If you’re like me you’ve probably found everybody has an opinion on everything that has nothing to do with them. It never ceases to amaze me how many of us live our lives dictated or at the very least influenced by the way other people perceive us. Here’s the problem as I see it.

Well meaning people have an opinion as to how you should live your life. The problem is they don’t know who you really are. All they can see is their own perception of who you are. Their perception of who you are who you really are is probablyquite different from who you really are. As a matter of fact I would suggest that your opinion of who think you are and who you really is probably two different things. How can I say this? Because I thought I knew who I was and now I’m discovering that I’m not that person at all. As a matter of fact the more I discover I’m less of who I thought I was, the more I realize that there is no possible way anyone else could really truly understand who I am. Now that I have you totally confused…

I think the only thing we can strive for is to be totally authentic. Now I understand this is totally impossible. How can I say this? Because as I was thinking about what to write in that last sentence and then I started to think about what it was that I was writing. That moment of pause while I thought about what I was saying and how it would be perceived by you the reader was a gap between who I am when I am just being and to I perceive myself to be. So how can we be totally authentic?

I believe that authenticity is very closely linked to congruence. To be congruent is to line up your behavior with your values. When we start acting in harmony with what our highest held values are we become more congruent. The more congruent we are the less out of alignment with ourselves we are. As the gap  between what we value the most and how we act narrows, our authenticity has a place to shine. So how do we get to that place?

The first thing is by not listening to all of the influences around us. I don’t mean to totally disregard the impact that your actions and words are having upon others but rather to operate from a place of internal strength. We as responsible human beings have an obligation to be cognizant of the impact that our words and actions have on others. If we did not we would be living a selfish life with disregard to everyone and everything around us. Other people’s opinions are valid and their feelings are important… just a lot less important than your feelings and your opinions. What we do need to understand is that others will not always understand what our motivations are. They won’t understand where were coming from or what we’re trying to express.

Ultimately we are not going to be of much use to anyone unless we become the type of people we are capable of becoming. We will never become this type of person until we do the introspective work of realizing what matters most to us and then bringing our lives in harmony with this.

I would suggest that the world is going to become a much better place when more people act more like themselves and less like others. The more real genuine authentic people we have walking around this planet the better off we will all be. Can you imagine a place where everyone was exactly who they seem to be? Although this is not likely to happen on a global scale the only thing I can promise is that for the rest of my life I will strive to be more and more like me. Really, who else could be better at that than me?

A question more of a should be asking ourselves is who else could be better at being me than me. The world needs to see our gifts and talents and abilities. Throw away all of the fear and anguish and concern over what other people think. This is like a whole bunch of paint and varnish on a beautiful piece of antique wood. You are a special gift from God to the world. Become everything that you can be so that he will know that you have cherished gift of life that he gave you.

I worked 14 minutes and made $6000/hour.

Sometimes it’s a matter of just being in the right place at the right time. I would suggest however that even if you are in the right place at the right time if you don’t take the right actions it really doesn’t matter. Our story today starts with an e-mail I got last night.

www.AllowWealth.com

As I was reviewing all of the marketing messages that came through my e-mail last night, one of them caught my eye. It was by the same guys who put together traffic geyser. Traffic geyser is a video syndication site that charges users a monthly fee. Once you upload a video of their day will automatically upload it to many of the video hosting sites out there. In effect is that your video gets a lot more exposure and I found that the site is quite useful. Because the site had credibility in my eyes I decided to watch a promo video that they put out. The video is here: http://bit.ly/caoCYp.

The video itself is a work of art. Entertaining, engaging and very educational. The thing that really got me though was the topic of discussion. It was all about the convergence of online and off-line, but I digress.

After watching the video I signed up to get more information and sure enough an e-mail lands in my inbox today. The e-mail pretty much stated that the promoter of the product was going to do a seven hour long live stream on the ins and outs of the product. I decided I’d go check it out.

When I get the site and see a video running under a couple of guys there explaining all about the product and how amazing it is. Underneath the video there was a chat session with over 1200 people. These people were doing everything from networking to asking questions about the product to just plain old chatting. All of a sudden it dawned on me… most of these people are here because they’re interested in purchasing this product. So how can I capitalize on this captive audience? Here’s what I did just before I got my IP address banned.

I decided that if these people were going to buy this product they may as well buy it from someone who deserves the money (you can guess who that is:). So I promptly went to the order page and signed up as an affiliate. Turns out this product is selling for $3000 and the affiliate commission is half of that amount. After my account was all set up I returned to the chat and started offering people a $700 discount on the software. Immediately I had five or six people respond. Here’s why they reached out.

I couldn’t put an e-mail address or website address because these were automatically blocked. The next best thing I thought is I could put my phone number on there. Sure enough there are had not found a way to block phone numbers just yet. As soon as I listed my phone number my phone started ringing off the hook. I only had time to take name number and e-mail addresses from these people. Then I got banned.

In a sometimes it’s not a bad idea to get banned. You never know where the line is unless you’re willing to push it. Granted sometimes I have push it too far but today it worked out quite well because as soon as I got banned I had time to call these people back. As of the writing of this blog , two of them have purchased the product. Once I issued them the discount my net profit for today in that 15 to 20 minute of time put $1597 into my pocket.

The moral of the story: Do what you need to do to be prepared. Be in the right place at the right time and sometimes pushing the limits is profitable.

P.S. For those of you who would like to enjoy a discount I would like to line my pockets further you can go to www.allowwealth.com:0

An insane bird and listening to the collective consciousness

You know we all have weird things in our life. I have a bird. It is a weird bird. My family actually thinks it is literally insane. As a result of its rather loud squawking , I’m not sure you’ll be able to get through the video. At the very least it will test your ability to pay attention:) and if you manage to get through it there is something for you at the end.

