Site Build-It’s special buy one get one free holiday promotion is back again for a short time, starting today. This the best deal they offer, and they only do it once each year around Xmas time. This offer is good until midnight on December 25th, 2011.So if you’re thinking about starting an online business, now’s the time to get started.

What Is SBI?

SBI is a service for people who want to start their own Internet business. They provide the hosting, tools, and education to help you create a real business that generates income for you.

SBI is a very popular service. I’ve been recommending them for years, and thousands of people have signed up as a result of my recommendation alone.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I don’t personally use SBI. I’m not the right type of customer for it. But if I wanted to start my own online business today and I didn’t already have 16 years of experience, I’d use SBI.

Why? SBI would help me get to the income-generating phase a lot faster. I could learn in several weeks what might otherwise take me years to figure out on my own by hunting for resources all over the place instead of having everything I need in one central location, organizing in a step-by-step process.

SBI offers a massive amount of educational resources, support, and tools to help people learn and implement the things I had to learn the hard way.

Years ago when people would ask me how to make money online, I tried to tell them how to do it the way I was doing it. I was very specific with the details too. But pretty much everyone screwed it up when they tried to implement it. They made lots of mistakes that seemed really dumb to me, but couldn’t even see it. I didn’t realize how much of my knowledge in this area is subconscious and automatic. I don’t have to think about it, but someone who’s just starting out really does have to learn a great deal more than I can teach them.

The tricky thing about online business is that it’s very sensitive to mistakes. You have to do a lot of things right. If you screw up  just one of a dozen critical pieces — and virtually everyone does — you can doom yourself to failure. Then no matter how hard you work thereafter, you cripple your traffic and cripple your income.

Lots of bloggers, for instance, write to me with messages like, “I’ve been working on my blog for 9 months now, and I still have very little traffic. What am I doing wrong?” If I go to their sites, it takes me maybe 30 seconds to spot several mistakes they’ve made. If they just used SBI instead of trying to muddle through on their own, they wouldn’t have made those mistakes in the first place, and they’d have traffic and income instead of a ghost town.

An example of a mistake that I can share is ad placement. Some bloggers try to make money with ads on their sites, especially Adsense, but they use ad layouts that aren’t going to be effective. Ads are really sensitive to how you arrange them. One layout can easily earn 10x as much as another. I say this from experience since I used to earn $9-10K per month just from Google Adsense (as I shared in this article).

The biggest mistakes aren’t usually what a blogger does though. It’s what they don’t do that kills them. I look at their sites and see some really important stuff missing. They install WordPress and few plugins and figure they’re good to go. Unfortunately that isn’t enough. WordPress will help you build a nice website, but it won’t build you a business.

If you just want a website, don’t use SBI. That would be overkill. Use it if you want an online business that generates income for you. Making a website is just the first 20%, maybe less. That part is fairly easy relative to building traffic and having your site earn significant income. It’s the difference between learning how to drive and being a race car driver.

Making a website isn’t a competitive endeavor. No one will get in your way if that’s what all want to do. But if you want to make it a real business, now you’re competing with others who are trying to do the same thing in your field, so you’d better know what you’re doing if you want a shot at the income pool.

It’s not enough to just put some content out there and sprinkle in some affiliate links for good measure. If you want to generate income, you have a lot more learning and skill-building ahead of you.

My decision to recommend SBI was born of my frustrations watching various friends try to jump into online business and failing miserably at it. Now I just refer everyone to SBI. SBI gets them up to speed and helps them achieve their goals, and SBI does a better job of it than I would.

SBI helps you break the work down into small chunks, and then it helps you complete the necessary steps one by one. But it’s still a good bit of work.

If you’re lazy and you know you won’t follow through, don’t bother. If you’re willing to put in some effort and seriously make this happen, then SBI is a good choice.

Many people who thrive with SBI do so because they’re fed up with the alternatives. They’re sick of working for someone else and just scraping by financially.

Others do it because they want a more independent lifestyle.

I got on this path as a combination of both. Having a boss doesn’t appeal to me, and I want a flexible lifestyle where I can work when I want, where I want, and how I want. I’m not lazy, but I value my freedom to choose how I spend my time.

I also like earning money from my overall contribution, not from how many hours I sit at my desk.

I worked maybe a couple hours yesterday, doing what I enjoyed, and my website earned a few thousand dollars. I now earn more in a day than I used to earn in a whole season when I had a job, and I can’t be fired or laid off.

About the SBI 2-for-1 Special

The 2-for-1 special is an extra bonus where you can get a second SBI account for a friend or relative (or yourself) for free. It’s a nice deal for couples, for a parent and child, or for two friends, since the two of you can build your own online businesses together and help hold each other accountable.

Most SBIers that I know use the 2-for-1 special to build two sites for themselves though. Every site monetizes differently, so you may find that one site brings in $500 per month while a second site is earning $2000 per month after an equivalent amount of time spent on each. Then you may want to put more effort in the more successful site to build it even higher.

The 2-for-1 is also a nice deal if you can’t decide between two different ideas. Go ahead and develop both, and see how each idea performs.

WordPress or SBI?

If you’re considering using WordPress to build your own online business, you can indeed do that. I used WordPress, and it meets my needs just fine. But I don’t recommend this approach for most people.

Before I started this blog, which became very successful (I hit yet another all-time traffic record last month), I’d already been actively generating income online for nearly a decade. Most of the income I’ve earned in my life has come via my online businesses.

I’m also a skilled programmer. I’m comfortable working with Internet technology and writing my own custom code.

So I’m not in the same boat as most people when it comes to running an Internet business. My choice to use WordPress was dictated by my personal skills and experience.

If you’re in a situation like mine, and you’re already making tens of thousands of dollars per year online without much difficulty, then go ahead and use WordPress or something similar for your new ventures. It’s fair to say you don’t need SBI.

If you have outstanding technical skills and you’re willing to learn the business side, that’s a borderline call. For you I’d still recommend using SBI to start. Use it to learn the business and marketing side until you start making real money with your sites… till you’re bringing in about $5K per month or so. Then think about using what you’ve learned with SBI to switch to WordPress or something similar. You could stay with SBI still, but you may no longer need it at that point.

Most programmers I know can build their own websites just fine, but they suck at building traffic and making money. They create sites that virtually no one visits. SBI is a good choice to help them learn the business side too.

I started as a programmer, and I assumed that learning to run an online business would be no big deal. I was wrong. It’s a whole different skill set, and it took me years to develop those skills on my own, even with tons of business-related reading, audiobooks, seminars, training, etc.

Don’t underestimate the scope of this challenge. It’s better to bite the bullet and learn it the right way, or you’ll have to the privilege of watching people with inferior technical skills run circles around you as they earn income from simple ideas. Don’t just be technically savvy — learn some business savvy too.

If you’ve never made serious money online and you’re not a programmer… or if you’ve been trying and you’re still struggling… don’t keep banging your head against the wall hoping for things to improve. Use SBI and take advantage of their system and resources, which has been refined over many years and is proven effective. That one’s a no-brainer. You’ll reach your goals faster with it than you will without it.

For more help deciding between WordPress and SBI, see this WordPress vs. SBI comparison page. It may look fairly short at first… until you notice the “Click here to show and read the rest of this page” link. It’s disgustingly detailed.

Getting Started

If SBI sounds interesting to you, a good place to start is to watch their video tour. It’s pretty basic, but it will give you an idea of how the service works.

Then you may want to read my full review.

After that you may want to poke around the SBI website.

And finally I recommend you read my Site Build It! Walkthrough.

If you have any questions about SBI, please submit them via their questions form. Your questions will be answered by an actual SBI customer.

Just remember that the holiday two-for-one bonus offer is expires at midnight on December 25th, so you have about 2 weeks to sign up.

Your Lifestyle Is Your Choice

Last year around this time, I wrote a similar post to let people know about the SBI holiday promo since SBI does this once a year. If you saw that post and decided not to act on it, did you make the right call?

If you took action and signed up for SBI back then and followed through on it, then today you’d own a profitable income-generating website. There’s no way to know how much it would be earning since that depends on many factors, but let’s say it would be earning about $2K per month by now, which I think is pretty reasonable based on what I’ve seen other SBIers do.

Do you choose a path that was better than this? If you had it to do all over again, would you make the same call, knowing what you now know?

We can never really know the outcomes of the paths we didn’t choose. We only get to see the outcomes of the paths we actually took. But if you suspect you chose a less than optimal path last year, then don’t make the same mistake this year. Try something different, and see where it leads.

I haven’t had a job since 1992, and I really don’t miss it. It wasn’t easy at first, but I’m glad I pulled the trigger and chose this path.

Some Internet marketers will tell you that building your own online business is really easy. They’re lying to you. It’s relatively easy to maintain it, but it’s not so easy to figure it out the first time. There really is a lot to learn.

If you’re really lazy and can’t get yourself to follow through on anything worthwhile, SBI isn’t going to baby you. But if you have a bit more self-discipline than the average person, and you feel motivated to create a more flexible and interesting lifestyle for yourself, then creating your own Internet business is an excellent choice these days.

With an online business, you can maintain it from anywhere. No one cares what hours you work. You can take vacations and travel when you want to. You can work from home or from a Starbucks or from the beach. And once you learn how to create some income online, it’s not as tough to maintain it and increase it. SBI businesses in particular often scale up very nicely. More traffic means more income.

Most likely I’ll be making a similar post around this time in 2012. When you see that post, will you be one of the people who sat on the sidelines and wished you’d made a different choice today? Or will you be satisfied and fulfilled by the path you took?

If you want more help understanding what the SBI path might look like for you, I’d recommend reading the stories from people who did make that choice. There are many detailed SBI case studies. This is especially worthwhile if you want to get a better idea of the specific results people are getting with it.

Whatever you decide, it’s up to you to creating the lifestyle you desire. The world won’t just hand it to you. I’m quite enjoying the lifestyle I’ve created, and my online business is a big part of that, but it didn’t happen by itself.

Update: SBI has extended this promotion through January 3, 2012.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Of course it’s possible. Many people have done it before. But is it realistic for you? Well… that depends. The honest answer is: probably not. What it takes to succeed as an artist isn’t such a mystery these days. The real question is whether or not you’re willing to do what it takes to get there. If you’re like most people, you aren’t willing. So if you want to succeed as an artist, you must elevate your standards well beyond the level of those who are willing to give up.

Starving artists may be more common and cliché than financially successful artists, but as you’ll discover in this article, there are some very good reasons for that. For starters, artistic skill alone isn’t enough to guarantee financial success.

There are many challenges on the path to financially sustainable artistic nirvana, and all of them have solutions. Successful artists are willing to apply those solutions; unsuccessful artists typically aren’t.

Here are a number of guidelines for transitioning from creating art as a hobby into a financially lucrative profession:

Get Your Financial Beliefs in Order

Do you harbor any beliefs such as these?

• Great art and money don’t mix.
• It’s noble to be a starving artist.
• Artists who make tons of money are sell-outs.
• Money corrupts true creative expression.

If your thoughts have been infected by such limiting beliefs, even a little, consider how this will affect your efforts to earn serious income from your work. These beliefs are financially retarded. With such mental baggage, you’ll miss too many opportunities to generate income from your art. In fact, you probably won’t even notice them. These beliefs will cause you to behave stupidly.

Consider upgrading your beliefs to something along these lines:

• Money can help fuel creative expression.
• Creativity is free; paintbrushes aren’t.
• Great art is financially valuable; surely the artist deserves a fair share.
• Artists who make lots of money have good business sense.
• Great art deserves great financial support.
• Art is a creative endeavor, but it’s also a business.
• Fans are nice, but customers pay the bills.

It’s a lot easier to generate income from your art if you hold beliefs that support income generation instead of demonizing it. If you’re going to attach some kind of meaning to earning income from your art (an event which is largely meaningless from a cosmic perspective), then at least apply a meaning that will support you on your path instead of creating imaginary roadblocks.

Beliefs are infectious, so choose your friends carefully. If you regularly hang out with people who harbor negative beliefs about combining art and money, they’ll just drag you down. It’s fine to associate with them now and then, but be very careful about inviting them into your inner circle.

Seek Out People Who Are Already Succeeding

Art is a social field, and so is business. The business of art — any kind of art — is hugely social. Insiders have it way easier than outsiders, so aim to be an insider. Don’t even think about trying to go it alone.

Financially successful artists are generally happy to share their “secrets” of success, including how they make money from their work. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Make every effort to meet such people and hang out with them. Join clubs or trade associations, join forums, attend conferences, and find other ways to socialize with successful artists in your field. It’s not that difficult, but it does require that you make an effort. You’ll make some networking mistakes along the way, but eventually you’ll figure it out. Read through the extensive How to Network With Busy People series to get a better sense of how to do this.

I suggest that you identify a certain income goal — something modest — and target people who are earning close to that. If you’re making no money as an artist, it may be hard to relate to the advice of someone who’s earning $1M per year. You’ll have a better shot of understanding and applying the advice of someone who’s earning $30-50K per year. Then when you get to that level, meet with people who are earning $100K per year, and notice what they do differently. And keep stepping up from there.

If you always hang out with artists who are making the same or less money than you, I hope you like eating at Taco Bell.

When you meet successful artists, don’t do the fanboy/fangirl thing. It’s best not to even utter the word fan because it sounds too much like stalker, and it steers the conversation in the direction of putting the artist on a pedestal, which really isn’t going to help you. Aim to be friendly, interested, and respectfully curious, but assume equal standing as human beings. Artists are generally very comfortable discussing their work, so a great opener is to ask a specific question about their work. Feel free to pick their brains, but don’t bleed them dry.

Being passive ensures dismal results. Push yourself to go outside and meet people. Take some social risks. If you dork-out now and then, it’s not the end of the world. You’ll recover.

During my computer games business days, I was having coffee with my lawyer on a patio in Century City (a business district next to Beverly Hills). He suddenly turns and yells to a guy walking down the street, “Bill!” Turns out it was William Shatner, who was working with my lawyer on a book deal. Shatner approached us for a friendly conversation, and being a 20-something Trekkie, I dorked out — not too much but enough to feel self-conscious about it afterwards. I learned to be much less dorky around such people after that.

Successful artists in any field typically know each other. They may not get to spend a lot of time together, but they often meet in person as a consequence of moving in similar circles. If you want to become a successful artist, it’s wise to prepare yourself for this. The key is that it must eventually feel normal to you. If it seems like a big deal, you’ll push it away.

Networking with other pros in your field is good business. Most of the income I’ve earned from my creative work (writing, speaking, computer games, etc) has resulted from business deals that came through my network. Other people brought me those opportunities. This isn’t unusual. Money flows through people.

As an unknown artist in any field, it’s difficult to get much exposure for your work. But if you have many friends who will help get the word out, it’s no longer so difficult.

Networking gives you the chicken and the egg at the same time. You can receive income-generating ideas and opportunities as well as exposure, without needing one to get the other.

Create Art That People Want

Think of your favorite music group. Would you respect them more if they created music you didn’t like?

When you spend money on art, is it because the artist was super creative, or is it simply because you like what they created?

Most likely you aren’t spending too much money on creative work that you don’t like. When you pull out your wallet, it’s because you like the work — or at least you expect to like it.

This doesn’t mean that the artist created the work for you (or for people like you), but it does mean that if the artist wants to get paid, there needs to be some alignment between their creativity and what people are willing to pay for.

It’s absolutely fine to create art that no one else will appreciate. Do that now and then. Just don’t expect to pay the bills with such an approach.

If you want to generate income from your art, then pay attention to what people are buying in your field. What’s in demand?

You’ll likely find that you can just as easily create works that align with trending demand but which still give you plenty of room for self-expression. These constraints are not inherently in conflict. You can choose and instead of either-or.

This article, for instance, is one that I felt inspired to write, and I’m enjoying the process of creating it, but it isn’t merely a gratuitous personal journal entry. It’s an article that I expect will provide some value to certain people. It’s art, but it’s also socially purposeful.

Sometimes people will want you to express yourself in ways you aren’t willing to deliver. Feel free to say no. Sometimes you’ll want to express yourself in ways people don’t care about. Feel free to do that. But when you want to generate income from your work, focus on the area of overlap between what people want and how you enjoy expressing your creativity. Then you can enjoy your work and pay your bills too.

If you’re going to be stubborn about this, then be prepared to see much less talented artists whizzing past you financially.

You may not control the waves of public desire, but you can still surf them.

Publish or Perish

Creating art isn’t enough. To be a financially successful artist, you must get into the habit of publishing art.

Many amateur artists amass sizable collections of half-finished pieces. The pros often do this too, but the pros get into the habit of finishing and publishing their work.

I know from experience that if I create and leave something in a half finished state, and I go more than a few days without working on it, it’s dead. The inspiration is gone. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, it’s easier to start and finish a new piece than it is to rez and finish the old one. A half finished piece isn’t 50% done; it’s more like -50% done. To finish a half-done piece weeks later may take 150% of the effort of creating a new piece from scratch.

If I start writing a blog post, and I get it 60% finished, but I get interrupted and can’t get back to it for a week, I’ll virutally never finish it up and publish it. I’ll just delete it and move on. If it’s 90%+ done, or if I just need to give it an editing pass, then I’ll likely finish it, but if I can’t cross the finish line with ease, it’s a dead work that will never see the light of day.

I’ve learned how important it is to kill my unfinished work and let it be dead. I don’t save it or let it linger in my drafts folder. I put it out of its misery and kill it for good. Then when I look at my portfolio of creative work, I see 1000+ finished and published creative works: mostly articles but also computer games, speeches, workshops, a book, a poem, and some podcasts. I don’t think of unpublished works as being part of my portfolio. If I didn’t complete and publish them shortly after conception, they’re dead to me.

This may sound overly harsh, but what’s the alternative? Amass an ever-growing collection of partially finished pieces? How do you feel when you think about that monstrous pile of unfinished work? It’s draining, distracting, and demotivating, isn’t it? It’s clutter that weighs on you.

If you’re thinking about stuff you need to finish up from the past, then your creativity isn’t focused on the present. Creativity is limitless and abundant. There’s no need to tie it to past obligations. Thinking that there’s value to be extracted from partially finished work is a result of scarcity thinking. If there was major value in finishing those pieces, you’d have finished them long ago.

Chalk up the value of those partially finished pieces to the learning experience you got from them. If you wouldn’t get much growth from finishing them, let them die. Focus your attention on the sweet spot of artistry by creating works that provide value to others and provide growth experiences for you. Your creative energies must be focused on the present, which is the only place where you can create. Don’t allow your creativity to be drained by past regrets and obligations. The flow is here and now. The wave that passed you by is gone. Don’t go swimming after it. Just ride the next wave. And there’s always a next wave.

