioning as well, teaching you the importance of being responsible and holding down stable employment. If you do these things well, then according to this conditioning, you are successful. You’re doing what’s expected of you, and no one could fault you for that. But sooner or later you’ll come to realize that successfully paying the bills and satisfying other people’s needs, while depriving yourself of a happy life you’re truly passionate about, is no success at all. In fact, it is complete and utter failure.

Branding, brand management, and brand strategy are rooted in fear and are completely unnecessary. This is true whether we’re talking about business, product, organizational, or personal branding. The primary aim of branding is control. But people don’t generally like to be controlled. So branding is largely done at the subconscious level; if it were done at a conscious level, people would reject it. Brand management attempts to implant subconscious associations that bypass conscious filters. But when people think about brand associations more consciously, they realize just how utterly worthless most brands are.

Recently I attended the Winnipeg Fringe Festival, which is a festival of theatrical shows. This one included 30 venues with rotating shows running 12 hours per day. I managed to see 25 plays in 5 days, including musicals, comedies, murder mysteries, clown shows, acrobatics, performance poetry, and more. I was very impressed with the talent of the various performers, who obviously worked hard to hone their skills.

From low to high, the levels of consciousness are: shame, guilt, apathy, grief, fear, desire, anger, pride, courage, neutrality, willingness, acceptance, reason, love, joy, peace, enlightenment. While we can pop in and out of different levels at various times, usually there’s a predominant “normal” state for us. If you’re reading this blog, chances are you’re at least at the level of courage because if you were at a lower level, you’d likely have no conscious interest in personal growth.   http://www.entheos.com/philosophersnotes/samples?c=3565 (^^ If you're interested, check out the free ^^^ affiliate samples from PhilosophersNotes)

Limiting beliefs are usually subconscious. They operate below the level of awareness most of the time. You’ll typically notice them by their side effects first, often when setting ambitious goals and trying to pursue them. Link to get rid of one limiting belief (recommended by Steve): http://recreateyourlife.com/free/

  If someone is late about 70% of the time, and you expect them to be on time, that’s a rather foolish prediction, isn’t it? They may be on time, but they probably won’t be. What many people will do is get angry with the friend who’s frequently late. Does this usually change that person’s behavior? Perhaps sometimes, but it usually has little or no effect. The person will most likely continue being late at roughly the same frequency. Wanting a person to change doesn’t change their behavior. It’s more likely to cement the behavior in place since people tend to resist others’ demands of them. Instead of resisting your predictions, a more sensible approach is to accept them. Accept that your friend will probably continue to be late most of the time. [keep reading] Get more personal growth audio from PhilosophersNotes: for more big ideas, check out the three free samples from PhilosophersNotes. ( free ^^^ affiliate samples)  

From Steve's original article, published on 7/3/12. The main contribution I want to make here is to encourage you to think carefully about the long-term impact of your investments on the world as a whole. You’ll find it much easier to invest in alignment with your values since you won’t be fighting a part of yourself (i.e. less self-sabotage). The good news is that there’s still plenty of money to be made from intelligent investments that create positive ripples for others. There’s no need to settle for harmful investments that violate your values and leave you feeling conflicted and incongruent. http://www.youtube.com/embed/jRwnx9wLEAE Americans' long-term savings in stocks, bonds, mutual funds, pension funds, and life insurance funds total about $30 trillion. But not even 1 percent of these savings touch local small business-even though roughly half the jobs and the output in the private economy come from them. So, how can people increasingly concerned with the poor returns from Wall Street and the devastating impact of global companies on their communities invest in Main Street? In Local Dollars, Local Sense, local economy pioneer Michael Shuman shows investors, including the nearly 99% who are unaccredited, how to put their money into building local businesses and resilient regional economies-and profit in the process. A revolutionary toolbox for social change, written with compelling personal stories, the book delivers the most thorough overview available of local investment options, explains the obstacles, and profiles investors who have paved the way. Shuman demystifies the growing realm of local investment choices-from institutional lending to investment clubs and networks, local investment funds, community ownership, direct public offerings, local stock exchanges, crowdfunding, and more. He also guides readers through the lucrative opportunities to invest locally in their homes, energy efficiency, and themselves. A rich resource for both investors and the entrepreneurs they want to support, Local Dollars, Local Sense eloquently shows how to truly protect your financial future--and your community's.

Recent data from 1189 publishers shows that ebook sales have overtaken hardcover book sales and will overtake paperback books soon. In comparing the same sales period for 2011 vs. 2012, hardcover sales increased by 2.7% while ebook sales increased by 28.1%. It’s difficult for the supply of quality ebook offerings to keep up with this kind of growth rate, so ebook sellers are likely to see stronger than normal demand for their existing ebooks for quite a while. Paperback books are still #1 in terms of sales, but this lead isn’t expected to last much longer. What’s driving this rapid growth in ebook sales? Tablet computers and ebook reading devices like the iPad and Kindle. Most of these tablet devices are geared for consuming content rather than for creating content. This is creating a big surge in demand for apps, games, and of course ebooks. Note: try not to get so worked about about whether or not your first income stream is a homerun vs. a flop. Passive income is a skill to develop for the long run. The only way to really know how well a given idea works is to test it. Read more: > Why Ebooks Are Such a Golden Opportunity on StevePavlina.com > Ebook Sales Surpass Hardcover for First Time in U.S. on Mashable.com > PDF download of "How I Created Six Figure Income" from Vic Johnson Also, check out the Kindle Direct Publishing website. If you're going to publish on Kindle, Amazon provides a ton of information and tools to help you out. And they're free - personally, I wouldn't start spending money on programs unless I had done some investigation first ;)  

If you already have a website that provides some decent value for free, I encourage you to at least try putting up a donations link and see what happens. If at least a few people want to pay you back in some small way, why not make it easy for them? Donations help, but I wouldn’t suggest basing your entire income strategy around donations unless you’re creating a non-profit enterprise and you have someone in charge of fundraising, or if you have a truly massive audience like Wikipedia. For a normal web business, donations can provide a nice little income stream, but I wouldn’t count on them to cover all of your expenses. Original article published by Steve Pavlina on 6/22/12.

Fame is attention. With enough attention you can generate passive income. Monetizing fame is actually pretty easy. Consider the Oprah effect. When Oprah recommends a book, it sells like crazy. If she wanted to, she could leverage her fame to promote products, businesses, and more in exchange for a cut of the sales. Lots of companies would be happy to  [... keep reading on StevePavlina.com]

I've found that combining emphasis on creativity along with market research to be a good focus. If you're interested in strengthening your creativity muscles, you could check out Twyla Tharp's "The Creative Habit." I finished reading the book this past spring, and now I've got the PhilosophersNotes summary to refresh and remind myself of the key ideas. Here's a direct link to the PDF if you want to download the summary. With that in mind, here's a super simple rundown on market research from Steve's original article (which you can read on his blog here): I’m not really too particular about how I conduct market research. There are so many variables that you can get bogged down in analysis paralysis if you overdo it. I take a pretty light-weight approach to it. Mainly I look for two things: What are people already buying? Where are there gaps with relatively high demand and low supply that I could potentially serve? Sometimes it’s hard to answer #1 directly because you probably don’t have access to other people’s sales figures. But you can often use other public data to make some educated guesses. I didn’t know other game developers’ sales figures, but I could go to download sites and see how many downloads each demo had and how many games there were in each category. I could then calculate average downloads for each game in a a particular category. If I saw that one category had triple the per game downloads of another category, well… it wasn’t hard to surmise that one genre might make me triple the sales of another genre.

Virtual Real Estate

Passive Income From Real Estate

Passive Value