 I started this thought process about six months ago and it is amazing how things have accelerated since then. I was sent a link to a video by the same guys who put together traffic geyser. (http://bit.ly/caoCYp) It was a video all about Main Street marketing (interpretation: bringing Internet marketing to the real world of small to medium-size business).

I find it absolutely fascinating that as I start to think of these things independently there is a whole other group of high-end marketers that have been working on it simultaneously. It were minds me of Napoleon Hill’s laws of success book where he talks about a collective consciousness that travels through the ether. Mr. Hill goes on to talk about how when your mind is vibrating at the same frequency as others in this collective consciousness you can literally count in and listen in on their conversations.

It almost feels like that’s what’s been happening lately to me. Before you go off and call me a psychologist to consult with the election in on some of the thoughts I’ve come up with. Hopefully they will be documented here are before they show up in the real world just so that I can prove that I had the idea first. (I know I can be awfully darn selfish at times:)

Here are the highlights of where we are right now in our mission to converge the online with the off-line.

Feet on the Street

A real world direct sales organization that gets small and medium-sized businesses to join a free social networking site.

Real world seminars

Seminars that will teach business owners how to capitalize on the opportunities the Internet offers. Subjects covered will include social networking, PPC, SEO, online advertising etc.

Iphone app

A geo targeting software that enable people who want something to connect with those who have it. Each person puts in their own data and the app matches up people who want stuff with people who have that stuff to offer. Full privacy setting slider that allows the individual to control how much info others see.

Lead generation

Every business needs more leads. We will be creating these leads for businesses for free to illustrate the value of being online.

Honestly there’s a lot more to share but if I told y’all now you’d have no reason to come back:)

The value of Converging On and Off line

The journey

I’ve been on a journey for the past few months trying to figure out what I want to invest the second half of my life doing. I know that every time I’m on the Internet I think about all the possibilities and how underutilized this incredible resource is. As I’m reading through the book “Lynchpin” can by Seth Godin and began to realize more and more that success in life is all about adding value to others and becoming indispensable. Given my background in network marketing, I’ve realized that success in that business is all about making connections and adding values to those connections. I revamped my objective to as much value to his many people as possible. Although I had no idea what this looked like I didn’t know that  whatever tools, systems and applications that would assist me to accomplish this would be of primary importance.  

The vision

It never ceases to amaze me that when my vision becomes clear, all of the people, resources and anything else I need seems to magically appear.  I think this all began when I read the book by Ray Kurzweil entitled “The Singularity”. The main points I derived from that book was that as time progresses technology will merely be an invisible expansion of human intelligence that will multiply our consciousness exponentially. The idea of convergence between humans (off-line) and technology (online) was very appealing to me. This got me to thinking about Internet and Network Marketing

MLM and belly-belly

It seems to me that Network Marketers and Internet Marketers have two quite different and distinct philosophies. The traditional network marketers believe that you must reach out and talk to every single individual in a belly-to-belly interaction. This is absolutely critical because relationships is the glue that keeps a network marketing organization together. This face-to-face time is something that engenders trust and helps others come to know and like you. This is a very difficult thing to accomplish online.

IM going through the numbers

On the other hand Internet marketers believe in going through the numbers as quickly as possible. The technologies and systems available on the Internet really enabled people to go through a lot more prospects in much shorter periods of time. It also allows for automated follow-up and prequalification which can result in finding a much higher quality prospect with much less effort . This allows Internet marketers to identify the type of people they are looking for much more quickly and build bigger organizations faster.

Add value

My reasoning was if you can use the Internet to go through as many people as possible and use online systems to follow-up with them and then use real-world network marketing techniques to reach out and build relationships with those people you can have the best of both worlds. As I started to read books like Go Givers Sell M will  by Bob Burg I started to realize that no matter what technique you use it’s all about adding value to others. So the question now becomes, “how do I use the incredible prequalification and follow-up abilities of the Internet and the intimate relationship building techniques of networkers to come up with the best value added proposition”. This is what got me on the track of converging the online and off-line worlds.

Convergence

 As I spent more and more time considering what that looked like, I started to realize that what I was after was not really a convergence of Internet and Network Marketing at all.  What I was really looking for was a convergence of the online and off-line worlds. Understanding that value is added when you put someone who needs something together with someone else who can offer it, it was an epiphany for me. I started to think in terms of hardware and software.

The hard link

What is the single most ubiquitous piece of hardware on planet earth today that every individual carries around with them on a daily basis? Of course it is in the smart phone. I started to think that if this is a piece of hardware that everyone is walking around with every day and the software that connects these pieces of hardware to each other is the Internet that developing an application that connected people which also ran on that platform would be a key component.

Virtually a geo-future

I envision millions of people with millions of smart phones connecting real people with real people using the Internet as the transmission lines. Of course this will never be a substitute for meeting face to face so there must also be a geo-specific component to this. And that is what led me to my five-hour coffee shop appointment last night. But that is a story for another time.

I intend to contruct a “magic bullet” that provides real, tangible long-term benefits to those that are determined to succeed in business.

Who you really are becomes evident when you stop trying to prove it.

IMHO, The only real way to protect your Network Marketing business…http://ping.fm/AjZ6i

Pondering the awesomeness of God’s creation

And we think we're a big deal

How to protect your MLM business

A picture my wife had painted for me

My Lisa decided to immortalize my dream to create the show to end all shows in a painting.