You could say that publishing is an unnatural process. A creative work is never really done — it’s abandoned. You can keep polishing and refining a piece indefinitely, but at some point you have to declare it done and move on. If I ever feel that I published an article too soon, I’ll give it an extra editing pass after it’s posted (that’s a nice thing about publishing online). Sometimes I over-polish a piece that probably didn’t warrant so much attention. It takes time to calibrate and get a feel for when a piece is ready to publish, and there’s no right or wrong solution per se. It’s mainly a matter of trial and error and experience.

When I begin a new creative work, it’s a race to the finish line to get it published. I need to express the ideas quickly and tune out distractions till the piece is done and released. Friends who’ve been around me when I’m designing a workshop, for instance, will know how single-minded I can be during such times. Even if I’m ahead of schedule, I can scarcely pay attention to anything but the workshop. My energy is focused on bringing everything to completion. I can pay attention to other things when the workshop is over.

I find it best to work on one major creative piece at a time. I try not to start something new until the previous piece is done. I can make some exceptions like writing a blog post in the midst of a bigger project like designing a workshop, but I want to avoid creating more loose ends. I wouldn’t want to design two workshops at the same time, for instance.

Visibility First, Then Income

If you want to become a successful artist, you’ll need to get your art into people’s hands (or eyes, ears, etc). If the art is hidden in your closet or buried on your hard drive, don’t expect it to generate much income.

I recommend that you focus on visibility first, and don’t worry so much about generating income at first. If you aren’t very visible, you probably won’t be able to earn more than a pittance anyway. But if you can gain visibility and sustain it for the long run, then it’s much easier to generate abundant income.

A good strategy for creating visibility is to give your work away for free. Spread it as widely as possible. Encourage people to share it with no restrictions. If you can manage it, favor media that encourages sharing without costing you anything — i.e. anything that can be put into digital form.

Show your work to anyone who might be interested in it. Give your art as much state time as you can. If you aren’t willing to do this, don’t expect your art leap onto the stage and market itself. Being timid about promoting your work will hurt you financially; don’t pretend it won’t.

If you give your work away for free or otherwise procure lots of stage time for it, and people don’t seem to appreciate it, consider the possibility that your work (1) isn’t very good, or (2) isn’t what people want. This happens to just about everyone. Everybody falls the first time. Keep refining your creative output until you strike something that people appreciate enough to share.

Once your visibility is high enough, then start charging for your work.

Commit to Excellence

Mediocre artists are broke artists.

Don’t settle for mediocre. Put in the hours and years it takes to become outstanding. If you want to become an overnight success, spend a decade building your skills first.

There’s little income to be made from most art forms except for those who commit to excellence. Such fields are simply too crowded and too competitive. The good news, however, is that most people in these fields are just dabblers. They aren’t serious about it. Rest assured they’ll give up within a year or two and go back to working at Starbucks, only to be replaced by people with even less experience. There’s a lot of churn at the bottom.

Consider the field of music, for instance. There are millions of wannabe musicians, but only a small percentage of them are committed to becoming truly outstanding. They’ll practice a little here and there, and they might dream of great success, but at the end of the day, they’d rather watch TV than invest an extra hour or two in practice. These people aren’t your competition. If you stick with your craft for 3+ years, you’ll be well beyond the majority of them, and they’ll never match your skill.

Persistence is your friend. With persistence you can easily outlast 99% of the people in your field. The longer you stick with your craft, the more the gains begin to pile up: a growing portfolio, a growing network of peers, and a growing fan base. As these aspects improve over time, it gets harder to fail, and it becomes easier to generate income. You have more work to leverage for income generation. You have a larger network to bring you opportunities. And you have more fans who could become customers.

If, however, you go around switching fields every year or two, you’ll have a hard time building a financially sustainable practice. If you’re unwilling to commit to long-term mastery, you’ll be denied access to its rewards. You can still switch fields if you really want to, but there’s a price for doing so.

It may be true that 99% of artists within a particular field aren’t making much money. But that’s largely because those 99% aren’t any good at it. The top 1% get paid because they’re the ones who put in those 10,000 hours to become world class.

Are you willing to commit yourself to joining that top 1%? Do you love your art so much that you’ll invest 10,000 hours into it? That’s about 5 years working full-time. If you aren’t willing to make that kind of commitment, well… Starbucks is hiring.

If 99% of artists in your field won’t become financially successful, then you’d better commit to bypassing that 99% if you wish to avoid their fate.

I realize this might sound like a very difficult challenge, but the truth is that it’s actually easier to make such a commitment in the long run. It only appears more difficult in the beginning. Think of it like this. The time is going to pass anyway. Someday that distant future will become your present reality. Now imagine that your future self is reflecting upon the decisions you made today, decisions that greatly influenced his/her results in life. Is that future you shaking his/her head in disgust or smiling in appreciation?

One reason I kicked off my 30-day trial of learning music is that I’ve been thinking about where I’d like to be at age 50 (I turned 40 earlier this year). I have the sense that my 50-year old self would really appreciate it he had some serious musical ability to enjoy during his 50s. He’s not too particular about which instrument(s), but he’d be disappointed if he had to enter his 50s with no musical skills to speak of. He’s glad I developed my writing and speaking skills to such an extent, and he can count on their continued development, but he’d be even happier if he could express himself through music as well.

I’m not at the point where I’m willing to commit a decade to learning music, but a 30-day trial is a good starter commitment. I’m enjoying it so far, and I’ll likely commit beyond that point, but for now an exploratory approach is best since I wouldn’t even know what kind of long-term commitment to make yet. Even as I conduct this 30-day trial, however, I’m approaching it with the mindset that I might be initiating a new thread of skill building that could last for decades. This long view sharpens my short-term decisions. I’m willing to embrace the awkward phase of being a newbie, since I know it’s a stepping stone to building new skills I can enjoy for years to come.

Get to Know Your Customers, and Serve Them

If you want to be financially successful in any field, not just art, then sales are very important. Without sales, there’s no income, and without income, it’s hard to sustain yourself as an artist. If you can maintain strong sales, then even if you screw up almost everything else, you’re still going to have a sustainable art practice. Strong sales are very forgiving of mistakes. Weak sales aren’t.

Fortunately, selling needn’t be pushy or manipulative. If you create work that aligns with what people want, then selling is largely a matter of letting people know that you have something that will please them. If, on the other hand, you have to do a lot of convincing to get people to open their wallets, then the problem is likely the art itself.

Earlier this year I went to a local art fair. I walked past a lot of art that didn’t resonate with me, but then I stumbled upon an artist from Arizona who had a collection I really liked. I have an affinity for Southwestern art, especially pieces depicting bears and eagles. This artist had some really unique copper pieces, and I bought one of them. It currently hangs above the fireplace in my living room. He did his part to help sell the piece — very softly — but it was mostly a “you had me at hello” situation. The main act of selling he did was to envision, design, and create a piece that someone like me would appreciate.

If you want to create art to sell, it’s wise to know why someone would actually buy it. If you haven’t a clue or if you assume you’ll figure out how to sell it later, best of luck with that.

Selling is often treated as a discipline unto itself, but for a serious artist, selling is an integral part of the creative process. Selling begins with the question, Who would most appreciate this? Ideally this question should be asked before you start a new creative project. Determine who will buy your work and why. Who’s the buyer? Does such a person actually exist? How do you know?

If at all possible, meet your customers (or at least your potential customers) face to face. Talking to your customers about what they want is perhaps the best source for your sales education.

At my workshops I like to spend many extra hours talking to attendees outside the workshop itself. On the first day as people are arriving, I greet them with hugs. I stick around during breaks, at lunch, and at the end of each day to talk to people. Partly I do this because I enjoy it — these are interesting people to connect with. But I also do it to better understand them. Who are they? Why did they attend this workshop? What else can I help them with?

It’s important for me to create workshops that give me plenty of freedom for creative expression, but it’s also important to give people what they desire, especially if I want my workshops to be financially sustainable.

Respect the role of money in your artistic endeavors, but don’t put money on a pedestal. Money is lubrication to grease the wheels of your artistic endeavors. You’re always free to create art for art’s sake, even if it won’t pay the bills, but if you want to get paid, then create art to sell.

Canadian actor Michael Ironside said in an interview that he accepts some acting roles for the money (Robocop being a good example), while other roles he performs for the soul. I make similar choices. Sometimes I write articles that I expect will boost traffic or generate income, while other times I write purely for the sheer enjoyment of being creative. And sometimes I get the best of both worlds. This variety is very nice.

Creating art to sell doesn’t equate to selling out. In my opinion the sell-outs are the artists who spend more time complaining than they do creating. If you create art to sell, then you can spend a lot more time creating art for the sheer joy of creating, and once you’ve built up the sales side of your practice, you may find that there are buyers for anything you create.

Buy Art

As a corollary to the above, when you see art you like, buy it. Yes, with money.

Get into the habit of financially supporting artists whose work you appreciate. Don’t do the piracy thing. Piracy is rooted in scarcity thinking, and it’s disrespectful of the artists. The beliefs that justify piracy are at odds with the beliefs that will help you generate sustainable income from your art.

By piracy I’m referring to illegally obtaining something that isn’t free. That which is given freely is a different animal. All of my blog posts and podcasts are uncopyrighted, for instance, so you can translate, republish, or share them however you wish, and it wouldn’t be piracy. But if you do this with copyrighted works without the artist’s permission, that’s piracy.

When I first began developing my own computer games, I was still into pirating games and other software. I realized that if I expected people to buy my software instead of just pirating it, it made sense for me to get my own house in order. So I stopped pirating, and I began purchasing what I wanted. If I wasn’t willing to purchase it, and if it wasn’t free, I did without.

Making that transition was easier than I thought, and it felt really good. I observed that I appreciated what I purchased more than I did when I pirated it. I also became more selective about what I consumed and less impulsive. My computer was easier to manage. I felt better about myself knowing that I was helping to support other people’s creative work. I felt like I was partnering with them in some fashion.

If you want others to financially support you as an artist, take a good look at yourself in the mirror. Are you an avid supporter of other people’s creative work? Do you readily purchase art that you appreciate?

Like many people I have a sizable collection of media, especially music. None of it is pirated. When I scroll through my collection, I not only see a lot of art that I enjoy, but I also see a list of artists that I’ve helped support financially. It’s comforting to know that Alan Wilder will never run out of hair gel.

I know it’s tempting to try to justify piracy. Don’t go there. You can claim that everything digital should be free, but such beliefs are at odds with those who choose not to release their work for free. Some people would still appreciate fair payment for their work. If you’re going to demonize them for making such choices, realize that you’re also necessarily demonizing the part of you that would like to make money from your creative work. That incongruency will surely come back to haunt you; usually it will show up in the form of self-sabotage.

When you support other artists financially, you reinforce the belief that you deserve to be financially supported. That’s an important belief to have if you wish to succeed as an artist.

Although it might seem more difficult to pay for work you could easily pirate, in the long run it’s easier than the alternative. If you wish others to respect your work and to pay for it, then have the integrity to show this much respect to other artists. Respect their right to ask for payment. If you feel their prices are unreasonable, don’t patronize them.

Supporting other people’s creative work can also be good motivation to increase your own income. I rather like spending money on books, seminars, music, and other art forms. This tells me that the more money I earn, the more I can support other creative people.

Learn to Handle Criticism

In any creative field, you’ll find plenty of people willing to assume the role of critic, largely because it’s easier to criticize art than to create it. Sometimes critics can be helpful by providing specific ideas for improvement, but they rarely bother to do so. More often they approach art with a sense of entitlement combined with undercurrents of bitterness, resentment, and envy.

A good summary of the relationship between artist and critic can be found in Teddy Roosevelt’s “Citizenship in a Republic” speech from 1910:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

What really disturbs critics is the knowledge that they don’t want to face — that they simply don’t matter. The critic is irrelevant and superfluous. History remembers the great artists, but it forgets the critics.

If you try to respect the critic, you’ll feed more power to the self-judgmental part of you, the part that says you aren’t good enough and can’t measure up. To empower your critics is to empower your self-doubt. If you want to be more prolific, then give your full attention to your artistry, and starve the critic of attention. A good way to transition is to laugh at the critical part of you. Poke fun at it. See it as the joke it truly is.

Abandoning self-criticism doesn’t mean letting go of reason and becoming blind to areas where you could stand to improve. You can still examine your work with an eye for improvement without getting bogged down by the voices of envy and resentment.

Genuine constructive criticism is what artists bestow upon themselves. Look at what you’ve created, and pay attention to your reaction. What do you think about it? How do you feel about it? Is this your best work? How could it be improved?

Feedback from others can be helpful, but such feedback rarely comes from would-be critics. Often the best feedback comes from other artists, people who understand what it’s like to play in the arena. Even then, you’ll still need to take such feedback with a grain of salt. If it makes sense to you, then use it, but don’t give it more weight than your own opinion.

Here’s some more text from that same Roosevelt speech:

There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes to second achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s realities — all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority but of weakness.

Offer your art to those who will appreciate it. You can safely ignore the critics, for history will treat them as if they never even existed. Their weakness is unworthy of your respect. Regardless of criticism, artists will continue creating art. The artists will have their cake and eat it too… while the critics scurry for the crumbs.

One of my most criticized pieces is the article 10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job (2006). Another one is 10 Reasons You Should Never Have a Religion (2008). For me these were inspired pieces that I truly enjoyed creating. Criticism of those pieces has drawn even more attention to them, making them some of the most popular works I’ve ever created — both are in the top 1% in terms of the referrals and traffic they generate. To critique such pieces, the critic is admitting that the work was impactful, so the critic is actually validating and promoting the artistry of those pieces.

In the long run the critics ultimately serve the artist’s interests, whether the critics realize it or not. The critic draws more attention to the artist’s work, which can still benefit the artist with extra publicity, even if the criticism is largely negative. A professional artist will seldom return the favor by publicizing a particular critic, however. This dynamic reflects the artist’s commitment to his/her creative expression as well as the critic’s denial of his/her creative abilities. The role of the critic may seem pitiable, but ultimately the critic serves to elevate the artist, which is good for everyone.

Appreciate Your Customers

While your critics can be safely ignored because they don’t provide any value, your customers are actively supporting your work, making it easier for you to keep doing what you love. It makes sense to support your customers in supporting you.

As an artist it’s easy to confuse your customers with your fans, but these aren’t merely different labels for the same groups. Your fans consist of anyone who appreciates your work. Your customers are the people who are financially supporting your work. These groups will likely overlap, but it isn’t unusual for an artist to have many fans who aren’t customers.

If you have lots of fans but few customers, you don’t have a financially sustainable operation.

It may seem like a wonderful thing to have lots of fans, but fans who aren’t customers can potentially hurt you more than help you, unless they’re helping to refer more customers to you. Maintaining a large fan base can consume extra time and resources. For example, if you have a website, more fans may mean more web traffic, and more web traffic means higher hosting and maintenance costs as well as more communication.

It’s wise to appreciate your fans too, but be careful about encouraging too much fandom at the expense of customers. If you want to be famous, then more fans are great, but if you want a financially sustainable lifestyle as an artist, then put your customers first. If you lose some fans but retain your customers, you can still sustain your practice. But if you lose your customers by focusing too heavily on your non-customer fans, you could see your work becoming very popular while you become very broke. It happens.

Fans may feel that by appreciating your work, they’re somehow helping you. They may believe they’re on your side. But is that really true? Love and appreciation are nice, but they won’t keep the lights turned on.

Imagine that you hosted a dinner at your house. Guests arrive empty-handed, enjoy the food you provide, and graciously thank you for it. Do you perceive that as a form of support? It may be emotionally and socially supportive, but it isn’t financially supportive. How long can you sustain this? The more you do it, the more you incur a hit of time and resources. Sure, you may end up with lots of people appreciating your cooking and your generosity, and they may gladly refer others to you, but where will that lead in the long run? By itself this isn’t a good way to sustain your artistry.

To have a financially sustainable operation, it’s fine to have fans, but you’ll also need to see a certain percentage of those fans choosing to become customers.

Some artists take this to the extreme, focusing entirely on customers and ignoring non-customer fans altogether. Others go the opposite route, treating customers and fans as equally valuable. There’s no right or wrong way to do this. It’s a matter of finding the right equilibrium for you, one that can create long-term sustainability.

I enjoy seeing a healthy ecosystem around my work that consists of many more fans that customers. It gives me a sense of optimism because I only need to see a small percentage of fans become customers to maintain financial sustainability, and I’m happy to see people enjoy my work whether they pay for it or not. My conversion rate from fans to customers is high enough that I can afford to scale up without much risk to sustainability. But I do have to make some sacrifices for this to be viable.

I can afford to hang out with workshop attendees for a few hours after a workshop. I can’t afford to give this kind of personal attention to anyone who visits my website, however, despite receiving many requests to that effect. From a financial perspective, I can’t justify investing as much time and energy in non-customer fans — I have to put more attention on serving the needs of my customers. To fans who don’t wish to become customers, this may sound disappointing, but it should be understandable.

Your non-customer fans may not like the fact that you pay more attention to your customers, and this realization may cause them to feel under-appreciated, but ultimately this is a matter of common sense. If a non-customer fan feels under-appreciated and abandons you as a result, you’ll lose the chance to someday convert them to a customer as well as the other customers they may have eventually referred, but that’s a gain that may never have been realized anyway. On the other hand, losing an existing customer is a less speculative loss and one that anyone with good business sense would work harder to prevent.

In your relationships with other artists, notice the difference between being a fan and being a patron, and start paying attention to why you make these choices as you do. This will deepen your understanding of how you wish to relate to these groups as an artist. Again, there’s no right or wrong way to do it, but you’ll find that some ways feel better to you than others.

Socializing with fans and customers can be very enjoyable. It’s wonderful to connect with people who have shared interests, and you’ll generally find such people to be very friendly. After all, you’ve already earned their appreciation. But it’s crucial to maintain reasonable boundaries and balance these connections within the context of your life as a whole. It’s all too easy to overdo it, feel overwhelmed by too many people trying to connect with you at the same time, and actually end up resenting the attention. If left unchecked, you could end up sabotaging the very success you’ve been seeking.

So appreciate your fans, and appreciate your customers, but safeguard your boundaries. As your work becomes more popular, you’ll need to pay more attention to maintaining your sacred creative space. Don’t allow your fans, customers, or anyone else to encroach upon that. Your connection to the creator-god within you (however you may define it) must not be derailed. In the long run, your fans and customers will forgive you for not being as available as they might like… as long as you keep creating.

Learn to Surf

As your artistic practice matures, managing your relationships with fans and customers — along with all the other relationships in your life (family, friends, business partners, etc) — can be one of the trickiest aspects of your practice to get right. You only have so much time and attention to devote to each of these groups, and there are consequences for being too giving as well as for being too stingy. These challenges can be exacerbated as your popularity increases. The shifting populations of fans, customers, and business contacts will keep throwing you out of equilibrium, and solutions that worked for you last year may seem utterly broken this year.

The best advice I can give is to accept that your equilibrium is a moving target. Fortunately you have some say in the matter. If you want to be more social, take action by inviting new connections. If you’re feeling socially overwhelmed and need some privacy, feel free to back off.

I’ve learned that the more often I blog, the more incoming communication I receive. If I have a backlog of communication and need a break, the best thing I can do is to stop blogging so much. When things really get overwhelming, I can disable my contact form or take a break from social media. Then when I’m ready to be more social, I can start blogging more often, and I can more actively invite people to connect.

I have made more screw-ups in this area than I can count, but with each passing year, I develop a better understanding of where my equilibrium is, and I know how important it is to go with the flow. Sometimes the flow takes me in a very social direction. Other times I feel an intense desire to be alone and turn within. The biggest mistakes I’ve made were the result of failing to honor and accept where the flow was going — i.e. trying to be social when I really wanted to be alone in my creator space, or forcing myself to create when I’d much rather be around people and share love and laughter. As it turned out, the balance I sought was never a static state where I could run essentially the same patterns week after week. Balance looks more like a sine wave, constantly oscillating from one extreme to the other. And to make it even more complicated, there are smaller sub-oscillations that combine with those larger oscillations.

Imagine trying to balance a basketball on your finger. If you try to keep your hand totally rigid, the ball quickly falls. To balance the ball you must be in constant motion, making continuous adjustments based on what the ball is doing. This is how it feels to balance the creative and the social aspects of art. Inspiration never sits still; it is always in motion. Either you’re diving more deeply into your private creator space, or you’re opening yourself to more social connections. The key, as I’ve learned, is not to resist these oscillations. Instead, learn to ride them like waves, much like a surfer.

Another metaphor for thinking about balance — perhaps a better one than surfing — is to think of your artistic life as a song. Consider that your life is a combination of rhythm, melody, harmony, etc. A song is always in motion, but it isn’t chaotic or random — there’s a structure to it. That structure may be complex and difficult to grasp, but it’s there nonetheless. Notice where the song of your life wants flow next. Notice when you’re trying to force it to go in a direction that doesn’t feel right. What might be the next notes in the progression? If you can sense the structure of the song and develop a feel for where it wants to go, you’ll find it easier to cultivate a fulfilling life-work balance as an artist.

* * *

The bottom line is that making a sustainable living as an artist is doable. It doesn’t require a miracle, nor does it mandate putting money ahead of artistic expression. It does, however, require some intelligent choices and a genuine commitment. For those who are committed to the mastery of their craft for the long haul, ensuring the financial sustainability of one’s work is a worthwhile and achievable goal.

Invite the universe to express itself through you, and do your best to get out of its way. It will support you on this path if you’re committed; otherwise it will bring you every manner of obstacle to validate your lack of commitment.

The question being put to you now is: Will you do it? Will you step into the arena? Will you know the great enthusiasms and the great devotions? Or will you sit in the stands as a spectator… or a critic?

Is your future self looking back on this day with intense appreciation and gratitude… or with disappointment and regret?

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

That’s a recipe for glorious failure.

Sure it could work sometimes, especially if you have millions of marketing dollars to help create demand, but for small businesses it’s not a very wise approach. For a sustainable business you’ll want to see some evidence of genuine demand for what you’re going to sell — ideally before you go through all the work of starting a business or creating a new product or service.

Many amazing businesses have been launched because someone noticed an existing problem or some kind of demand for a solution or improvement, and they found a way to fulfill that demand reasonably well.

When I started my computer games business in 1994, I didn’t know if there was any demand for what I was creating. I created some games, but hardly anyone bought them.

Then I went to a game development conference where one of the co-founders of a very successful company explained in plain English the difference between creating games that sell well vs. creating games that don’t.

He said it came down to creating games that people clearly wanted to buy vs. creating games that the development team wanted to create. These goals aren’t necessarily in conflict. He explained how his company went from struggling for 8 years in a row to finally creating some mega-hits. They started paying attention to what kinds of games people really wanted to buy. Then they created games in those genres. Their games sold millions of copies.

It’s not rocket science, but it sure makes a difference.

I applied this advice on a fairly small scale, and my games business did much better. I targeted genres where I saw more demand than supply, and so I didn’t have to push so hard on the marketing front. I mainly just had to get the word out that my games would satisfy a particular type of player. And within a matter of months, those players were flocking to my website.

Erin’s intuitive reading business did well because people were already asking her for advice. People had been asking her for readings since she was a teenager. She mainly had to say yes to what was already showing up. When she began offering readings professionally, people began signing up right away. She got so much business that she had to go through several rounds of price increases until she reached a reasonable equilibrium.

If you want a sustainable business, it’s important to pay attention to demand. What do people want and need? What problems are they having? What sort of help are they looking for?

Quite often you’ll find things you love doing, but nobody else cares to pay for it. That’s fine. Enjoy those activities as your side hobbies. The demand may change in a decade or two.

Other times you’ll notice demand for something, but you’ll have no personal interest in helping out. That’s fine too. Let someone else fulfill those needs.

If you’re open to creating a sustainable business, be on the lookout for evidence of demand that you’d enjoy servicing.

When I started my personal development business, it was largely in response to existing demand. Before I ever wrote my first blog post, people were already emailing me every week with productivity questions, small business questions, motivation questions, etc. It wasn’t a stretch for me to say yes to that because I enjoyed writing about personal growth. But I didn’t start the website and hope the demand would be there. I saw clear evidence that the demand was already there before I started. I said yes to what was already showing up.

Marketing such a business is a lot easier than marketing a business where the demand is unclear. If the demand is already there, then marketing is mainly a matter of letting people know that a solution or service exists and that it may satisfy them.

But if there’s little or no demand, then marketing amounts to trying to convince people they need something, and they may very well disagree. That kind of marketing is a struggle, especially for a small business without a huge marketing budget.

Demand doesn’t have to be personal for it to matter. People don’t have to be asking you to solve their problems. They just have to be asking for a solution.

If you’ve started a small business, and it seems like an uphill battle to generate sales, could it be that you’re providing something hardly anyone wants? If that’s the case, try not to see it as a personal failure. It happens often. It’s all part of the entrepreneurial calibration process. You’ll eventually figure out that sales matter, and it’s easier to generate sales by cooperatively giving people what they want as opposed to trying to convince them to want what you’ve decided to give.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

That said, there can be tremendous value in planning. Thinking through a business in advance is hard work and requires deep concentration (if you want to do it well), but the payoff is a significant increase in clarity and a better shot at creating or expanding a successful enterprise.

I spent most of last week creating a new long-term plan for my business, which I just completed on Friday. I hadn’t done anything this thorough since 2005. It was incredibly tough mental work, and I put in many 12-16 hour days in a row, sometimes working so hard that I literally fell asleep at my desk. Then I’d wake up and work on it some more.

Since I’ve just been through this process, let me share some thoughts on creating a written plan for your own business.

Planning for Yourself vs. Planning for Investors

There’s a big difference between creating a business plan for your personal clarity vs. creating a plan to attract funding. Most of the business planning information I’ve seen in books or online is heavy on the latter side. If you don’t need outside funding, you can probably ignore 30-50% of the typical suggestions for what to include in a business plan.

There can be value in doing some of the work that it would take to impress an investor. Thinking through the financials is a good idea, but in practice a lot of what goes into an investor-based plan is actually persuasion as opposed to serious planning. Financial projections can be incredibly subjective, and you can’t predict with much accuracy what’s going to happen under real-world market conditions anyway. Overplanning is also a waste of time — you need to guard against filling your plan with irrelevant details that simply won’t matter one way or another.

I set financial goals for my business, but I don’t bother making predictions which are merely guesswork. Instead I spend more time planning how my business can adapt to whatever conditions may occur.

My business plan is created solely for me, and to a lesser extent, for those who work closely with me. I’ll never show it to an investor or banker because I’m confident I can continue to grow the business with a strategy that requires no outside financing.

Thinking Strategically

Business planning helps you think strategically about the road ahead. You only have so much time each day, month, and year to make decisions and take action. For many business owners those actions are chaotic and unfocused. They start projects they never finish. They miss opportunities by failing to act promptly. It’s very easy to hit a plateau and get stuck there for years.

A clear, committed strategy helps to cut through all of that. It sharpens your day to day choices. It provides an intelligent framework for action.

The problem, however, is that there are many valid strategies for growing a business. You will undoubtedly have more opportunities than you have time to pursue them. You can’t do everything well. If in the back of your mind, you’re oscillating between several different primary strategies, you’ll have a hard time growing your business if these strategies don’t mesh incredibly well.

I could grow my business in a variety of different ways. I could blog more often. I could write more books. I could expand into videos. I could expand my workshop offerings and begin doing them in different cities. I could invest in more marketing and PR. I could do guest blogging and accept more interview requests. I could get back into podcasting. I could start a membership site or paid subscription service. I could hire a few personal coaches and open a coaching program. I could turn my blog posts into products to sell. I could expand my social media presence. I could launch my own affiliate program (for workshops and future products). I could do more joint venture deals.

We could do any or all of these things, and many of them would be effective. But we can’t do all of them well. We might be able to do one or two of them well at any given time.

Thinking strategically requires deciding which fronts not to open. To create a practical and realistic business plan, I had to make some tough choices about which directions not to pursue. At first glance, almost everything looks golden. But with some deeper probing and a lot of analysis, I could discern which opportunities are truly the best relative to the others.

The Planning Process

Planning is an iterative process. In many areas you won’t know the best decision to make. At best you’ll be able to identify some options, but you won’t have much clarity about which possibilities make the most sense.

The way I resolve this is by taking a stab at each part. You can’t leave things in a wishy washy state, or you’ll end up with no workable plan at all. You have to keep pushing towards resolution and convergence. A good way to do this is to force a decision in a particular part of your plan. Then see how it fits. If it doesn’t feel right, yank it out, and try another possible solution. Repeat till you get it right.

Planning is an exploration of the potential solution space. To find the right combination of products, pricing, marketing strategies, staffing, and more, take some guesses and see what the big picture looks like. Then notice how those different elements mesh together.

It’s much like creating a song. Choose some notes and sequence them together. Then listen to the result. Does it sound harmonious? At first it probably won’t. But what’s creating the disharmony? Can you identify one misalignment? And can you fix that?

Then you keep tweaking and listening, tweaking and listening. Write out each new idea in great detail. Then read it back.

Sometimes you’ll get inspired ideas. Sometimes you’ll have to use a lot of perspiration, testing multiple ideas to find the right one.

My business plan is only 23 pages, but I probably wrote at least triple that to create it. For some parts of my business, intelligent solutions were fairly obvious. But in other areas, the right approach wasn’t obvious at all. My first stab produced a lot of text, but when I stepped back and read it within the context of the rest of the plan, it wasn’t harmonious. Perhaps my website would be delivering one message, but my products and pricing were likely to be incongruent with that message; the predicted consequence of that disharmony is that my business would end up attracting people who’d resist being customers — not a very sustainable approach.

This is a really important point to emphasize. To achieve convergence you can’t just sit and ponder until the right idea pops into your head. You have to take some guesses and run with them. Take a stab and fully document how it’s going to work, as if you’ve already made your final choice. Then look at it within the context of the rest of your plan. Does it seem harmonious? Does it support the other areas beautifully and elegantly?

My major rule here is that if it doesn’t feel elegant (or sound harmonious, or look beautiful — take your pick of modality analogies), it’s wrong. I know I have the right solution when a wave of awe washes over me, when I have to get up out of my chair and pace around so I can just be with that feeling for a while. Then I know I’ve figured out a key piece.

Deep Honesty

Deep honesty means being able to look at what you’ve planned and answer these questions:

• Is this an intelligent approach?
• Is this an honest approach?
• Is this a loving approach?
• Is this a strong plan, or am I caving to weakness and low standards?
• Is this a harmonious plan? Is it elegant and beautiful?
• Will this be a path of continued growth for me?
• Is this a courageous path, or am I playing it safe?

This is akin to asking a musician after many days of hard work, What do you think of your finished song? Will you get a fair and honest assessment, or will the answer be overly biased by the musician’s personal investment in the song?

There’s a temptation, especially when you’re tired after working so hard, to capitulate to a flawed plan. At some point you’ll want to say, This is good enough. You’ll want to label weak as okay, okay as good, and good as great. You’ll want to turn in B-quality work hoping to get an A.

But if the plan isn’t harmonious and elegant… if it doesn’t knock you back in your chair… if it doesn’t quicken your pulse like a beautiful song… you’re not done. You mustn’t say “it’s good enough.”

Hold out for the truly elegant solution — not by waiting, but by continuing to diligently explore until you find it.

How do you know when you’ve found a beautiful solution? If you have to ask, you haven’t found it yet. When you find it, you’ll know. If you don’t know that you’ve found it, you haven’t.

Listen to your very favorite song, one that you’d consider a masterpiece. When you listen to it, ask how you know it’s beautiful. You probably can’t articulate exactly why. You know that it’s good by how it makes you feel. If you have to seriously ask yourself whether the song is beautiful, you already know that it isn’t. Beauty is recognized, not analyzed.

When Martin Gore wrote the song “It’s No Good,” he knew he’d created something good (ironic given the title). He called Depeche Mode bandmate Andy Fletcher and told him, “I think I’ve written a number one.” And in many countries, it did hit #1. (source: DM biography Stripped).

This is how it is with a good business plan. When it’s finally done, you’re compelled to take a deep breath and say something akin to, “I think I’ve written a number one.”

When you’ve created a song you know is amazing, you can’t wait to share it with people. Similarly, when you have a business plan that you truly love, you can’t wait to implement it. But if your song (or your plan) is weak, then moving forward is more difficult. You’re more likely to procrastinate because you know you haven’t done your best work.

If you don’t love it, you’re not done. A plan you don’t love isn’t finished. How do you know you love it? Again, if you have to ask the question, you’re not there yet. A great plan will excite you.

What to Include

There are many guides to creating a business plan, but so many of them are filled with fluff, or they may be inappropriate for your particular business. Most of the ones I’ve seen are ridiculously archaic. In doing some research, I came across a business planning tutorial from Entrepreneur Magazine. Their template appears to be based on a manufacturing business. Seriously… what percentage of entrepreneurs are starting new manufacturing businesses these days? Perhaps they should note what century this is.

If you need to create a plan for investors, then you may want to follow conventions that they expect. But if, like me, you’re just creating a plan for yourself and your team members, then make sure the plan fits your business. Feel free to take advantage of online templates, but adapt them to your needs. If a section seems irrelevant, it probably is.

My plan has the following sections:

Overview – What’s the basic concept of the business? What is its purpose?

Business Description – What does the business actually do? Who are its customers? What are its products and services? What value does it provide? How does it earn income? What’s special or unique about it?

Market Strategies – What’s the target market for the business? How will you position it? How will you get the word out and reach potential customers? Why should anyone care about what you can provide? What’s your distribution strategy? What kind of PR will you do? Who’s your competition in the marketplace? What’s your strategy for dealing with competition? What’s your search engine strategy?

Pricing – What’s your pricing strategy? Do the numbers make sense? How will this affect your market positioning? This can be one of the most challenging sections to get right.

Social Media Strategy - How will you leverage social media? How does social media mesh with the rest of your business? Can you use it intelligently without seeing it become a distracting diversion? I haven’t seen any business plan templates that include a separate section for social media, but I include it because it’s a part of my business (blog, forums, Google+, etc), and it’s a growing segment that will likely be around for at least the rest of the decade. StevePavlina.com’s own discussion forums will soon pass 1 million messages posted.

Development Plan – How will you take the business from where it is now to where you want it to go? This is where you linearly plan out the steps to go from A to B. Document the key processes your business will need to execute. Identify the major risks, and decide how you’ll manage them. I prefer to spin off separate documents for this section, so it doesn’t become too bloated. For instance, I have other planning docs for my staffing plans, my process for creating and delivering workshops, my process for creating new products, etc. Those plans are 2-7 pages each, so if I included them in the main doc, it would probably be around 50 pages in length. Expect to spend a lot of time on this part of the plan.

Business Finances - In this part of the plan you can include things like balance sheets, income statements, and cash flow statements. You can analyze your costs as well. For a new business these will be projections (which are often just guesses). For an existing business you can use historical data and also include projections if you so desire. I don’t bother to include this section in my plans because my business has been profitable for years (October 1st, 2011 was its 7-year anniversary). I’m not trying to impress any investors, and I can use my accounting software to review my financials whenever I desire. I don’t bother to make future projections since I think it’s largely a waste of time. Another reason this section is largely irrelevant to me is because my business has a very low cost structure. My growth plans don’t require spending much cash, and the existing cash flow will cover it. I also have plenty of ways to quickly adapt to a cash crunch, so I simply don’t need to pay as much attention to this area. This would be an important area to fill out if you’re investing a lot of capital into the business, and you need to convince yourself and/or others that you have a sound plan for recouping that investment. But if your projections ultimately amount to guessing, why bother?

Closing – I like to include a half-page closing of just a few paragraphs to summarize the key strategic decisions. Since I already have a business, my main focus here is about what I need to start doing differently in order to implement the plan. What do I need to start doing? What do I need to stop doing? What do I need to change about the ways I’m doing things?

Thinking Holistically

Each part of a business plan is like a puzzle piece, and the entire plan is the puzzle. Your puzzle may have 100 pieces to it. But you may be able to identify 500 puzzle pieces. Many of those pieces will look like they fit the puzzle, but when you include them, it will feel like the puzzle isn’t quite coming together.

A holistic plan is one where all of the pieces support each other to create a singular picture. When you have this picture, your business will seem much simpler. Without this picture all you have is a jumble of pieces, each one demanding your attention. You don’t have the capacity to give all 500 or even all 100 puzzle pieces your full attention. But you can give your attention to the big picture, and if those 100 pieces all fit together beautifully, you’ll be giving them the right level of attention when you focus on the big picture.

As I created my business plan, I realized that the process requires a lot of deleting and letting go. There were some puzzle pieces I was very attached to, pieces I’d assumed should be important components of my business, but when I included them, I had to conclude they didn’t fit the big picture.

Letting go of the unneeded bits requires a lot of self-awareness. I had to pause many times and admit to myself that I didn’t feel good about a particular aspect of my plan. Occasionally I worked through the math behind an idea, or I tried to project the idea forward in time to think about the long-term consequences. In some cases I could see that 5-10 years down the road, I’d be left with a very undesirable situation, even though the first year looked great. Other times my intuition would be the dissenting voice. If any part of me disagreed with the idea, I knew I had to rework it or let it go. My commitment was to create a plan that made logical sense, that felt good, and that satisfied my intuition.

One thing that helped me tremendously was to do a 7-day all raw no-fat cleanse before I began this planning process. I started with a 24-hour water fast, and then for the next 6 days I ate nothing but fresh fruits and vegetables. No salt. No spices. No oils. No sweeteners. No overt fat sources like avocados, nuts, seeds, or coconuts. Just raw, water-rich fruits and veggies, water, and some occasional herbal tea (no caffeine). I lost 4.5 lbs during that week, but that was nothing compared to the mental clarity I experienced. After about 3 days, my mind became super sharp, as if I had more working memory available for conscious thought. I wasn’t even going to make a business plan at this time, but when I started working on other planning documents, I couldn’t help but notice how sharp my thinking was. I blazed through a day’s worth of work in a couple hours. When I tackled really hard problems that had challenged me for months or years, simple solutions were suddenly obvious. I felt a bit stupid for not seeing them earlier.

I realized I had to take full advantage of this heightened clarity for as long as it lasted, so I dove into this business planning project and worked each day till I was ready to drop. I’m so glad I did because I think I was able to do a better job in a week than I probably would have been able to do in a month if I didn’t have this extra clarity. If you’ve seen the movie Limitless, the experience was almost like taking one of those pills — not quite that good, but enough to notice a difference.

I’m still feeling this heightened clarity now, but I can tell it’s not quite as high as it was near the end of the cleanse week (which ended last Sunday). I’m probably still enjoying 60-70% of that boost though. I’ve never done a cleanse like this before (I’ve done low fat but never no fat), so this was a new experience for me. I’ll very likely do more cleanses like this when I want to regain that mental boost. The productivity I’ve been enjoying these past couple weeks has been amazing. I’d love to learn how to create this level of mental performance permanently, but I’ve had problems with eating very low-fat in the past for more than 2-3 weeks (like having my skin become so dry that my knuckles were cracked and bleeding).

I’m not saying you have to do a similar cleanse to create a decent business plan, but I am suggeting that it makes sense to be at your mental and physiological best when you do it. The sharper your mind is, the better your plan will be. This is incredibly challenging work that will stretch your brain to its limits. Give yourself every advantage you can.

Competitive Advantage

One of the most important parts of a good business plan is identifying your business’ competitive advantages. Many planning templates have you start by doing market research and looking for market gaps. Then you deliberately target those gaps to position your business competitively relative to existing businesses. You look at what the other players are doing, and you target where they’re weak.

I prefer to approach this from a different angle, especially for small Internet businesses. Start by looking at your personal strengths. How are you different from others? What can you do better than most people? Or what could you eventually learn to do better than most if you worked at it?

If you start with a strengths-based approach, then you need to massage your strengths into a competitive advantage that people will care about. A strength is probably something that matters only to you. It may take some work to transform it into a benefit for your customers.

One of my strengths is that I can develop quality content on many topics much faster than most of my competitors can. I can create in an hour what takes many of them half a day to a day to do.

Being a prolific content creator isn’t necessarily a competitive advantage, but it can be turned into one. For instance, by using this strength to write lots of quality free content, I was able to build very high web traffic in just a couple years. This was largely under my direct control too. I didn’t need Oprah to host me on her show. I didn’t need outside investors to give me money. Now I’m able to leverage this traffic to do things that most of my competitors can’t, such as delivering workshops without spending any money on marketing or promotion. I can also develop workshops faster, which allows me to launch several new workshops simultaneously instead of doing the same one or two over and over.

While you may not like the idea of thinking competitively, it’s wise to view your business through this lens and give it some careful thought. People have an incredible array of choices today. Why on earth should they buy from you instead of from someone else? If you can’t come up with a good reason, don’t expect your customers to figure it out for you. They will indeed buy from someone else.

If you can’t think of any major strengths, then what makes you different? What sets you apart from other people? If you embrace your differences, you may see that you can turn them into strengths. For instance, I live in Las Vegas, which is different than where most people live but not necessarily better. However, I’m able to turn this into a strength by doing workshops on the Las Vegas Strip, which is a fun and lively place. I take full advantage of the location by inviting people to do special exercises in the casinos and on the Strip and by encouraging people to hang out socially after hours, see shows, etc. This provides them with fun, memorable experiences that they won’t have at other people’s workshops. Living in Las Vegas is merely different, but with a little creativity it can be made into a strength.

What’s different about you or your business but not necessarily better? Can you massage one or more of those differences into a strength for your customers? Is anyone else already using similar differences to create a competitive advantage?

Thinking Long-term

Business planning will challenge you to think long-term, years and decades ahead.

I use a time frame of 10-20 years for most aspects of my plan. If I think only 6-12 months ahead, I fail to see how particular paths can magnify into problems down the road, and I overlook major opportunities. If I try to think more than 10-20 years ahead, my plan becomes too speculative, although I can think further out for some aspects that are likely to remain stable.

A lot can change in 20 years. If you had a PC 20 years ago, you probably had a 386 or 486 running MS-DOS 5.0 and possibly Windows 3.0. Windows 3.1 didn’t ship till 1992, and Intel didn’t ship the Pentium processor till 1993. No smart phones. No iPods or iTunes. No web browsers. No Google or Yahoo. No YouTube. No social media unless you liked BBSing. You may have had email, but you probably checked it using a slow dial-up modem. If you did use the Internet, you may have accessed it via CompuServe, Prodigy, or AOL. If you owned a video game system, it was probably a NES, Super NES, Sega Genesis, Turbo Grafx, or Neo-Geo… or Game Boy or Game Gear for a handheld. If you went to the movies, you’d have be wowed by the 3D special effects in Terminator 2.

So if so much is going to change, how can you possibly create a long-term plan that makes sense? Isn’t planning pointless in light of such uncertainty?

The purpose of planning isn’t to predict the future. The purpose of planning is to sharpen your present day decisions and to give your business an intelligent basis for growth.

It’s true that you can’t know what’s going to happen even a few years from now. Surprises will occur. Some of those surprises will help your business. Others will throw you for a loop. No matter what, you’re going to have to adapt as you go along.

But some aspects of the future may be fairly predictable. I feel good in predicting that personal growth will still be important in 20 years. It’s been around for thousands of years. It will probably survive a few more decades. Actually I predict it will be even more important in 20 years than it is today. For at least the last few decades, this field has been trending towards expansion, growing by many billions of dollars in annual revenue within the past five years alone. People are spending more on personal growth than ever before. And as far as I can tell, this increase is expected to continue for many more years.

One of the reasons personal growth will become increasingly important is that change is accelerating, especially technological change. The job market will continue to shift. To be competitive workers, people will need to adapt more quickly than ever to changing circumstances. They won’t be able to trust that they can just get a job and keep it for decades.

I predict that traditional educational systems like universities will become increasingly less relevant, failing to adapt quickly enough to marketplace changes. By the time a student graduates from a 4-year degree program, so much of what they learned will already be obsolete. This is already a major issue today, but it will continue to get worse. College grads will enter the workforce wholly under-prepared for the competitive realities of the workforce. This creates tremendous opportunities for the personal growth field (which overlaps traditional education) to fill in the gaps. There will be increasing demand for faster, more intelligent, more practical sources of education — forms that can adapt their curriculums more quickly to changing circumstances. Archaic elements like tenure only make it harder for old systems to adapt, so if those structures aren’t replaced with more flexible systems, those institutions will be out-competed by smart entrepreneurs who are willing to embrace change. To some degree this is already happening, and I expect this sort of change to continue.

The business opportunities in education alone are staggering. I’ve lost track of how many millionaires I’ve met who built successful businesses teaching people important skills that aren’t normally taught at traditional universities. By leveraging the Internet, they can do it at much less cost for their students, they can do it faster, and they can keep their programs modern and practical under today’s conditions.

All this growth and expansion will create more confusion and stress. Self-discipline and focus will become increasingly important qualities for people to develop since distractions will surely keep expanding. The demand for better management of one’s life will increase significantly.

You don’t need to be a technologist to make some reasonable predictions about the future. Just look at some of the general trends that have been building for years, and project them forward. Smart phones will get smarter and will become even more common. Tablet computers will become more powerful and more common. Data transfer rates will increase. The Internet will become much bigger. New major players will emerge. There will be more interests competing for your attention than ever before.

Some major breakthroughs will occur, and human beings may begin integrating tech-based enhancements onto or into their bodies, but the concept of growth won’t go out of style. Very likely it will become even more important. The fastest growing, fastest adapting people will have a major competitive advantage over those who are slow to adapt. This remains true whether the world of the future becomes more abundant or more scarce.

By making some reasonable predictions about the needs of future humans (or cyborgs, or whatever we become down the road), you can make decisions today that set yourself and your business on a path to long-term success. You can avoid getting bogged down in short-term thinking that leads you astray. You can build a business to grow in alignment with the direction that the world is heading, not where it’s been.

I can see pretty clearly that people are going to need a lot more help with focus, self-discipline, and self-control over the next several years. I can see that many traditional educational institutions are going to get worse in terms of their ability to teach students skills they’ll need in today’s workplaces, especially as they have their budgets slashed. I can predict that more people are likely to access my work on devices that aren’t a desktop computer or a laptop. This helps me make intelligent choices about how my business can serve those needs while remaining flexible and adaptable.

It’s important to get clear on the difference between your medium and your message. Your message can remain fixed, even under changing circumstances, but your medium must remain flexible if you want to have a competitive business across decades in time. My message is conscious growth, and that message can adapt to many different media. I don’t need to worry that blogging may someday go out of style. Ten years from now, most of our interactions may occur through a medium other than blogging. Growth is my business, not blogging, and growth can be communicated in many forms. With a plan based on your message, you don’t need to fear change; rather, you can be excited by all the new opportunities change can bring. (For more on this notion, read The Medium vs. the Message.)

Clarifying the Core

When you finally complete your business plan and clarify the big picture, you may feel a newfound sense of excitement about it. Ultimately the core of your business will probably be something very simple, perhaps something so simple that you were inclined to overlook it.

In my case when I saw the big picture, I realized that it ultimately came down to one simple principle. In order to have a business that really works, I have to focus first and foremost on pursuing my own path of growth. Making money doesn’t work as the main focus. Creating products or doing workshops can’t be the main focus either. In order to succeed, I have to make sure the business is tough on me. I can’t allow it to become so easy that I no longer feel challenged.

When I feel challenged, I’m much more motivated, so I work harder, and my business thrives. When it gets too easy or repetitive, I lose interest. If I don’t feel I’m growing by running the business, that’s a problem. So I have to run it in a way that keeps me in that sweet spot of challenge. That sweet spot, however, is a moving target. It’s not a static spot. And so I came to realize that the only way I can make my business viable and successful in the long term is that I have to relate to it as a vehicle for my own growth and development.

If I stop growing, my business loses its value to me. I begin to check out from it. I’ll turn my attention elsewhere to keep growing. And the business will ultimately suffer for that.

Intuitively I’ve known this all along, but it was difficult to see it till I worked through all the details and finally understood it logically too. It may seem like an emotional or even an irrational choice to define the primary purpose of my business as serving as a vehicle for my own growth. But when I worked through the consequences of that focus, I understood that if I make this my primary focus, then many other intelligent choices flow smoothly from there. I have to help other people grow in order to grow faster for myself — I can’t grow much in a vacuum. I have to innovate. I have to make the business financially sustainable since going broke isn’t going to help me as much as creating more abundance will. I already did the going broke thing more than a decade ago and don’t see much point in repeating it.

This simple understanding helped me remove many puzzle pieces I might otherwise have kept. I now see with much greater clarity that it’s unwise to try to expand my business in directions that won’t help me grow.

I don’t think this is particularly unique though. I think the appeal of entrepreneurship for many people is the long-term personal growth that’s gained from this path. That’s what keeps a business fresh and exciting for the founder. That’s what got me out of bed at 5am this morning. When that growth is no longer present, it’s a good time to sell or leave, so you can move on to new growth experiences.

What’s really interesting about this is that even though I mainly used the objective perspective to develop this business plan, the end result is nicely congruent with the subjective perspective as well. What does a business matter in a dream world? The subjective value is how the business affects you, the business owner. It doesn’t matter how much dream money you accumulate or how many dream characters you can count as customers. What matters is the story you’re creating and how it affects your character’s development. This is of course perfectly in line with what we should expect from the Equivalency Principle, which I’ll be covering in more detail at the Subjective Reality Workshop in less than two weeks.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

One reason my business has been successful is that I enjoy running it. A big part of that enjoyment is that I genuinely like the people my business attracts as long-term customers. I include many of them among my friends and hang out with them socially often. My business partly serves as a feeder for making new friends.

The same is also true for the other business partners I work with. I like these people and enjoy them personally at least as much as I like networking with them professionally.

Since I like the people I serve, my motivation is higher, and I naturally work harder without having to force it.

If someone doesn’t have enough compatibility with me to potentially become a friend, I’d rather not have them as a customer of my business.

Many business owners will sanitize their public personas in an attempt to avoid alienating anyone. While following the rule “Thou shalt not take a stand” may indeed be a way to attract more customers, I wouldn’t want to run such a business. I know people who’ve done this, especially in the personal development field, and by and large they tend to have a great deal of stress in their lives. They reach a place where their businesses run them, and life is all about satisfying obligations. The joy fades. Going to work is a burden.

I’m not willing to go that route. If I did that, I’d end up disliking my business and the people it attracts, and my motivation would plummet. This approach wouldn’t feel good to me at all.

So I do the opposite. I intentionally share things that are likely to repel people who wouldn’t make good friends for me. I’d prefer not to have such people as customers either.

People so often tell me I’m crazy to post certain things that they believe will alienate people. I think it would be crazier not to do that. I share what I’m into. Why on earth would I want to run a business that requires me to suppress my interests? And to what end? Temporarily making more money at the cost of unhappiness, demotivation, a lot more stress? No thank you!

I think many small business owners underestimate just how important it is to love your customers, but I don’t recommend trying to force yourself to love people you wouldn’t even like hanging out with socially. I think it’s much more intelligent to design your business around serving people you already like. And then take steps to make sure that you don’t have too many incompatible people getting through.

I also enjoyed running my computer games business because my customers for that business were people I liked having as friends too — i.e. fellow gamers. I published games I enjoyed, and so my customers and I had some common interests. But the compatibility with my current business is much greater. I rarely met any of my games business’ customers face to face, but with my current business this is a regular occurrence. For instance, I like hosting meet-ups when I travel because I get to meet many interesting people that way.

I’m really looking forward to CGW this weekend, and the main reason is the people. I get to spend the weekend hanging out with people who are strongly interested in improving their lives, including many friends I already know and new friends I’m sure to make.

What kinds of people do you really like? Can you think of a business that would attract these people as your core customer base? You could start by asking some of them what their biggest problems and challenges are.

Even if you’re not a business owner, do you love the people you get to work with each day? Do you like your business’ customers and your co-workers? Do you go out of your way to hang out with them socially, just for fun? If not, that’s a hint and a half that you’re in the wrong place.

You don’t need to be so anal that you require 100% compatibility with everyone, and that isn’t realistic anyway, but downplaying your personality, interests, and desires in a vain attempt to get everyone to like you is not a path to happiness.

Running a business where you actually like the people you serve is very motivating. A day’s work feels like helping out your friends and doing nice things for people you care about.

Be unabashedly yourself. Many people won’t like that. Don’t chase after them. You may want to shoo them away instead. If they can’t accept you as you are, they aren’t a good match for you — personally or professionally.

There’s no need to check your soul at the door when you go to the office. If you can’t be yourself at work, you haven’t found — or created — the right workplace yet.

I’ve proven to myself that it’s possible to run a successful business this way. My web traffic keeps going up, hitting a new all-time high of 10.7 million page views last month. When I announced the new workshops, they sold enough tickets to cover all the costs within the first week, and some are still months away.

This October 1st will be my blog’s 7-year anniversary. Only a tiny percentage of blogs last that long. I doubt I’d still be happy doing this, however, if I held back in order to avoid alienating anyone.

One thing I’ve learned is that although not everyone will like you for being you, more people will respect you. And some of them, as ironic as it may seem, will actually refer new business to you even if they don’t like you that much. They may be disappointed that they don’t have much compatibility with you personality-wise, but there’s a good chance they’ll be able to tap into some appreciation for you at the level of character. While people may not like some of my personal interests, I think many of them still appreciate my honesty and openness. They may not like my playfulness or sense of humor, but they can still appreciate my willingness to push boundaries and stretch myself.

I’m not really trying to push people away or to alienate people — not directly. I’m simply making sure that I continue to enjoy my work and that it remains a labor of love. I hope you can understand and appreciate that. There are plenty of other people in this field, and if you find that my style or my message is a turnoff for you, I invite and encourage you to go elsewhere. It really is pointless to complain to me about such things though because despite the protests, I’m going to continue doing what I love, and I absolutely refuse to sanitize my public image. If you attempt to complain to me about that, don’t be so surprised when I treat you as a fool for doing so.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

One thing that encouraged me to take a look into this was when I learned of people who can’t lift themselves out of poverty because they don’t have a nickel. Imagine being in debt for the rest of your life and watching your kids go hungry for the lack of a few pennies.

In some countries the lack of access to capital is the main limiting factor in creating prosperity. I heard one story where a combined loan of $42 would have been enough to lift 27 people out of poverty (that’s only $1.56 per person).

Microloans, as opposed to pure charity, are more in alignment with my principles. I want to empower people to help themselves, not to “help” them in ways that disempower them and perpetuate an endless cycle of poverty.

Fortunately there are microloan companies that make it easy to help out. Last time I checked, more than 100 million people have already been helped by microloans — the kinds of loans that traditional banks won’t do.

I recently started using Kiva to make microloans to people. So far I’ve made loans to people in Lebanon, Peru, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Benin, the Philippines, Tajikistan, and more. Sometimes I loan the minimum of $25, and sometimes I loan more. It’s very easy to loan people money this way — really just a few clicks.

Most of the loans I’ve seen have repayment terms in the range of 9 to 18 months. I intend to keep recycling the money in my account, so as it gets repaid, I’ll loan it back out again. This way some of my money will always be working to help others. I haven’t been using the service very long, but if I like what I see, then I can add to my account over time and keep a good chunk of cash supporting other people’s goals at all times.

You can loan as little as $25 to someone, paid via PayPal. According to kiva.org, 98.79% of their loans are repaid, and when you get paid back, you can re-loan the money to someone else. I don’t think you earn any interest on your loans, but it’s a good way to put some of your extra cash to good use. It’s also a good way to shift your vibe. It’s hard to feel down when you’re helping others.

Most of the time, you’re funding loans collectively with many other contributors, so it’s not just one funder per loan. There may be a dozen or more people contributing to any given loan.

I like that you can review the details of each loan and make loans in alignment with your values. I wouldn’t fund a slaughterhouse operation, but I’m happy to help a farmer upgrade the irrigation system for his fruit trees. Most of the people I’ve funded so far have fruit-related businesses and need money to expand. It was easy to find these businesses just by doing a search on “fruit” on the site. This isn’t the only thing I care about, but it was an easy place to get started making loans that I feel good about.

Another thing I like is that your microloan money doesn’t go towards overhead. There’s some complexity based on how they pre-fund the loans — feel free to read through the text on their site if you want to know how it works from start to finish — but the bottom line is that 100% of your loan goes to support the people receiving the loan. You can make a separate donation to Kiva each time you make a loan, but that’s optional. Kiva has other supporting partners like major corporations and foundations (Google, Microsoft, etc.), so you can simply make loans without donating to Kiva directly if you so desire.

Microloans can’t solve all the world’s problems, but they do make a positive difference in the right situations. The originator of this idea won a Nobel Prize for it. Personally I think it’s a wonderful concept, and I’m happy to lend my support to it.

I encourage you to look into microloans, whether via Kiva or some other outlet. It only takes a few minutes to select and make your first loan, and the second time it’s even faster. A small action on your part makes a positive difference for someone else, and it certainly feels good to help people in this way. After doing 14 loans so far, I can literally find and make a new loan in about 60 seconds. The site is very easy to use.

If you want to, you can see the loans I’ve made via my Steve Pavlina Kiva page. If your values are similar to mine, feel free to piggyback on my choices and help fund one or more of the loans I’ve chosen.

Update: I just started a community lending group on Kiva called Team Pavlina, so please join our group if you’re on the site. This will allow us to see what kind of difference we’re making collectively. The team page doesn’t account for previous loans you may have already made, but it should track all the new ones.

Another Update: In our first two hours, Team Pavlina has already funded $350 in fresh microloans. That’s awesome!

Yet Another Update: A few hours later, our team has funded $1125 across 40 new microloans. We’re actually one of the fastest growing teams on Kiva.

Please join us in helping people help themselves. $25 isn’t a lot for you, but it can make a big difference to someone else.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Dr. Wayne Dyer says, “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” I hope you realize just how profound that statement is. But just in case you don’t, let me share a personal story about it.

During my first 5 years in business (1994-1998), I lost money every year, turning my $20K life savings into $150K of debt. That’s a net loss of $170K, or $34K per year on average. In 1999 I finally went bankrupt when my credit ran out.

Every year since then, my business made a decent profit.

So I suffered a negative cashflow each year from 1994-1998, and then from 1999 – present (12 years in a row and counting), I enjoyed a positive cashflow each year.

What the heck happened in 1999? What was responsible for this major change in results?

Learning How NOT to Make Money

I can actually pinpoint the exact moment when I felt the shift. I underwent a radical change in my perspective. I turned the way I thought about business upside down. My attitude and my motivation changed.

Obviously there were some catalyzing experiences that led to this epiphany such as getting kicked out of my apartment and going bankrupt, but when the conditions were right for it, the actual mental and emotional shifts happened fast — in a matter of minutes. It was like flipping a switch, partly in my mind… but mostly in my heart.

Here are the main before-and-after differences:

During my first 5 years in business, I focused on making my business successful. I pursued deals, money, and projects as if they were things to be acquired. I wanted to create hit products that sold well (computer games at the time). My motivation had a lot to do with proving myself, with making my mark on my particular field. I visualized my games getting glowing reviews, and I imagined seeing them selling in software stores. Money was a big concern. I always went for the deal that I expected would put the most money in my pocket and lead to the greatest success.

During my last 12 years in business, I focused on having fun, enjoying life, and creatively expressing myself. I stopped worrying about whether or not I was ever going to be successful. The bankruptcy supplied plenty of proof that I’d already failed dismally, so I didn’t see any point in continuing to pursue the same priorities that led me there. I was using a cardboard box as a piece of furniture, a symbol of just how much financial success I’d been able to achieve. Since I’d been soundly thrashed while playing the success game, I decided to change the rules and try my hand at the “let’s just play for fun” game.

A Tale of Two Mindsets

My initial motivation for starting my computer games business was to make more money. For several months before that, I worked as a contract game programmer on the side while going to college. I completed a 4-pack of Windows games, doing all of the programming and much of the design work for a local games company. When the games got published, I received about $1 in programmer’s royalties for every $7 the company received. Other people at the company contributed artwork, music, and some design work, and of course they closed a deal with a publisher too. But these were fairly basic games from a resource standpoint, and it was clear to me that I was doing well over 50% of the actual production work, probably 70-80% in terms of sheer hours invested. I even wrote the help files and instruction manuals.

I recognized that with a bit more effort, and with the help of the right people, such as an artist and a musician, I could essentially do what this company was doing, and I’d get to keep a lot more of the profits. Finding talented people to work with wasn’t too difficult, so soon I was off and running.

I had the technical and design skills to create more games at least as good as those I created for the local game company, but after years of trying, I was never actually able to make a profit.

While running the business for the first 5 years, I was constantly looking for ways to make money. If I smelled potential dollar signs, I’d chase after them. I ran after a lot of elusive deals that fizzled, fell apart, or collapsed, even after some advances were received.

I worked hard, hard, hard, sometimes even sleeping at the office. But I could never get the money coming in with any consistency. Ironically the harder I tried to make money, the faster I lost money. Instead of the Midas touch, I somehow mastered the Medusa touch.

Looking back, I didn’t do that initial contract programming work for the money. I did it for the love of game programming. I was in college at the time, and a friend pointed out a flier about a game programming position. He suggested I take a look at it because he knew I was into computer games, and we were both computer science majors close to graduating. It seemed like a wonderful opportunity to me.

I went for an interview with the company. I felt confident about getting the job, and I really didn’t care how much they paid me. I just wanted to work on games. So when they asked me how much I wanted to be paid, I said “$10 an hour,” which was a ridiculously lowball amount. Game programming may not pay as much as some other types of programming, but it certainly pays more than $20K per year, even for a starting programmer who’s still in school.

That company hired me on the spot, and I must say they got a great deal. I hit the ground running and threw myself into the first project they assigned me. They were stunned that I had a prototype up and running after only 9 days, and they actually pulled me off that project and assigned me something more ambitious.

One time my project manager asked me how many hours a week I was putting in. This was during the summer when I wasn’t attending classes. I told him about 40 hours, which would have seemed reasonable because I worked at their offices Mon-Fri during normal business hours. But I actually lied. In truth I continued working on their game projects at home on evenings and weekends. Realistically I was probably putting in 60-80 hours most weeks. And those hours were dedicated to solid coding work, not to email or any other distractions. I said that I worked 40 hours a week because I didn’t want to make the other programmers in the company seem less dedicated. I was on good terms with them — and I wanted to keep it that way.

I wasn’t working hard and fast for low pay to impress anyone. I did it for the sheer love of the work. I was enthralled by the technical challenges of each game. There was nothing else I wanted to be doing. I probably would have done that work for free.

Within a month or two, I think the management of the company could no longer stomach seeing me do such high quality work for so little, so they voluntarily doubled my pay. I didn’t request it, but I received it with gratitude. $20 per hour is a lot for a college student.

By the time the royalties were added in (after the game hit store shelves the following year), I probably ended up making about $50 per hour for programming those games, even though I only asked for $10 per hour. Plus it was really cool to walk into software stores and see something I created on the shelves.

That’s rather beautiful, isn’t it? I certainly thought so. It’s a classic example of sowing first, then reaping.

And then over the next 5 years, I proceeded to take this beautiful model and completely screw it up.

I underwent a perspective shift that seemed intelligent at the time. The potential for greater success hit me, and I began seeing dollar signs. That local games business immediately offered me another project to work on, and I turned them down so I could start my own game development business. I did that specifically because I wanted to make more money.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. I was simply expressing the American entrepreneurial spirit, right?

Getting My Ass Kicked by Kolrami

After 5 years of total failure, I finally had to admit that my great plan wasn’t working. Going bankrupt was a hint and a half that something went awry. The more I chased after money, the faster it ran away from me, as if screaming, “The horror! The horror!”

So in 1999 I finally gave up. I didn’t enjoy living this way. It wasn’t producing the results I wanted, so for that reason alone I could justify declaring “game over.” But beyond that, those 5 years were very frustrating. I did my best to be positive and optimistic, but seeing some great projects canceled after years of work were serious disappointments.

In my moment of epiphany, I realized that my decision to pursue money was when everything started going kittywompus. Becoming more financially ambitious simply did not work.

In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Peak Performance,” the master strategist Kolrami competes with the android character Data in a game of Strategema. The crew expects Data to win, just as you’d expect a modern chess-playing computer to kick your ass at chess. They confidently advise Data to take the shortest path to victory in order to put a dent in Kolrami’s smugness. However, Kolrami soundly defeats Data without breaking a sweat. Data is stunned by the loss and assumes he must have some kind of programming defect, going so far as to remove himself from active duty until he can figure out what’s wrong with him.

Later in that episode, Captain Picard informs Data that it’s possible to make no mistakes and still lose. This leads Data to challenge his assumptions about the game. He accepts Kolrami’s offer of a rematch, and this time he plays Kolrami to an endless stalemate, leading Kolrami to eventually surrender in disgust. The crew celebrates Data’s victory and asks how he did it.

Data confesses that he couldn’t defeat Kolrami by playing to win because that’s what Kolrami expected him to do. Every advantage-maximizing move that Data attempted was blocked by a superior counter-move from Kolrami. So in the rematch, Data used a different strategy. He bypassed obvious avenues of advancement and played for a draw instead of trying to win. This visibly frustrated Kolrami and allowed Data to theoretically play the game indefinitely, rendering defeat impossible.

This episode may contradict game theory and minimax algorithms, assuming that Data could search ahead more moves than Kolrami could, but setting aside that issue, I found tremendous value in this lesson. It seemed like the perfect analogy for my own situation. I felt like I’d made no serious mistakes, but I still lost. When I reviewed my previous moves, they still seemed reasonable even though they led to failure, and pondering whether I might have a defective brain proved as unhelpful to me as it did to Data.

During my first 5 years in business, I played to improve my financial score. I saw each business negotiation partly as a competition. If I got more money out of a deal, it meant that the other party got less. The more I succeeded in setting things up to maximize my financial score, the more I had to diminish the scores of others. In order to maximally win, someone else had to lose, at least a little bit. The harder I tried to win, the more friction I created that would ultimately cause me to lose.

Maybe some people are good at playing this kind of game. I wasn’t. Someone always had more resources, more time, or more expensive lawyers. The more I pressed for gains, the more I felt an opposing force pushing back against me. This led to many problems such as delays and cancelations. I could blame others for it, but the truth is that I was responsible for creating that reality.

When Internet marketers treat you as a dollar sign, can you sense it? Can you feel that tugging sensation — the sense that their main motivation is to get something from you? How does this ultimately affect your relationship with them?

Bypassing Obvious Avenues of Advancement

In 1999 I decided to stop trying to make money. I stopped trying to achieve success. I had 5 years of failure to convince me that it was time to change my approach. The bankruptcy was like a bonk on the head that told me I’d better not live the next 5 years like I lived the last 5. I had no more credit and no more cash to burn, so I had to make immediate changes. I had little choice but to try a different path.

When I tried to succeed, Kolrami always showed up to kick my ass. I could never defeat him no matter how hard I tried. The harder I tried, the more vigorously he thrashed me.

So I surrendered to his superior skills. I stopped trying to win. I accepted the irony that trying to get a higher financial score actually doomed me to a negative score. The opposing force was always greater than anything I could overcome.

I decided to apply Data’s lesson to my business. Instead of trying to win, I began to play for a draw. I bypassed what seemed like obvious avenues for financial advancement, recognizing that it was exactly what Kolrami expected me to do. If I made those self-maximizing moves, he would simply knock me back, and I’d be worse off than when I started. Again, I had 5 years of experience to drill this lesson into me.

In practice what this meant was that I stopped trying to maximize revenue or profits. In each business transaction, I opted to give more than I received in return. I always sought to leave extra value on the table.

For example, in mid-1999 I priced my next game release at only $9.95, even though I believed a competitive price would have been $19.95. I began writing articles for free. I committed hundreds of hours to unpaid volunteer work. I hosted free discussion forums on my website to help other game developers succeed. I spoke at conferences and hosted roundtables for free. I made it impossible for Kolrami to counter my moves because my moves weren’t competitive.

Last year I uncopyrighted all of my articles and podcasts and donated all of them to the public domain. I also committed to placing my new articles directly into the public domain (including this one). I encouraged people to republish, translate, and/or sell my work for their own financial gain if they wanted to.

I deliberately and intentionally earn less revenue and less profit than I feel I’m capable of earning. When it comes to income generation, I hold back when it seems like the logical move would be to advance. While Kolrami expects me to play to win, I’m actually playing for a draw.

Playing for a Draw

When I played to win, I lost for 5 years in a row. I never actually won. Even when it seemed like I nailed a winning move, it always turned out to be a mistake that led to my being checkmated several moves later.

When I played for a draw, I was able to make money for 12 years in a row. And I didn’t have to work nearly as hard to make that happen.

When you play to win in a competitive game, you’re playing for someone else to lose. If you want to maximize revenue or profits, you need to maximize the amount of money your customers or clients pay you. The more money you make, the less money they get to keep. You can only go so far down this path before you start meeting serious resistance. And the more tactics and techniques you use to try to combat that resistance, the stronger the resistance becomes.

How many businesses have had to learn this lesson the hard way? The more they try to extract the maximum amount of money from you, the more you feel driven to resist them, such as by resorting to piracy to cut them out entirely.

Which businesses do you dislike most? Do you feel those businesses are playing to win at your expense? How does that affect your ongoing relationship with them?

What are your favorite businesses? Why are they your favorites?

One of my favorite businesses is Google. I like them because I feel they give me a lot more value than they ask in return. They provide me with a free search engine, free email, free calendar, etc. I benefit from their engineering expertise every day, and I’m grateful for it. I’ve paid them back in some ways over the years, such as by generating hundreds of thousands of dollars of business for them when I had Adsense on my blog… and probably millions if you include all the referrals I must have sent their way, such as other bloggers who signed up for Adsense after learning about my results with it.

Facebook, on the other hand, left me feeling used and abused after two years as an active user of their service. So I shut down my personal page and my fan page and wrote multiple articles about why I had to abandon them and take my social networking to greener pastures. Ironically, one of those articles racked up 2000+ Facebook likes.

Of course these evaluations are being continually refreshed. Google might screw up, and I may have to bid Larry and Sergey adieu. Facebook might correct its problems, and I’ll have to refriend Zuck. But for now, my perception is that Google is still playing with me, while Facebook still wants to play at me.

Becoming an Enigma

What does it mean to win? What does it mean to succeed? Does it even make sense to pursue these ideals?

I learned the hard way that it’s actually easier to enjoy an abundant and fulfilling lifestyle by playing for a draw instead of playing to win or succeed.

When you play for a draw, you change the way others relate to you. They may not understand this consciously, but they’ll behave differently towards you nonetheless.

Some of your decisions may confuse people at first, especially if they’re used to dealing with businesses that play to win, but generally people seem to respond positively. A business that plays for a draw is a breath of fresh air.

When you leave extra value on the table without trying to extract it, that value rolls over into goodwill, which is the lifeblood of a sustainable business.

For example, by giving away so much free content, my business receives a massive number of referrals. New referrals happen every single day — passively and with zero marketing costs.

I’ve done okay financially too. Not counting income from my workshops or my book, my blog alone has generated well over $1 million in revenue since I started, mostly from joint-venture promotions and affiliate programs. That’s plenty for me to sustain a positive cashflow and to enjoy an abundant lifestyle.

What about the economy? I live in Nevada, which has the highest unemployment rate of any U.S. state, according to the U.S. Dept of Labor. Lots of people here are looking for ways to make money, and they’re getting thrashed by Kolrami. They’re trying to beat a game that they can’t win. The odds are better in the casinos.

The irony, however, is that I perceive my actual income as much lower than it could be if I put more effort into it. There are lots of ways I could potentially earn more money, and some are dirt simple. For instance, for about an hour’s work, I could immediately start earning at least an extra $10K per month in passive income just by putting up Google Adsense ads, which I used to have on the site for several years. See this post if you want to know why I dropped Adsense. I deliberately choose not to earn this money.

Now you might be wondering, What kind of idiot would pass up an easy $10K/month in passive income? The kind of idiot who’s had his ass kicked by Kolrami way too many times.

You see… I don’t run my business to optimize revenue or profits. When I tried to do that, my real-world results were the exact opposite of what I wanted. So these days I deliberately make business decisions that leave significant value on the table, untapped and unextracted. Kolrami cannot make sense of these moves, and therefore he cannot counter them. Consequently, any potential competition with him remains in a state of perpetual stalemate. He cannot defeat me, and theoretically I can keep playing indefinitely.

Instead of seeing me as a competitor, my peers in this field tend to regard me as a bit of an enigma. Many of them became very curious when I did the whole copyright giveaway thing last year. From their perspective it seemed like a very risky thing to do, perhaps even foolhardy. Some regard it as very brave, while others simply don’t know what to make of it. Most aren’t willing to go down a similar path, preferring to keep all their work copyrighted so they can control it. They know that I’m an intelligent and strategic thinker, but since this action doesn’t really make logical sense from the standpoint of maximizing revenue, they don’t perceive me as any sort of competitive threat, so by default I’m treated as a non-threatening ally. And the truth is that I’m not a competitive threat of any sort because I’m not playing this game to win. I’m still playing for a stalemate with Kolrami, and I plan to continue doing so indefinitely.

Making money is very easy now. I don’t consider myself uber-rich, but I’ve achieved what I consider to be functional abundance. All my bills are paid, and I have sufficient income to enjoy the lifestyle I desire. I can work when I want and take time off when I want. And I feel I can keep this going indefinitely.

Even though I’ve made plenty of money from this business, I always have the sense that I could be earning many times more than what I’m actually earning. But I deliberately avoid that level of success, not because I’m resistant to success but because I recognize that the pursuit of such success is a trap.

It was a major lesson for me to learn that I can actually make more money by trying to make less money. I can achieve more success by trying to succeed less. This is what has actually worked for me in the real world.

The path of abundance isn’t the path that maximizes velocity. It’s the path that minimizes friction. If you try to maximize velocity, you end up maximizing friction too, thereby causing massive amounts of heat. Ultimately, you burn up.

If you race to every destination by driving as fast as your car will allow, is that the optimal approach? Or is it better to intentionally hold back a bit, driving at speeds well below your car’s maximum potential?

Success = Sustainability

Instead of seeing success as some kind of accomplishment, victory, or conquest, I think it’s wiser and more effective to define success as sustainability.

This isn’t just about how we run our lives or businesses. It’s about how we relate to each other and to our planet as a whole.

Is the most successful energy company the one that extracts and sells the earth’s resources as quickly as possible? Is a successful relationship one in which you extract maximum value from your partner, leaving them drained at the end of each day?

I like Stephen Covey’s analogy of the goose and the golden eggs. If you try to maximize all-out production by extracting as many golden eggs as possible, you eventually kill the golden goose, thereby causing your production capacity to crash. For long-term sustainability, you must nurture the golden goose. Getting greedy with the eggs will cause Kolrami to swoop in and turn your goose into foie gras.

The game of business isn’t winnable. No matter how hard you play to win, you’ll always lose in the end. Even if you become an extremely cunning player, laying waste to all who oppose you, eventually you’ll die, and your deathbed score resets to zero. Kolrami always gets the last move.

But if you largely ignore the score and play for a draw instead of trying to win, Kolrami cannot defeat you. You can play the game for as long as you like.

When you seek sustainability, the games of money and business are transformed. Instead of competing for survival and success, you can relax and enjoy yourself. Playing for fun is a whole different ride.

When you play for fun instead of trying to win, most people will relate to you in the same manner. Some players may initially assume a competitive posture with you, but once they realize you’re playing for fun instead of trying to win, they’ll quickly lower their shields, and they’ll begin to play the game with you at your level — for fun. Even highly competitive players naturally sense there’s no honor in thrashing an opponent who isn’t trying to beat them. No real victory can be achieved against a player who stands no chance of winning. Players that try to overwhelm defenseless opponents simply make themselves look ridiculous.

I’m not saying that you’ll never encounter a stubborn victory-minded person who seeks to trounce you anyway, but it’s a lot rarer when you decline to resist them. Competitive people tend to expend more energy on those who resist them. If you offer no resistance, they’re more likely to consider you a potential ally.

When I tried to win in business, I experienced frustration and failure. When I played for a draw, I had fun and enjoyed sustainable success.

If you’re still trying to win, maybe it’s time to give it up. Kolrami is just too good. You cannot hope to beat him. He’ll take all your best moves and turn them against you, causing you to end up worse off than when you started.

As for defeating Kolrami, in the strictest sense, I did not win.

I busted him up.

Thanks for the inspiration, Gene. You are still loved. <3

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, then you’d probably expect me to take a non-traditional approach to staffing. You’d be right.

After writing articles like 10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’m not interested in creating dull, corporate-style positions and then looking for people to fill those predetermined roles, as if I’m buying parts for a machine. My business is too fluid for such rigidity anyway. I need people who can be flexible, adaptable, and willing to do what needs to be done. This tends to be true of small businesses in general though — people wear many different hats.

Second, I think the traditional employer-employee model is too rooted in industrial-age thinking. My business is highly creative and always evolving, so I need growth-oriented people who will push themselves to develop new skills and embrace new experiences. I’m aware that many businesses spend millions training their employees to become Farmville pros, but that isn’t a core skill for my business.

And lastly, I don’t want to work with people who just want a job to pay the bills. I want people who have the right heart set, people who are motivated to help create and deliver growth experiences for others — and to contribute to a powerful group energy that’s dedicated to this pursuit.

Lots of people are looking for work right now, and I have far more work on my plate than I can personally handle. I have an abundance of opportunities that I need help to pursue. So I think the timing is right to start building a staff.

Economic Considerations

Let’s be brutally honest. Unemployment is very high right now. In my home state where the reported unemployment rate is around 13-14%, it’s estimated that the true unemployment rate is more than 22% when you factor in the people who’ve given up looking for work.

Lots of people are in need of work. And I have plenty for them to do.

Many people think they need money to pay their bills, but they really don’t. Those are merely socially conditioned needs. People need food and shelter, but if they have those needs covered, then they don’t actually need money.

This isn’t a situation where I need to pay people to do work for me. I just have to make sure their basic needs are met well enough, and it should be no problem finding plenty of people to work for me for no pay.

This eliminates a lot of red tape as well. If I don’t have to put people on the payroll, then it’s less paperwork, less taxes, and more money to reinvest in growing the business. And if people aren’t officially employees, then I don’t have to worry about various rules and regulations that apply to employer-employee relationships. This greatly reduces the complexity of my business and makes it leaner and more efficient, meaning that we can provide more value to people with less overhead. It also means we can offer lower prices for products and services.

In light of the above, I’ve considered many different staffing models, trying to figure out what would be the best fit for my business, my values, and the current economy. Eventually I settled on a model that I feel pretty good about…

Slavery

I have to admit that I don’t really want employees. If I wanted employees, I’d have hired some years ago. Deep down, I know that hiring employees isn’t the right direction for me. It’s not what I truly desire.

What I really want is to build a staff of slaves.

Slavery solves so many problems that I’d otherwise have to deal with if I hired employees or worked with independent contractors. Even unpaid interns can be a bit burdensome. Slavery is clearly the best option.

This model also aligns well with my ongoing exploration of D/s. I don’t want my workers calling me Boss. That just sounds lame. I’d much rather be called Master. It’s better for my self-esteem.

I already have more than a year of experience in the role of Master, and I like to think I’m getting pretty good at it. I have one excellent slave who’s been with me for more than a year, and I enjoy her immensely. However, she’s more of a personal slave than a business slave, although she does a great job of giving me typo reports on new blog posts. Eventually it dawned on me how great this slavery model would be if I extended it to my business as well.

The good news is that I’m a very benevolent Master. I have no desire to abuse or punish slaves, so there’s no need to worry about that. I only use positive conditioning and training methods. I’m very good at expressing gratitude and appreciation. I want my slaves to be happy and fulfilled. Unhappy slaves are no fun to work with.

Female slaves can be very sexy too. I’d especially love to have one as my secretary. Why on earth would I want to fill such a position with an employee — and be subjected to all the burdensome rules and regulations and potential liabilities that come with it — when I can fill this role with a willing slave instead? It’s a no-brainer — and it’s certainly a lot more fun — to recruit slaves instead of employees.

Also, since I’d prefer female slaves for certain positions (such as missionary), I don’t want to have to deal with laws regarding discrimination based on sex (slave sex is awesome), religion (you can’t have two Masters), height (shorter slaves are easier to dominate), etc. Involuntary slavery may be illegal, but voluntary slavery is perfectly legal, and it isn’t regulated by the same burdensome package of crazy laws that I’d have to deal with if I hired employees.

I also think that slave is a more honest and authentic job title than employee. I command. You obey. This is simple and straightforward.

The Benefits of Slavery

Fortunately slavery isn’t just about work, work, work. I intend to take really good care of my slaves, so there are some pretty cool benefits. I think that once you consider the overall lifestyle package of what enslavement can offer, you’ll surely agree it’s better than getting a regular job.

First, I’m happy to feed and shelter my slaves if they’re in Las Vegas (or willing to relocate), so you’ll get free housing and free vegan food. I have a big house in one of the nicest neighborhoods in Las Vegas, and there are some empty bedrooms that could easily be converted to slave quarters. We could probably fit 2-4 slaves in each room.

Slaves will also have full access to the pool and spa. Imagine relaxing in the hot tub and gazing up at the stars on a warm desert night at the end of a day of hard work. Your slave accommodations will be quite luxurious, certainly better than what most employees enjoy.

As my slave, you’ll be immersed in personal growth. You’ll gain valuable skills, learn the inner workings of my business, and have the opportunity to hang out with other growth-oriented people as well. You’d be surrounded by an amazing support group of fellow slaves, encouraging you to become the best slave you can possibly be.

As a slave you won’t have to worry about being fired since you’re not employed. If you got really uppity, the worst thing that would happen is that I might pawn you off on someone else. So you could still enjoy being a slave, just not with me as your Master. While I enjoy playful slaves very much, at the end of the day I need them to be obedient, not ornery.

Another benefit of slavery is that you no longer have to worry about discovering your life purpose. I know how challenging and confusing it can be to figure this out. Fortunately when you become my slave, it then becomes my responsibility to define your life purpose for you. Your purpose will be to serve me and my business and to help the business grow, prosper, and provide strong value to more people.

Full enslavement may seem like a big commitment, but I can make the decision easier for you. We can start with a probationary period of 3-6 months — a trial enslavement. Then you can see if you like it. If at any time during this period you decide that enslavement isn’t for you, we’ll restore your freedom and send you on your way. I’ve always had strong faith in the try-before-you-buy model. I think that once you get a taste of enslavement, you’ll never want to go back.

Of course the rewards for full enslavement can be even better in the long run. If you’re able to earn my trust, and if I see that you are indeed a hard working and loyal slave, then I may offer you the opportunity to travel around the world with me. I’d like to do workshops in other cities, both in the USA and abroad, so I’m going to need some slaves to help make this a reality. How does an all expenses paid trip to Europe sound? This could be your opportunity of a lifetime.

Now obviously you’ll have to relinquish your freedom to get access to all these benefits, but were you really taking full advantage of it anyway?

You see… enslavement is the new freedom. Think of how freeing it will be to no longer have to worry about paying rent, affording healthy food, or figuring out what to do with your life. You’ll be provided with abundant healthy food, a luxurious shelter, and limitless social opportunities. You’ll automatically inherit a meaningful life purpose — to help people live happier and more fulfilling lives and to co-create a more conscious planet. As a valued team member, you’ll be able to make a powerful contribution. You’ll be surrounded by a benevolent Master and fellow slaves who love you, and you’ll be showered with appreciation and gratitude for your service.

Think of how much happier your life will be as my slave. For some this is a dream come true.

How to Apply

If becoming my slave sounds good to you — and I’m sure it does — then please apply by writing to me at the mailing address on my contact page. I must insist that you use regular postal mail. I won’t be accepting emailed applications.

Qualified applicants for enslavement must be:

• loyal
• obedient
• submissive
• caring & compassionate
• hard working
• trainable
• horny (for certain positions)
• playful (but not too ornery or uppity)
• growth-oriented

Please include a personal letter explaining your interest in working with me. What kind of work appeals to you? How would you like to develop yourself? What would you like to contribute to my business and to this field?

Do you want to help improve Master’s website, assist in facilitating live workshops, serve as a personal assistant, be Master’s sexy secretary, etc? If it’s the latter, please include a submissive-looking photo of yourself.

It would be helpful for me to see your educational and employment history and what special skills you have, but please don’t merely send me your resume or CV. Your work history isn’t the only factor I’ll consider, and in some cases it isn’t even the most important element.

I need to get a good sense of where your heart is. What’s important to you in life, and how does enslavement fit into that picture?

Lastly, let me know if you’re willing to relocate to Las Vegas (or if you already live here) and if you’re able to meet up for an enslavement interview at some point. I could potentially use virtual slaves for certain tasks, but it’s just not the same as co-located slaves. The immersive environment is a significant part of the enslavement experience. And the more people I have calling me Master in person, the more motivated I am to do my best work.

Obviously I don’t need to know your salary requirements since there is no salary.

If you’re curious as to whether I can offer a health plan, I certainly want my slaves to be healthy and fit. I’ll make sure you get plenty of exercise and that you’re fed only vegan foods, so you don’t get sick too often. If you get hit by a bus, that’s a shame indeed, but I’m sure you can still do some kind of work once you recover. We’ll do the best we can to nurse you back to health.

I sincerely regret that I may not be able to enslave everyone who desires and deserves it. If you seem like a qualified candidate and if there’s still space available, I’ll do my best to accommodate you. Even if I can’t enslave you right away, it’s possible that with enough hard work from the initial group of slaves, we may be able to purchase a larger estate that can house more slaves. So don’t give up hope if you don’t make the first cut. If you want it badly enough, we can probably find a way to make it happen.

My staffing plan may seem unconventional, but I think you can see the logic of it. It’s obviously a win-win situation. I win with a staff of dedicated, loyal, obedient helpers and no stressful bureaucratic red tape to deal with. My slaves win with free food, shelter, training, love, encouragement, an amazing lifestyle, and in some cases… sex play. And my readers benefit with an abundance of fresh value such as an upgraded website and new products and services offered at very reasonable cost. After years of struggling to figure out how to build a staff in alignment with my values, I finally discovered a path that excites me.

Update 4/11/11 – Is this for real? Read Help Wanted (the Serious Version) to find out.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

I wasn’t sure if I should even write a post like this since it took a lot of time, and part of me felt my time would be better spent diving in and doing what I plan to do instead of explaining what I plan to do. Part of me still wonders if writing this was a good idea. I mainly wrote this post for two types of people: those who like it when I’m very transparent and want to know the behind-the-scenes details, and entrepreneurial readers who like it when I share insights into how I run my business. In the end, I did feel this post would provide enough value to enough people to justify taking the time to write it.

That said, this post is disgustingly long, so only read it if you think this kind of information will be worth your while.

There are 1,451 completed surveys so far — more than I expected. I’ll keep the survey running in order to collect even more data over time. The aggregate results appear to have converged though, so I don’t expect them to shift much, but I still learn new insights from the text comments.

As many people guessed, I did put a lot of time and effort into crafting the questions, so they would give me good information. I used Survey Monkey to conduct this survey and bought their gold membership ($299), so I could get access to some advanced features I wanted to use. For example, I randomized the answer order for certain questions to eliminate order bias. I did this for the list of potential product topics in question #2, so each person would see those topics listed in random order.

In addition to lots of raw data that I can view in different ways (charts, graphs, etc.), the results also included more than 3,000 text comments. When I saved them as a PDF, it was 225 pages long. I spent many hours reading through every comment, taking notes as I went along.

Why a Survey?

The reason I conducted this survey was to get some hardcore data about what people would like to see next. How can I do a better job of helping people grow?

Some of the survey comments suggested that I should just keep doing what I love and not worry about what other people think I should do, implying that it was a mistake for me to even conduct such a survey. I think they misunderstood my reasons for doing this.

I’m currently in a situation where I have many options that look wonderful to me. I would enjoy doing more blogging, podcasting, workshops, writing books, making videos, creating audio programs, etc. I also have many different interests, and I can be just as passionate making a product about entrepreneurship as I can about subjective reality… or any of a few dozen other topics.

However, I can’t do everything all at once.

I can’t create products on 25 topics in 5 different formats all at the same time. I can’t even write articles on all the topics people want to learn more about as quickly as they’d like. The demand for more content on certain topics is far greater than what I can satisfy. And there’s also clear demand for other media forms — especially audio.

Since I enjoy sharing ideas on many different topics, and since I also enjoy expressing myself through a variety of different formats, I think it makes sense to figure out where the greatest demand is for topics and formats, so I can focus my efforts where they can benefit the most people.

If I want to share something simply because it interests me, I always have the freedom to do that. But if I see that 3x as many people want help with problem A vs. problem B, then I’ll be more inclined to explore problem A in greater depth. And if I see that people prefer one format vs. another, then I’ll use the most requested format.

I think it’s reasonable to focus my efforts where they can have a greater positive impact. To me this is simple pragmatism. Giving people what they want is entirely compatible with doing what I love. It’s not either-or. I can do what I love and still work on doing a better job of serving others.

This Community is Certifiably Insane

As I reviewed the survey results, especially the text comments, one thing became abundantly clear: Y’all are crazy!

I mean that in the nicest possible way. Let me ‘splain…

When I started looking over the survey responses, in the back of my mind, I was trying to answer the question, What does this community want from me?

I soon figured out that this question has no real answer. Or at least it seemed that way initially.

It’s not just that people want different things. It’s that what one person wants, another person wants the exact opposite of that. Some people are actually bothered when I attend to someone else’s needs. There’s almost a form of sibling rivalry at work here.

One commenter says I should write more about topic A because it’s obviously my strength, and they lose interest and tune out and maybe even get annoyed whenever I write about topic B. The next person shares essentially the same feedback, except that topics A and B are switched. There are dozens of pieces of feedback like this.

It wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration to choose any two random topics and fill in one for topic A and one for topic B, and I could probably find a survey comment that said something close to that.

Some people say that subjective reality is nutso and that I should stop writing about it and get real. Others tell me that subjective reality is obviously my unique strength and that I should devote a lot more time and energy to it.

Some people said I should write more about relationships, and “don’t neglect the sexy bits.” They find traditional relationship models unfulfilling, and they want me to keep exploring and sharing what I learn, so we can compare notes (if only in a virtual way) and figure out how to experience deeper levels of unconditional love. Others say I should stick with what I know — which is obviously productivity — and drop all the fluffy relationship writing because it turns them off.

Many people requested that I share more personal details of how I live. They love in-depth illustrations of how I apply certain ideas on a practical level and what the results are, and they also like it when I share my emotional journey as I figure things out. Others said they really don’t care to know any details of my personal life; they just want the facts and how-to info in short, easily digestible formats; personal stories are fluff. The latter opinion was a definite minority, but it still goes to show that there are different points of view.

What I found most interesting on a personal level is that each person needs/wants me to be something different for them. Everyone defines my primary role relative to what they need, and they all have different ideas about how that role should evolve over time.

Some people want me to help them get out of an unfulfilling career situation, start a business of their own, and make it successful.

Others want me to help motivate them to set bigger goals, to help them focus, and to improve their self-discipline.

Some people want me to write about fewer topics and focus on what they believe I do best (and my “best” topics are different for everyone). Others want me to keep exploring and write about new topics that I haven’t covered yet.

It’s obvious that everyone is a unique individual with different problems, challenges, goals, and desires. If I try to look at these results as if they’re coming from a community that speaks with a singular voice, then that voice is clearly insane.

I’ve known for years that it’s impossible for me to please everyone. But these results took that realization a step further. In order to please, satisfy, or delight some people, I actually have to frustrate, annoy, and potentially piss off other people who think I’ve taken a wrong turn. In fact, pretty much anything I might do is going to have this effect.

Some people were frustrated by my focus on live workshops last year because they decided in advance that they would never come to a workshop, so all the time and energy I invested into those workshops was worthless to them. It was as if I turned my back on them during this time. Other people were delighted to attend these workshops and registered as soon as I announced them. The experience was transformational for them — and now they keep telling me to “Please do more workshops!”

Perhaps my only recourse is to apologize for not being everything you’d hoped I’d be… and for my apparent inability to ever become that. Sometimes I may delight and inspire you, but at some point I will probably frustrate and annoy you (if I haven’t already done so multiple times). Even though I can’t always serve you well, I do hear you, and I still care about you. My writing flows where my attention goes, and sometimes my attention won’t go in the direction you’d like.

It’s a bit strange to accept on a deeper level that no matter what I do or don’t do, I’m always annoying some people while delighting others — and that it’s impossible to prevent that. Even this post will likely fascinate some people who enjoy hearing these kinds of details, and it will annoy others who couldn’t care less about this topic.

No matter what I do next, some people will shout, “OMG! That’s awesome! Yes yes yes! I love you!” while others will curse, “You frakkin loser! You obviously don’t know what the f— you’re doing. I’m outta here!”

Despite all of this, I still find some value in imagining that this community is speaking with a single voice. It’s a collective with lots of different parts, and those parts aren’t harmonious. Doesn’t this describe us as individuals as we strive for inner harmony? If we do what pleases one part of ourselves — Mmmm… sleeping in late, that feels very restorative, and I love the extra dream time — another part is upset by that choice — WTF, you loser! You wasted your whole morning lying in bed!

I think the point here is that even when you can receive high-quality feedback from intelligent people who are on a similar journey, in the end you still have to follow your own inner guidance. To attempt to satisfy others’ desires for you would only make you crazy. You can gain a lot by listening to others and by caring about what they have to say; however, at the end of the day, their feedback is only useful if it helps you get in touch with your inner truth. Other people’s opinions cannot serve as a substitute for your inner guidance.

Ultimately this is how the survey results affected me — by further validating the path I was drawn to take and by giving me some extra clarity about the details.

Let me share some of the specific results now.

What Are the Most Requested Topics?

The most popular topics for new products are, in order:

1. Success & Achievement
2. Self-discipline
3. Life Purpose
4. Entrepreneurship
5. Courage
6. Habits

The most popular topics were all packed pretty closely. Success & Achievement at #1 had about 55% strong interest, while Habits at #6 had 47% strong interest. Most people expressed strong interest in multiple topics.

The suggested topic with the least interest was Blogging, but even that topic saw 1 in 6 respondents saying they had a strong interest in it, which is still a very sizable group of people.

Self-discipline was the early leader in the survey as the first few hundred responses flowed in, but it was later overtaken by Success & Achievement. I can see why the early responders might have a bias towards wanting extra help with self-discipline, especially if they caught the survey early because they were web surfing as a form of procrastination.

There were a lot of text comments expressing interest in products about subjective reality. As far as the aggregate data goes, however, that topic was near the middle of the pack. Same goes for the Law of Attraction. There’s definitely enough interest to justify making products on these topics though.

From the comments I also saw that a lot of people want help setting a direction for their lives and moving forward with action. Many people feel they’re currently stuck (dead-end jobs, unfulfilling relationships, unsupportive friends). They want to get moving forward, and they may already have a good idea of what to do, but they’re having a hard time getting themselves to do it. It’s clear that people don’t just want more information and advice — they also want me to play a bigger role in helping to motivate and push them to do what they feel they ought to be doing. This was one of the most important insights I picked up from the survey — that people actually like it when I push them as opposed to merely suggesting or informing.

Some topic choices will likely be more popular than others, but most topics have enough strong interest that I can justify taking the time to create products on all of these topics and more. In the short-term I might be better off focusing on the topics with the greatest demand, but in the long run, I can pretty much create whatever interests me most, and there will likely be plenty of people who share my enthusiasm for the subject. From a business standpoint, following my inspiration is quite justifiable, especially since inspired products can be completed and released faster than uninspired ones, and at a higher level of quality. In other words, I can develop products in much the same way that I write new blog posts. I just need to start catching bigger waves of inspiration and riding them further.

For a typical blog post, a wave of inspiration lasts a few hours. To create a larger work, I may need to catch a wave that lasts for days, weeks, or perhaps even months. I’m excited to focus my attention on bigger waves this year as opposed to smaller ones. If you think that implies I’ll be doing less blogging this year so I can spend more time creating larger works, that’s true. After writing more than 1000 articles, I want to tackle some bigger challenges. This is important for my own path of growth. If I stick with what’s easy, life loses its edginess.

What Are the Most Requested Formats?

The most requested formats for products are, in order:

1. Ebooks
2. Audio Programs
3. Home Study Courses
4. Print Books
5. Video Programs

There’s no overwhelming favorite here. Ebooks have a plurality of strong interest at 48%, while most other formats are in the 20-40% range.

Teleseminars are the least popular format at 9%. That’s interesting to me because many of my friends in this field love doing teleseminars. From a creator standpoint, it’s very easy to put on a teleseminar, but the feedback says that people often find it to be a rambling, unfocused format, and they don’t like having to call in at a set time. This is especially bad when potential listeners are scattered across different time zones. No argument there.

Even so, with 1 in 11 people having a strong interest in this format, that’s still enough to justify doing a teleseminar, but clearly it shouldn’t be my main focus for content delivery. One potentially good use of a teleseminar would be that if/when I decide to put on a new live workshop, I could host a teleseminar for people who are on the fence about registering, so I could share more details about what to expect and to answer people’s questions.

Ultimately the format feedback suggests that it’s a matter of individual preference. Some people prefer to read. Others want to hear my voice. Others want to see and hear me. Everyone has good reasons for liking what they like.

Given these results, I think the best approach is to choose the most appropriate medium for whatever message I’m trying to express. Every format has its strengths and weaknesses. If I’m going to invest the time and energy to create a new product in a certain format, I want to play to that format’s strengths.

Since I’ve already done so much writing and since I’ve already had a book published, I’m not as attracted to doing more of the same when it comes to making new products. I’d rather see what I can do with other formats.

Presently I’m feeling most drawn to audio. It’s more emotionally expressive than text, and being able to hear tone of voice is especially important for content that’s intended to motivate or inspire people to take action.

Audio is very accessible. You can listen to it on your computer, iStuff, cell phone, CD player, etc. Audio is also very efficient to digest. You can listen while driving, exercising, making dinner, going for a walk, flying on a plane, etc. Audio listening doesn’t require a big time commitment.

I’ve listened to many audio programs in the past 20 years, and it’s one of my favorite formats. I especially like it when the author expresses his/her passion and enthusiasm for the ideas being shared, as opposed to merely reading the content in a near monotone. I not only learn new ideas, but I also get infected by the positive vibe of the author. Sometimes understanding the author’s vibe is even more important than absorbing the content.

A really good audio program can provide more value with each repeated listening. I own some 6-hour audio programs that I’ve heard more than 50 times, such as Earl Nightingale’s Lead the Field. If you’ve ever heard Earl speak, you know he has a one-of-a-kind voice. Quite often he takes a long time to express the simplest of ideas, but it’s hard not to become fascinated by the subject matter simply because he’s so fascinated by it.

I listened to hundreds of hours of audio programs while I was going through college (about 2 hours per day on average), and it made a huge difference for me. Since I didn’t have a big budget for these programs, I mostly listened to the same programs over and over, or I checked out new ones from the school library.

Looking back with the benefit of hindsight (and a lot more experience), I can see that content from those old audio programs was pretty basic. Sometimes the author had a valuable lesson, but he picked a bad example. For example, Earl Nightingale raved about a particular business’ great customer service, holding them up as a model of excellence, but that business was later found to be cheating its customers. Despite some shortcomings in these programs, I was infected by the authors’ positive vibes and can-do attitudes. I learned how to stay strong when dealing with brutal setbacks. I learned to think outside the box and tackle problems creatively. I learned to trust myself more and not worry so much about what other people thought of me. And I learned that success is more about the journey than the destination. These were all pretty basic lessons, but they were important ones. It was the repeated listening of those audio programs day after day for years that indelibly etched those lessons into my mind. They still serve me well today. Because these ideas are so ingrained in me, I forget that many people have yet to internalize them, especially those who’ve had the opposite lessons ingrained into them from a young age.

I still frequently listen to audio programs, even those I’ve heard many times before, because the benefits are so powerful.

Another reason I’m leaning towards audio for new products is that it’s very accessible to me as a content creator. I’ve already created many podcasts, and I have everything I need to create quality recordings. The process for creating audio is fairly fast and efficient, even when you include the editing time.

I’ve received lots of positive feedback about my podcasts, and there were many comments in this survey asking/begging me to continue doing them. I can appreciate the demand for more audio content, but podcasting isn’t quite the right medium for the kinds of ideas I’d like to express through audio. Podcasting seems well suited to bite-sized or episodic content, but I’d rather go much deeper into a topic, and I wouldn’t expect that a 6-hour podcast would be well-received.

Audio isn’t such a great fit for content with tons of detailed how-to steps where you end up taking a lot of notes. But I rarely produce that kind of content anyway. I tend to favor content that helps people shift their thoughts, perspectives, and behaviors, and that kind of content seems very well suited to audio.

Video is a possibility too, but it’s not as good for reinforcement through repetition, and it requires more time and effort from the viewer. Video is more expressive though, but I expect I’ll favor audio for now and only go with video when I feel it’s the best format for what I’m sharing.

Physical Products or Digital Delivery?

One thing is clear. My readers overwhelmingly prefer digital delivery for products they might buy from me. This doesn’t surprise me. If you read my blog, you’re probably fairly Internet savvy.

Only 2% of respondents said they only want physical products and that they won’t buy anything digitally delivered. But most people would rather have products delivered to them instantly over the Internet as opposed to having something physically shipped to them, even if both options are available.

There are some good reasons for this. People from all over the world read my blog, and physical shipping isn’t practical for everyone. It can be very expensive, and it seems lame that some people have to pay more for shipping than the cost of the product. In some places the postal system is unreliable or corrupt, and people can’t trust that their products will actually arrive.

Also, some readers are travel sluts like me, and digital products are easier to digest while traveling. You can receive them wherever you are instead of having to wait till you get home, and they don’t weigh you down.

Many readers would not like to see me get into physical products because of the negative environmental impact. Why produce more dead tree items and plastic packaging and then expend more resources to ship it all over the planet, especially if the value is in the content?

On the other hand, some readers say they appreciate having a physical product, especially one with high production values. I can understand the importance of thump value to certain people, although they’re clearly in the minority.

The only format situation that even came close to being contentious was the ebook vs. book question. Some people really like having a physical book to read. They’re still in the minority, but they’re a bigger minority than for any other format. For audio and video, it’s clear that the majority of people don’t want CDs or DVDs. They’d prefer to receive that kind of content digitally.

This feedback makes some decisions easier for me. There clearly isn’t enough demand to justify the added work of producing and shipping physical products, not even for books. To create physical products would add tons of extra work in terms of design, packaging, production, inventory, shipping, returns, and so on. This means a lot more complexity for my business and higher prices for you. It would also mean that fewer products would be created, and you’d have to wait longer for each one to be released. I don’t have that kind of patience, not after years of instant publishing.

So in this case, I must tell that 2% that I won’t be able to serve their needs. I intend to go with digital delivery only. To deal with physical products seems like an enormous waste of time, energy, and resources.

After a product is digitally delivered, people can still print an ebook on paper, burn CDs, or burn DVDs. So if they really want the physical media for some reason, they can produce that at home or use a service to do it for them. It may not be as snazzy looking as something that’s professionally produced, but they can still have their products in physical form if it’s important to them.

My book is published by a publisher, so they still do the physical publishing thing. But based on my last royalty statement, it appears that my book is now selling more Kindle copies than physical copies.

If it sounds like I’m glad the survey results here turned out the way they did, that’s true. I expected this kind of result, so it wasn’t a surprise, but I also wanted to know how many potential customers I might be turning away if I don’t create physical products. This survey suggests it’s around 2%. I can handle 2%. I could probably handle 10-15%, but it would sting a bit more.

To Steve from that 2%: You frakkin loser! You obviously don’t know what the f— you’re doing. I’m outta here!

To Steve from the other 98%: OMG! That’s awesome! Yes yes yes! I love you!

Download or Access Online?

Regarding how the content is accessed, most people want to be able to download it to their computer or to some other digital device as opposed to consuming it online. The one exception was video — people are okay watching a streaming video online, but for ebooks, audio, and other types of content, they prefer to download and save it.

There were several comments asking me not to use DRM in my products (digital rights management). This would mean locking the content to a certain device, like offering an ebook that can only be accessed in Kindle format or an audio program you can only access via iTunes. I prefer highly accessible content formats myself, so I’m in favor of letting you transfer the content to whatever device you prefer, including devices that may not exist yet.

For ebooks I’d favor PDFs, and for audio I think MP3s would be the most sensible format. There are other audio formats I could use, but for spoken voice content, I think they’re overkill. Listen to one of my podcasts, and you should be able to hear me just fine. It’s certainly better than AM radio.

There were also some requests to provide ebooks in other formats like Kindle and Nook. If I make ebooks, I’ll look into these other formats and make them available if it seems reasonable to do so. It’s not a big deal for me to make content available in multiple formats and put them all in the same ZIP file. Then you can choose whichever version you’d like to use, and put it on your favorite device of the moment. I simply want to avoid the craziness of trying to support dozens of formats for everything I release. If there’s a lot of demand for a particular format and if it seems reasonable to support, I’ll do it.

Since I expect to go with audio for my initial products, I think it makes sense to package the content in a format that you can download and save to your computer. Then from there you can put it on whatever device you desire — your iPod, iPad, Kindle, cell phone, burn to CDs, etc.

Content Length

The most important insights on content length came from the text comments as opposed to the multiple choice questions. The aggregate data told me that people didn’t have a strong preference for any particular length. Lots of comments essentially said, “The exact length isn’t a big deal to me. Create as much content as you need to cover the topic thoroughly. Don’t add filler fluff, but don’t leave out important information either. Quality is more important than quantity.”

I liked seeing this kind of feedback, and I agree that it makes sense to allow the content itself to dictate the length.

With digital products I don’t need to worry about engineering the content around space limitations. I can put the integrity of the content first. I don’t have to design audio programs around a 74-minute CD, and I don’t have to worry that longer books will be more expensive to print. I’m used to having unlimited space when I write articles, so this suits me well.

Some people expressed concern that I might be planning to take my old blog posts and repackage or rehash that same old content to create products. People, please! Repackaging old content would bore me to tears.

A few months ago, if you searched for my name in the Amazon Kindle store, you’d have only found one item listed — my book. Now that same search shows about 30 items listed, and I didn’t add them. It wouldn’t surprise me if there are hundreds by the end of the year. So clearly I don’t need to repackage my old content in other formats because there are plenty of people already doing that, now that my blog posts, podcasts, and newsletters are uncopyrighted.

How would it help me grow if I went back and rehashed my old content in different formats? Is that how I’d want to spend my life? Heck no. I’m not the kind of person who’s capable of completing projects like that.

One of my motives for getting into product development this year is so that I can conduct a deeper exploration of certain ideas. A deeper exploration doesn’t mean revisiting the past though. Even if I make a product on a topic I’ve already written something about, the product will be based on my best insights at the time I create it. That’s the only way I can create products that are meaningful growth experiences for me. I can’t force myself to remain loyal to what I’ve written in the past. I have to stay centered in the present and create something that’s a complete and integrated work, not something that’s slapped together from different pieces created from different paradigms.

In many cases, blogging isn’t the right medium for what I’m trying to share. I can’t adequately explain subjective reality in a dozen blog posts written over a period of years. This only gives people a glimpse into it, and if they put all those articles together, it won’t quite make sense because each article is written from a slightly different perspective. Between articles my understanding evolved, and at each point, I wrote from my current level of understanding.

However, I could explain subjective reality pretty well with an elegantly designed audio program. Then I could ensure that the whole program uses a consistent framework that matches my best understanding at the time of publication.

The same is true of many other topics. Blogging isn’t the right medium to do them justice. I can only give people one small slice of the big picture in a blog post, but I can’t share my complete present-day understanding of that big picture.

In practical terms, it’s really just a matter of taking enough time and space to do the topic justice.

I’ve written some serial blog posts to cover certain topics in more depth, but that feels like I’m trying to stretch the medium to do something it isn’t well suited for. To me it makes sense to use a better medium for longer works.

This year I intend to invest most of my work time creating these longer works. I’ll still do some blogging throughout the year, but it’s not going to be my top priority.

One thing I learned about content length is that many people like receiving content in easily digestible chunks. I can certainly understand that since I’m the same way. If I create a lengthy audio program, for example, I can divide them into modules of about 30 minutes each. Each module would be a separate MP3 file. This makes it easier to go through the program on a device like an iPod. I’ll also use filenames that make it easy to see which module is which.

Pricing

This was the trickiest part of the survey for me to construct. What I really need to know here is what kind of pricing model will work best for my readers overall. Are some pricing models more favorable overall than others?

I’m going to put a lot of work into the new products I create, so I think that a direct exchange of value is a reasonable way to offer them. I’ve experimented with a number of different business models over the years (advertising, affiliate programs, joint venture deals, workshop registrations), and they all share one thing in common — ultimately someone buys something. A sale is made. Either I got paid for the advertising that led to that sale, or I got a commission on the sale, or I generated a direct sale.

This year I want to give more attention to direct sales instead of using more indirect methods of generating revenue. As with any change I make, some people won’t like it, while others will find it to be a very positive change.

If you’re only looking for free content and you feel certain that you’d never buy any products from me, then you may not like this change since I don’t expect to create as much free content this year. Fortunately, according to the survey, less than 2% of people say they’re in that category. The vast majority expect they will probably or definitely buy something that I create, as long as they’re interested in the topic. For obvious reasons it’s good to know that a critical mass of people will be receptive to this. Otherwise it wouldn’t make much sense for me to try to create and sell my own products.

The truth is that every day, people are buying products from my website. Most of those sales are currently going to affiliate or joint venture partners. I can see what the sales are because I receive sales reports and commission checks every month. Often this site generates more than $100,000 in monthly sales, sometimes a lot more.

I understand that some people will resist anything with a price tag, but I have years of data to show me that people are definitely coming to my site and spending money on products and services that interest them. Otherwise my existing business model wouldn’t be working so well.

In the survey comments, some people suggested that I could rely primarily on donations, making all of my content and products free and then asking people to donate to support them. I agree that this model sounds wonderful in principle, but I put my faith in real world testing, and my years of testing don’t support this model as a viable one. Although thousands of people have donated, and I continue to receive new donations each day (which I very much appreciate), the income from donations doesn’t come close to other sources.

For whatever reason, it’s abundantly clear that my readers would much rather buy a product or service than make a donation. The difference between sales and donations is roughly a factor of 100. Sure I could try to optimize donations, but I can’t see those optimizations increasing the results by 100x. So as far as primary business models go, a donation-based model isn’t a serious contender. I think it makes more sense to focus on business models that allow me to provide more value instead of spending my time trying to squeeze more revenue from existing value.

I also considered alternative pricing models such as “pay what you think it’s worth,” but I don’t have good reason to believe those creative models will work as well as a more standard pricing model. In my view a cutesy pricing model can easily create more problems than it solves. I like being creative, but I also like being effective.

Another result from the survey is that my readers are looking for a great value. Most of them are not so price sensitive that they want me to cut corners, but nor do they want me to overengineer the quality if it would significantly increase the price. For most people it’s the quality-price ratio that matters, so in terms of setting prices, that’s what I really need to get right.

I’ve seen this with my joint venture partners too. When they can offer a sweet deal that’s a great value for the money, sales are significantly higher. When a temporary discount is offered, we might see triple the normal sales during that time. My readers know a good deal when they see one. They’re savvy buyers.

In terms of pricing my products, I have many options, and the truth is that I could probably make all of these options work for my business.

One option is to create premium products and sell them for premium prices. Lots of Internet marketers do this. They might sell a home study course for $500 or more, and they usually write really long sales pages to explain why it’s worth that much. Many people won’t spend that much on info products, but at $500 per sale, you don’t need a lot of sales to have a thriving business. If you make 38 sales a week, you’re earning $1 million per year.

I believe I could build a thriving business with this model, but I don’t plan to go this route. Many of my readers couldn’t afford my products if I did this. Millions of people read my blog, coming from all over the world. Why set prices so high that I prevent most of them from becoming customers? I’d rather have more customers and serve more people, even if I make a lot less money per sale. I cover topics that are of interest to a great many people. I don’t serve a niche audience. I’m used to getting my content into the hands of lots of people.

What about the opposite end of the pricing spectrum? I could sell products at very low prices, so that just about everyone could afford them. I don’t have a particular price in mind here, but for the sake of argument, let’s say I keep everything below $20.

Now the interesting thing about digitally delivered products is that the costs for each sale are very low. For online sales you have to cover transaction processing fees, customer support costs, and fraud-related expenses. But if you could scale it up well enough, you could build a successful business with lots of small sales, as long as you have a large enough customer base.

Digital bits cost very little to send. The truth is that my fulfillment and processing costs would be nearly the same for a 30-page ebook or a 20-hour video program, as long as I can deliver everything digitally. The larger product will cost a little bit more in terms of bandwidth, and it will probably generate more customer support costs, but the difference shouldn’t be that great. Of course there’s a big difference in the cost to create each product, but after that’s recouped, the per-sale costs are very close. This means that as far as my costs are concerned, I could justify selling even a monstrous home study course for under $10, and I’d probably still make a profit if enough people bought it and if it didn’t require too much customer support.

This side of the spectrum doesn’t feel good to me intuitively though. If I use lowball pricing, then I’m basically saying that the content I’m producing is barely worth more than its digital bits. It’s disposable. Buy it on impulse. Consume it and be done with it. That isn’t the kind of content I wish to create. If people buy a product from me, I want them to have some pride of ownership and to be willing to pay a fair price for the value that I offer. If they don’t believe my content has much value to them, they can support someone else whose content they prefer.

Good content certainly has value to me, and it’s obviously worth more than the transfer costs of the bits. I’m happy to support good content creators, and I believe they deserve to be paid well for creating excellent content. If I feel the publisher and/or content creators deserve my money and if I feel their asking price is fair, I buy. If not, I do without and spend my money elsewhere. I don’t download content illegally (my computers contain no illegal software, music, movies, etc).

When I see content being digitally delivered, I know the transaction costs are probably quite low. If I’m buying something directly from the content creator, then I can guess that a significant percentage of each sale will directly benefit that creator. To me this is fine if I want to support that creator. If their product is of high quality, and if they charge a reasonable price that gives me a lot of value, then it’s a fair exchange from my perspective. This kind of purchase feels good to me.

With most personal development info products, it’s hard to quantify the value in financial terms. To say that an info product has any particular value seems silly to me. Marketers will sometimes tell you you’re getting $5000 worth of value for $1000, but I think you’ll agree that this is just a sales tactic when you’re talking about info products, especially those that are digitally delivered.

The truth is that the value of an info product can’t usually be quantified in financial terms. What is the financial value of doing work you love vs. work you hate? What’s the financial value of discovering your life purpose? What’s the financial value of increasing your self-discipline? We could try to come up with some kind of formula to put a price tag on these, but I think you’ll agree that this is a lame approach.

So I can’t really put a financial value on the products I sell. I don’t know what they’ll be worth to you. I believe they’re worth a lot more than the mere transfer costs for the data bits, but I can’t say exactly how much more.

What I can do is consider relative value. I’ve digested a ton of info products over the years (quite literally a ton if you were to weigh them), so I have a good grasp of what’s out there. I think that one aspect of an intelligent pricing strategy is to price my products at a level that makes them an extremely good value relative to what else is out there.

So if I create a $500 product, I want it to be one of the best $500 products you’ll ever see. If I create a $10 product, I want you to feel it was among the best $10 you’ve ever spent.

This is how I price my workshops. I figure out what I believe is a good deal, and I price on the low end of that. I make them as affordable as I can while still feeling good about the income they generate.

So this is how I intend to price my products. First, I want to set prices low enough so lots of people can afford them. I want my products to be highly accessible. I don’t want people holding off because they can’t afford them or because they’re concerned about the financial risk. Fortunately I can afford to keep prices low because with digital delivery, my costs are low. I already have access to a sizable audience, so there are a lot of people collectively supporting it. I’m not limited to a niche audience, so I don’t need to set prices super high.

To further reduce the risk, I can offer a money-back guarantee, and I can also use try-before-you-buy. For instance, I could release the first segment of a new audio program for free (like a podcast), so people can listen to it before deciding if they want the full program.

The next consideration is that I want to set prices high enough so that I feel good about each sale. I have no desire to be paid more than I deserve, but if I’m going to put a lot of time and effort into each new product and do my best to deliver outstanding value, then I want to feel that these efforts are appreciated and supported. I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I really like the idea of shifting to a primary business model that relies on direct sales as opposed to the mostly indirect models I’ve used in the past. This will help me better gauge to what degree people appreciate and value the work I’m doing… and which parts of it they value most.

I also want to continue to expand the work I do, such as by building a staff to help me deliver workshops in other cities, not just in the USA but internationally as well. If product sales are strong, this goal becomes much more accessible.

Lastly, I want people to receive an outstanding value for the money they spend. I want them to get such a good deal that they wouldn’t hesitate to buy from me again. I also want them to feel good about recommending my products to their family, friends, and co-workers. I’m a prolific content creator, so I expect to release many products over time. Consequently, I expect that the bulk of my business will come from repeat sales. Just as writing a good article can turn a one-time visitor into a long-term reader, I want to make sure my products provide so much value that when someone buys one of them, it’s even easier for them to make another purchase.

So what does this mean in down-to-earth practical terms?

Because value is the main consideration, it means giving you good deals on pricing all the time. It also means favoring a price range that’s highly accessible.

In the survey results, the most frequently mentioned cut-off price was $100. People said that below $100, they could easily buy what I was offering, but above that amount they might have to think about it.

For most digitally delivered products, I expect to price products between $40 and $100. By keeping them under $100, they’ll be more accessible. But I don’t really want to go below $40 because that means I’d be creating products that are worth less to people than a new video game. If I was going to make a product for only $20, I’d probably just release it for free and not bother trying to sell it. I want my products to be significantly better than my free content. And there are already people creating sub-$20 products from my free content, such as Kindle books.

Whatever I feel is a fair price for a new product, I’ll probably set the actual price at around half that amount or less. So if I create an info product I think I could sell well for $300, I might price it just below $100. I can afford to do that with digital delivery, and by consistently delivering great value, I expect that my business will thrive on repeat sales. Basically, I want to make it a no-brainer for people to buy products that I create; I want the value of my products to be high enough relative to the price that people can easily figure out it’s a very good deal for them and that missing out would be worse.

This is really just a variation on the model I used to build a highly successful blog. I provide lots of value at a cost that can’t be beat (free). I can afford to do this because I keep my business lean and efficient, and I leverage technology to get quality content into people’s hands for almost zero cost. So the result is that my blog gets tons of referrals with no marketing costs. My trick, if you could even call it that, is to provide more value at lower cost than others can.

Borders Books recently filed for bankruptcy, and they plan to close 200 stores. That’s the price of failing to keep a business lean and efficient. Most of a book’s value is in the content, not the physical packaging. But most of the costs are incurred when physical books are printed and moved around.

I don’t intend to play any pricing games with you, so don’t expect me to jerk prices around at different times of year such as with special sales or coupons. I don’t plan to do time-limited discounts at launch time either. I want to build my business on long-term repeat sales and a win-win relationship of service to you, not on marketing tricks. If I felt my regular prices weren’t a good enough deal, I’d set the regular price lower to begin with.

When I release each new product, it’s fair to expect that whether you buy it that day, or 30 days later, or a year later, the price and the package will most likely be the same. The only disincentive to waiting to buy is that you’ll miss out on the benefits of having the product while you postpone the purchase. I don’t intend to use artificial time pressure to push you to “buy now” as opposed to waiting. If you’d rather wait, that’s up to you. While you wait, I’ll either be off traveling to sharpen the saw after an intense period of focused work, or I’ll be back at work creating the next product.

As I shift my business in this direction, it’s very important to me to do what feels right. If something doesn’t feel good to me, I simply won’t do it. What feels good is inviting you to become a direct customer of mine and to cultivate a long-term relationship that’s a win for us both. I get to grow my business, keep doing what I love, and expand in new directions. You get a stream of new products that will provide significantly more value than my free content, and they’ll be of higher quality and less expensive than what you’ll find elsewhere. Some products won’t appeal to you, but others surely will.

No silly marketing tricks. No risk to you since everything will have a money-back guarantee. No need to even believe what I’m saying at this point (although hopefully you can see the logic of it). Just wait and watch it unfold.

Order in Chaos

Although at first glance the survey data appeared somewhat chaotic (particularly the text comments), ultimately I was able to discover plenty of order within that chaos.

By trying to figure out what others wanted from me, I learned new truths about what I wanted from myself.

I realized that within me are many seemingly conflicted interests… so many voices telling me where to go next. And in a way, all of those voices are valid. They’re all worthy of a yes.

I can’t say yes to all of them at once. I can’t even hear them all at the same time and have it make any sense. However, I can pause and listen to each one and say yes one by one.

I can focus on one interest at a time and fully immerse myself in it. I can also share what I learn from these explorations since that helps me internalize and make sense of each discovery. Then I can come up for air, let it go, and take some time off to relax a bit and have a life.

This doesn’t mean I have to say no to all the other voices. It simply means I must say, “Not yet.”

Most of the waves of inspiration I’ve been catching in the past have been fairly small waves — an article, a series of articles, sometimes a 30-day trial. But some have been larger waves, like a book and a workshop.

While I still enjoy the smaller waves, I want to spend more time this year riding bigger waves. But when I’m riding a big wave, I have to give it my full attention. I can’t distract myself with all the other potential waves to ride.

So if it seems that I’ve disappeared for weeks at a time, it doesn’t necessarily mean I’m dead. It doesn’t mean I’ve lost interest and abandoned my blog. It just means I’m busy riding a wave of inspiration, and I’m giving it my full attention. When I resurface, I’ll likely have something to share with you, perhaps something even bigger than this insanely long blog post (that was a joy to write).

Whatever you do, just don’t ask me about release dates or how long things will take. Anyone who’s ever asked me when I’ll be done writing a new article can attest to how meaningless my replies are. If you want to know when my next product will be released, go consult a psychic.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

2010 in Review

First of all, 2010 was a year of tremendous growth and exploration. It was one of the most unusual years for me. Some 2010 highlights include:

• Adjusting to the separation from Erin in late 2009 and working through many details of that
• Exploring interpersonal relationships (long-distance relationship, polyamory, D/s, new friendships, unconditional love, oneness)
• Quitting Toastmasters after 6 years of membership
• Traveling extensively (on the road for 3 months of the year; visiting many U.S. states, 5 Canadian Provinces, and Puerto Rico)
• Delivering 4 Conscious Growth Workshops
• Shutting down my online contact form (spending less time on email and more time interacting face to face)
• Helping to kick off a Las Vegas men’s group
• Conducting deeper explorations of subjective reality and inspired living
• Doing various personal experiments (trying hot yoga, running my business from the road, etc.)
• Uncopyrighting my work and releasing my blog posts and podcasts into the public domain

In many respects this was a chaotic year. If you place a high value on stability and security, you probably wouldn’t have enjoyed doing what I did. I spent a lot of time pushing the boundaries of my comfort zone. This year was more stressful than most, but it was also a year of wonderful new experiences. I feel like I really lived this year, not in the sense of living it up, but in the sense of having “had a life” outside of work.

For me 2010 was a year of exploring, especially in the area of interpersonal relationships. But it was also a bit crazy at times. I did a number of things “just for the experience” because I’d never done them before. It felt good to stretch myself in new directions as I was coming out of a marriage and rediscovering myself as an individual.

I also took a deeper look at my values and considered what was truly important to me in life. I thought more deeply about what I wanted to explore, experience, and contribute. My 40th birthday is coming up in April, so this felt like a good year to pause, reflect, stretch myself, and gain some clarity about the road ahead. I definitely spent more time working on my personal growth this year than I did on my professional growth, and I have no regrets about that.

Expanding Upon 2010

In the coming year, I’d like to continue building upon some of the explorations I began in 2010. I’d especially like to continue traveling. I’d love to visit Europe in 2011 since I’ve never been there. I like the idea of spending a month or more in a new country and immersing myself in the culture and language, but I can also see the appeal of visiting multiple countries in the span of a few weeks to get some rapid exposure and discover places I’d like to revisit for a deeper experience.

When it comes to picking travel destinations, I favor going to new places I’ve never visited, and beyond that I rely on intuition. Since there are so many countries I’ve never seen, I’m mainly interested in going to places that are new to me. It doesn’t matter whether they’re culturally similar to the USA or not. I learned a lot from the 5-6 weeks I spent in Canada this year; the more time I spent there, the more subtleties I discovered.

I’d also like to continue exploring in the area of relationships and social connections. One of my biggest challenges is maintaining a balanced social life. Because of the popularity of my website, it’s easy for me to be socially lazy because there are always fresh connections and invites coming my way. Turning off my contact form was a good step in the right direction because it removes the biggest social firehouse in my life and gives me space to initiate connections instead of feeling I have an endless line of people who need to hear back from me. I love being social, but I want to do it on my own terms and in a way that feels good to me.

This year I intend to pay more attention to the quality and depth of my connections. I could do with less quantity and variety for a while. I also want to shift further away from online socializing and towards more face to face connecting.

2011 Focus

Because 2010 was such an intense year, I don’t have as much clarity about my primary focus for the upcoming year as compared to previous years. I’m still processing my 2010 experiences and working through the rippling after-effects of separating from Erin. Consequently, I may be indulging in some wishful thinking in this attempt to clarify my 2011 focus. I’ll do my best to share what I can though.

I think the main thing I’d like to explore this year is alternative business models. I feel I’m in a good place to do this for several reasons.

First, I’m not particularly attached to money. I don’t fear experimenting in this area, even if it means taking financial risks and causing swings in my income. I’m much more curious than I am greedy. I’ve been an entrepreneur for 16+ years, and I’ve lived through many lean years and many abundant ones. I don’t see money as a power source, and I’m just not particularly inspired by financial gain. I am, however, curious to explore different ways of generating income this year.

On a practical level, I have plenty of financial fallbacks if things go south. I can write more books or do more workshops to earn more money if needed. This puts me in a good place to explore and experiment without feeling like I have to succeed. But I also get bored easily if I do too much of the same thing. I like to change things up since it makes my business more fun and varied.

I require a certain level of risk (or challenge) in order to keep my work interesting. If my work becomes too easy, I get bored, and my motivation plummets. If I had a guaranteed path to success staring me in the face, I’d abandon it and try something else. Otherwise my life would be like playing a video game in God mode. If there’s no challenge, the game is boring and pointless. I flunked out of university when I tried to go through it in 4 years (too easy, no challenge, pointless), but I graduated with two degrees when I pushed myself to do it in 3 semesters (challenging, difficult, exciting).

In previous years, I’ve done a lot of lifestyle experimenting, especially with respect to working, eating, sleeping, and relationships. I enjoy the growth and learning that comes from such experiments. This year I’d like to do more experimenting in the space of business.

During some of the years that I’ve been blogging, most of my income came from advertising. Then most of it came from joint-venture deals. Then most of it was from doing workshops. I’ve been experimenting with different ways of making my work financially sustainable since I started blogging, but in 2011 I’d like to be more conscious and deliberate about trying different ideas. I think it will make my business more fun, exciting, and challenging and less predictable.

My top priority isn’t to make as much money as I can. If I wanted to maximize my income above all else, I’d prioritize my actions very differently. As an end in itself, making money is pretty boring to me. It’s like playing a video game just for the score.

It’s fair to say that my website is grossly under-monetized. I’m pretty sure I could be earning 10x as much money with my existing traffic if I made income generation my top priority. But I don’t feel the sacrifices would be worth it.

I’d say that my priority when it comes to business model experimentation is to maximize my happiness. I want to enjoy my freedom, including the freedom to travel, and not feel chained to my work. I want to continue enjoying and increasing the level of financial abundance in my life. I want to connect with people as friends and not feel that transactions are more important than interactions. I want to provide strong values that benefits people. And I want to express myself honestly and openly; I’m unwilling to conform to others’ expectations in order to get more business.

I like to experiment, and I change my primary business model almost every year. I don’t do this because I’m trying to make more money. I do it because I get bored with the old model. When my methods for generating income become too secure and predictable, I’m drawn to abandon them in order to try something new. I like to drop proven methods even if it means less income because I gain more from the process of exploration than I gain from the income. I learn and grow faster when I experiment often, and life is more fun and exciting.

So for 2011, I’d like to do even more experimenting with my business model. You may see me doing things that look highly questionable — perhaps even foolish — if you’re coming from the perspective that an entrepreneur is supposed to optimize a business around revenue generation. I’d rather optimize for fun, excitement, and challenge. And of course I’m happy to share what I learn along the way.

Happy New Year!

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina