Before Tim Ferriss....There Was Mark Cuban

And he was a whole lot more financially successful too!

I just read Mark's book on Kindle for something like $2 - How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It - and although a little short, I enjoyed reading about his feisty background.

Here's the money quote:

In sports, the only thing a player can truly control is effort. The same applies to business. The only thing any entrepreneur, salesperson or anyone in any position can control is their effort.

I had to kick myself in the ass and recommit to getting up early, staying up late and consuming everything I possibly could to get an edge. I had to commit to making the effort to be as productive as I possibly could. It meant making sure that every hour of the day that I could contact a customer was selling time, and when customers were sleeping, I was doing things that prepared me to make more sales and to make my company better.

And finally, I had to make sure I wasn’t lying to myself about how hard I was working. It would have been easy to judge effort by how many hours a day passed while I was at work. That’s the worst way to measure effort.

Effort is measured by setting goals and getting results. What did I need to do to close this account? What did I need to do to win this segment of business? What did I need to do to understand this technology or that business better than anyone? What did I need to do to find an edge? Where does that edge come from, and how was I going to get there?

The one requirement for success in our business lives is effort. Either you make the commitment to get results or you don't.

See also - Marginalizing Mark Cuban.

Competition To Marginalize Harvard, Further

I just posted this to HomeschoolDad.com's Facebook Fan Page....but I think many of y'all will enjoy it from an *economic standpoint* as well:

Yet Another Homeschool Success Story

Laura Deming - Episode 1 from The Thiel Fellowship on Vimeo.

3.25 years ago her father wrote to me through this here blog...

He said:

My daughter at age 12 was invited to work in one of the top biotech labs in the UC system by the world-famous scientist who runs it. Two years later, the kid is still there doing advanced experiments on flatworms into the molecular basis of aging. She's applying to university next year at age 15. Just took her SATs 2 months into her 14th yr and scored 780, 790, 800.

She's a smart kid but no more so than lots of other smart kids I see around. The difference: she wasn't held back by the pedagogical hacks that run those wretched hoosegows called "schools."

Today I emailed him and asked him for an update - which you just watched in the form of that video.

Only a Moron would be surprised!

I have to credit her father, John, for giving me the expression *educated outside the system*.

I use it as often as I can in lieu of the misnomer *homeschooling*. (We're never at home....and we certainly don't do school!)

I mentioned this Peter Thiel before, see - The Brightest Bulbs Skipping College.

Running Out Of Self-Help Books!

Is that all you have to do, THINK?

In a sense, yes, Think & Grow Rich is about working *smart* rather than simply working hard.

I just finished it and my verdict...

I would say it is decent.

The background on it is that way back when, Andrew Carnegie (the steel magnate) commissioned this dude to spend 25 years studying *success*, er successful earthlings. And this book is allegedly the fruit of that laborious endeavor.

The more of these self-help, get-rich gurus I read....the more their theories blend together. In fact Tony Robbins, whom I just read, I feel rips substantially from this book which was published back in 1937.

To both of them, it's all about *mindset* - persistence, will power, self-control, etc.

I must note that there were two surprising parts to this book.

One, the author talks about sex a bunch. He asserts that highly sexed individuals are usually very successful - and they ought to be admired for their flirtatiousness rather than deprecated. (Throughout this subject....all I could think of was Bill Clinton.)

And the other section which was a little wacky was the part where Hill starts talking about, with considerable certainty(!), exactly what happens to people after they die.

In books like this I really look forward to great anecdotage and there was a bit (mostly Thomas Edison and Henry Ford), but not really that much considering all the alleged empiricism behind the text.

But that's not to say that Hill's suggestions on how to succeed in life don't constitute sound, if not profound advice. I will chew on his ideas and assess later on.

Anytime you hear people say *I've read that book 5 times* - as I did with this one - I think it can't hurt to check it out.

And, not for nuthin', but the book has actually sold over 60 million copies now.

Another Great YouTube Entrepreneurial Success Story

Yeah, it involves *dragon breath*.

Click here.

Another Business Book, Eaten

Not a long post here.

I just read - Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive - my 26th book of the year.

It was OKAY but nothing special.

The book was all over the place, essentially anecdotage from a shrewd, experienced businessman.

I'm not quite sure why it is so widely read and critically acclaimed.

Its best feature?....That it was an easy, skimmable read!

Forget Trump's endorsement on the cover. Read his book instead.

Website Building Chronicles - 3 - The Sales Letter

Do y'all know what a *sales letter* is?

Of course you get them in your junk(!) mail nearly everyday.

But they are alive and thriving online too. In fact they are all over the freakin' place since stamps are cheaper on the web.

These days I've been working on my own for HomeschoolDad.com.

One expert resource I've found is Dan Kennedy. I had previously read one of this other books and was very impressed. All these other guys (like Eben Pagan) mention him repeatedly and Kennedy certainly lives up the hype, IMO.

I just procured Kennedy's The Ultimate Sales Letter: Attract New Customers. Boost your Sales., I devoured it, and must say it was very helpful.

You have to understand that these guys have VAST experience; they've split-tested everything from fonts to formats to diction; and have amassed expertise that we could never acquire independently.

Heck Kennedy's book is only $10 AND I did one better - borrowing it from my library.

The other thing you can do, of course, is just read a bunch of successful sales letters/pitches online!

In fact Tim Ferriss recently did a blog post on the dude who's made tens of million$ from "The Truth About Six-Pack Abs" info-products. So I watched his sales videos closely and jotted down a few important notes.

Building a sales page, website, ebooks, etc. is a *process*. What I've learned is to overcome my school-induced perfectionism and to just throw something up and tweak/refine on the go.

I grabbed some popular software to help make snazzy sales pages - OptimizePress - for $97 or so.

Actually when I'm done I will have SEVERAL sales pages to which I'll direct different audiences depending upon demographics, specific group bigotries, etc.

One thing that's holding me back, still, is that I'm not entirely clear WHAT I'm selling and TO WHOM.

But the more research and brainstorming I do, the more clarity I'm gaining.

See also:

Website Building Chronicles 1 - For Morons

Website Building Chronicles 2 - Eben Pagan Selling Me On Change

Couple Of Book Rec's

Dan Kennedy - Famous Bull Photo

Tim Ferriss lists The Magic of Thinking Big as one of his top book recommendations. In fact he said he read it 5 times in high school or something.

Published 50 years ago, and with several million copies sold it was weird that I had never heard of it.

Anyways it's a decent read - inspirational and full of tips on developing an attitudinal plan for business success: wear nice clothes, be infinitely polite/nice, etc.  Tim's book rec's, and I've read a few of them now, have not been anywhere nearly as good as his own works (4HWW and 4HB).

The other book I read this week I had heard recommended by several big names recently so I concluded it was worth buying (surprisingly, my library network didn't have it).

Dan Kennedy's book How to Make Millions with Your Ideas: An Entrepreneur's Guide was also seemingly dated, published back in 1995.

I found this one to be much better, one of those compelling reads that you kill in a single day and has you lamenting the end of the book. It's chock-full of stories of earthlings who made $hitloads of money in the 80s and early 90s - mostly via infomercial-type products and innovations. Many of the big winners sold *information products* but of course in the pre-internet age the vehicles were different: FAX machines, classified ads, color TV commercials, and toll-free phone numbers. Watching how many people today have cleaned up selling content online and looking back at their forerunners I can't help but in hindsight say, "DUH...of course billions were going to be there for the picking on the web!"

I sure wish I had read this book 15 years ago!!!

What was striking about these little case studies is how banged-up, bankrupt, and thoroughly uneducated the people were originally. Seemingly almost NONE of them even went to college - notably the ultra-wealthy author himself.

So take THAT all y'all college flacks out there!

Saving Up For WHAT Exactly?

Here's a great parable from The 4-Hour Workweek.

An American businessman took a vacation to a small coastal Mexican village on doctor’s orders. Unable to sleep after an urgent phone call from the office the first morning, he walked out to the pier to clear his head. A small boat with just one fisherman had docked, and inside the boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish.


"How long did it take you to catch them?" the American asked.


"Only a little while," the Mexican replied in surprisingly good English.


"Why don’t you stay out longer and catch more fish?" the American then asked.


"I have enough to support my family and give a few to friends," the Mexican said as he unloaded them into a basket.


"But...What do you do with the rest of your time?"


The Mexican looked up and smiled. "I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take a siesta with my wife, Julia, and stroll into the village each evening, where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life, señor."


The American laughed and stood tall. "Sir, I’m a Harvard M.B.A. and can help you. You should spend more time fishing, and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. In no time, you could buy several boats with the increased haul. Eventually, you would have a fleet of fishing boats."


He continued, "Instead of selling your catch to a middleman, you would sell directly to the consumers, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village, of course, and move to Mexico City, then to Los Angeles, and eventually to New York City, where you could run your expanding enterprise with proper management."


The Mexican fisherman asked, "But, señor, how long will all this take?"


To which the American replied, "15-20 years. 25 tops."


"But what then, señor?"


The American laughed and said, "That’s the best part. When the time is right, you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You would make millions."


"Millions, señor? Then what?"


"Then you would retire and move to a small coastal fishing village, where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take a siesta with your wife, and stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos…"

Silicon Valley - Eventually Will Fall Into Its Own Pit

You have to love this story - Apple Store Employee Seeks To Plant Union Seed:

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - An Apple Inc store employee has started a union in a rare move at a company known for its near-fanatical following and cutting-edge mystique.


Cory Moll, a part-time employee at an Apple store in San Francisco, is working to form a union to fight for better wages and benefits and to address what he says are unfair practices in the company's glass-and-steel retail showrooms.


While unions are strong in industries like trucking and autos, they are largely unheard of in Silicon Valley companies, which pride themselves on being quick-footed and having the flexibility to hire and fire.


The would-be Apple union's website is sparse, but states: "At Apple, our most important resource, our soul, is our people. Our Time Has Come."

Hah! Take that Steve Jobs!

The *most important resource* at Apple IS NOT those amazing products that sell themselves....it's the $14 per hour multi-pierced geeks that work in Apple Stores!

I would love nothing more than to see a successful unionization effort at Apple - and at Microsoft, Google, among Warren Buffett's staff, etc.

There's no legitimate reason all those *entrepreneurs* enthusiastically vote with the socialist faction...

Except of course for their overriding hatred of Christianity.

It certainly doesn't help that Republicans are only half-hearted free marketeers but still...

All these Morons are mentally trapped in *binary* - just the way the organized political parties want it.

Extreme Couponing?

Now my first wife and I might possibly be the only people who hadn't heard of so-called *extreme couponing* - that is until we caught a few minutes of it on the hotel's color TV last week:

There are plenty more videos on YouTube, of course.

I myself as a stock option trader don't understand the *stockpiles*.

If you buy something you don't need for free (we'd say *bought for even*)....flip it to someone else for crying out loud - even at a below-market price. These cheapskates should be selling all that extra salad dressing and Powerade to their neighbors for 25-50 cents a bottle.

A few years ago, while reading Will Durant's Story of Civilization, I first learned that there were other forms of greed besides ambition for wealth. The precise example involved monks or something who'd camped out atop trees for weeks, naked, with nothing to subsist on. Durant characterized this as *spiritual greed* - and you may recognize a strain of it today amongst the radical earth-humping set. See - The Year Without Toilet Paper.

Watching these extreme couponers cursing at the register when they don't get the final price all the way down to a penny I couldn't help but think I was witnessing *miserly greed* or something.

Now I don't think it's worth my time and energy to spend 20 hours a week trying to buy $600 worth of useless, unhealthy groceries that I may be able flip for a $200 profit.

BUT it may be worth my homeschooled kids' time...

It, if successful, could be a great entrepreneurial exercise for them. For example I saw one woman buy 100 Butterfingers for free. She had a 50 cent-off coupon, *double coupons*, and they were retailing for $1. I'd have my kids sell those for 25 cents a piece outside of of the government schools here and they'd be sold out in no more than an hour.

You have to think though....

Once these strategies have hit color cable TV they are probably on their way out. I mean how long before stores and food manufacturers start putting quantity restrictions and whatnot on these coupons?

The First, Fast Mover Advantage

NY Man Makes 120K...

A quick-thinking New Yorker who started selling T-shirts celebrating Osama bin Laden's death made $120,000 in less than two days, TMZ reported Friday.

Maurice Harary, 23, went straight to his New York apartment when he heard Sunday that bin Laden was killed by US forces in a precision raid in Pakistan. He immediately began building a website to sell his "bin Laden is dead" T-shirts.

Harary claimed that his site went live at 3:30am local time Monday and sold 10,000 T-shirts at $12 each by Tuesday night.

The sales added up to $120,000 in less than two days as Americans expressed their relief that the man who masterminded the 9/11 bombings was dead.

Wow, right?

Well revenue should NEVER be mistaken for profits....it's still pretty impressive.

Do As I Say, Not As I Did

"It was a hard decision and I know my parents had their concerns. And while I would never encourage anyone to drop out of school, for me, it turned out to be the right choice."

Yeah, the richest man in the world and one of the most successful entrepreneurs EVER did actually drop out of Harvard - in case y'all didn't know.

But now he has the balls to stand up in front of children the world over and tell them that THEY should stay in these juvenile mind prisons.

Next we'll be hearing politicians tell us that WE need a one-payer healthcare system while they get to keep their own separate fancy health plan.

And then we'll be hearing other regnant elitists and pols tell us that WE need to shrink our carbon footprint....while they jet-set and motorcade all over the globe to and from their 15,000 square foot mansions.

It'd be one thing if Bill Gates stood up in front of these kids and said, "This is how I messed up....don't do what I did."

But what he's really saying is, "Don't YOU take the path that led to all my success."

No. He'd rather you stay in school, forget about your wild dreams and passions, learn to *follow orders* and *respect hierarchies* and hopefully you'll become qualified to work at a big corporation like his one day.

Just imagine how SCREWED the largest tech companies out there would be if say the most promising 200,000 students dropped out of school and started tinkering as Gates did way back when!

I Blame Obama For This Job Loss Too!

After deadpanning a *we have to talk about something* early this evening, my first wife informed me that she wants to quit her job.

So that'd be great - with me trying to quit trading the markets....we'd be one big unemployed family!

She said she'd take a year off so I can focus on my edu-preneurial pursuits and in the worst case scenario she's confident that she can land another similar job 12 months from now. (Anyone that believes she'll ever go back to that corporate Wall Street BS after a sabbatical is a complete and utter Moron!)

In other words it would only be a trial - one that would cost 50k (our annual bills), out-of-pocket health and dental coverage, plus the money we save each year from her salary.

Now we do have the cushion and the risk-taking appetite for something like this...

But I haven't greenlighted her in any way shape or form. I'd have to crunch some more numbers and really think hard about this. Believe me, there's nothing I'd like more than a break from my kids; and there's nothing she'd like more than a break from the grind and the opportunity to spend time homeschooling the Prince and Princess. There's no doubt in my mind that I would become a whole lot more productive with this website and my incipient one if I had, I don't know....more than a hour or so each day at my PC!

The Brightest Bulbs Skipping College

I played golf yesterday with some random guy. He has a daughter attending her 5th year of undergraduate studies at some no-name school in Ohio. Tuition with room and board is $48,000 per year and she's majoring in....drum roll....ENGLISH LITERATURE!

$200,000+ for that? You've got to be kidding me.

(There were no student loans, this was a full-boat, cash-out-of-pocket situation from a guy who lamented that he was one of the *poorer* people in his neighborhood - Great Neck, NY - and that there were *two Hondas* in his driveway.)

I flat out told him it wasn't worth it.

Self-JustifyingWaster - I think that you can't get anywhere without a degree...

CaptiousNut - What about Bill Gates, Michael Dell, and Steve Jobs?

Self-JustifyingWaster - But that was a different time. Nowadays you can't do that.

Really? With the explosion of the internet and the globalization of the economy....does he really think that aristocratic credentialism reigns?

Of course he does. Without believing such a fable he couldn't bring himself to write those tuition checks.

Deeply skeptical of the overall merits of *higher education*, PayPal Billionaire Peter Thiel is launching a small guerrilla attack on the edu-establishment:

Thiel’s solution to opening the minds of those who can’t easily go to Harvard? Poke a small but solid hole in this Ivy League bubble by convincing some of the most talented kids to stop out of school and try another path. The idea of the successful drop out has been well documented in technology entrepreneurship circles. But Thiel and Founders Fund managing partner Luke Nosek wanted to fund something less one-off, so they came up with the idea of the "20 Under 20" program last September, announcing it just days later at San Francisco Disrupt. The idea was simple: Pick the best twenty kids he could find under 20 years of age and pay them $100,000 over two years to leave school and start a company instead.

Two weeks ago, Thiel quietly invited 45 finalists to San Francisco for interviews. Everyone who was invited attended– no hysterical parents in sight. Thiel and crew have started to winnow the finalists down to the final 20. They’ll be announced in the next few weeks.

While a controversial program for many in the press, plenty of students, their parents and people in tech have been wildly supportive. Thiel received more than 400 applications and most were from very high-end schools, including about seventeen applicants from Stanford. And more than 100 people in his network have signed up to be mentors to them.

Thiel thinks there’s been a sea-change in the last three years, as debt has mounted and the economy has faltered. "This wouldn’t have been feasible in 2007," he says. "Parents see kids moving back home after college and they’re thinking, ‘Something is not working. This was not part of the deal.’ We got surprisingly little pushback from parents." Thiel notes a handful of students told him that whether they were selected or not, they were leaving school to start a company. Many more built tight relationships with competing applicants during the brief Silicon Valley retreat– a sort of support group of like-minded restless students.

Of course, if the problem Thiel sees with the higher education bubble is elitism, why were so many of the invitees Ivy League kids? Where were the smart inner-city kids let down by economic blight and a failing education system of a city like Detroit; the kids who need to be lifted up the most? Thiel notes it wasn’t all elites. Many of the applicants came from other countries, some from remote villages in emerging markets.

But the program has a clear bias towards talent, and like it or not, talent tends to be found in private universities. Besides, he’s not advocating that stopping out of school is for everyone any more than he’s arguing everyone should be an entrepreneur. But to start a new aspirational example– an alternative path– it makes sense to start with the people who have all the options. "Everyone thinks kids in inner-city Detroit should do something else," Thiel says. "We’re saying maybe people at Harvard need to be doing something else. We have to reset what the bar is at the top."

That hints at another interesting distinction between the housing bubble and the education bubble: Class. The housing bubble was mostly a middle-class phenomenon. Even as much of the nation was wrapped up in it, there was a counter narrative on programs like CNBC and in papers like the Wall Street Journal pooh-poohing the dumb people buying all those condos in Florida. But with education, there’s barely any counter-narrative at all, because it is rooted in the most elite echelons of the upper class.

Thiel assumes this is why his relatively modest plan to get 20 kids to stop out of school for a few years is so threatening to a lot of the people who have the biggest megaphones to scream about it. "The people who are the most critical of this program are the ones who are most complacent with where the country is right now," he says.

There's not much to disagree with in there - though there're certainly a few little points where Thiel is slightly off.

Of course *homeschooling parents* are already doing this and their kids are far more advanced than the crop that decides to opt-out of Big Education when they are 18-19.

Add Peter Thiel to that ever-growing list of famous self-unconscious homeschooling advocates.

Seth Godin, A Bald-Headed Guru?

I don't care what ANYONE says, this guy is not even close to a modern-day Confucius:

Yet Morons and non-Morons alike worship the ground he walks on.

He's peddling yet another tiny book; Poke The Box is only 88 pages!

Who in this day and age can publish non-children's books so short?

Underwhelmed by his other book, I think I'll pass on reading this *pamphlet*.

What Gatekeepers?

Here's yet another feel-good story of an author who overcame *publisher rejection* via self-published ebooks:

Check out her books on Amazon. They're pretty cheap if you buy the Kindle versions - starting at .99 and climbing all the way up to a whopping $2.99.

See also - Ebook Goldrush.

Raising Entrepreneurs?

I heard this guy a while back and couldn't for the life of me remember where when I went looking for him later on.

But I just found him again. Enjoy:

Website Building Chronicles 1 - For Morons

Even though I've been blogging for 6 years, there's a lot that I DO NOT KNOW about web publishing. In fact, since I've been using the user-friendly Blogger.com I never had to learn even the BASICS.

First you have to buy a domain name for $10 through GoDaddy or someone else. For lack of a better idea (and available keywords!), I bought HomeschoolDad.com. There's nothing there, probably won't be much on it for a while, and I may indeed find a better domain and switch it....but for the meantime that's my new site.  Trust me, it most certainly will not look like that much longer.

Then you have to pay someone to *host* your content - I'm using DreamHost for something like $5 a month.

These are the easy steps that most of y'all, even the Luddites, know well.

But then I installed Wordpress - a *semantic personal publishing platform* - and the complications started to arise, er....the learning curve started to steepen.

Normal blog publishing can be done in much the same manner as with Blogger.com - by going to the right website and simply *logging in*.

But the major reason for going with Wordpress is that as an *open source* platform, one can add all sorts of gadgets, plugins, and software embellishments to the bones of their website. Many are free but the good, snazzy ones cost $$$$ and, to the frustration of relative n00bs like myself, require manual installation and potentially mid-level HTML coding.

Another thing I learned, after a few hours of angst on Saturday, is that to communicate with my new website, I have to FTP - File Transfer Protocol - whatever files (i.e. software, plugins, video files, PDFs...) I want to utilize on my website. Who knew? For that you have to download one of the many FTP programs available. Upon the advice of Paul Mitchell, who's much further along with his commercial website....I went with Core FTP Lite. And even after figuring all that out, downloading the uploader, and whatnot I still had problems zipping files up to my website. I had the freakin' *port number* wrong!

Apparently there's a whole lot more to it. There's *encryption* for FTP-ing; I can enable others (*clients*?) to upload files to my website; etc. Arrgghh!!

Meanwhile I'm still baffled by *roots*, *subdomains*, *directories*, etc. I never know what files go where OR what 80% of the files I see in these folder freakin' are. Such are the bumps and potholes along the stubborn DIY path, I guess.

I told y'all I was a n00b!!!

Though the wealth of techno-information I have get up to speed on is vast and daunting, not only am I fully capable, it's also invigorating to USE MY BRAIN for a change. And that was one of the major problems with my career as a trader. After 15 years watching the tape, I could trade with my eyes closed. Someone could give me $100 billion today to allocate and I could do it without ANY of that useless analyst research, without a trading desk *team*, without expensive *sales-trader* brokers, without reading the WSJ, etc. All I would really need is a PC and a buxom secretary and I'll bet my positions would just as *good* as what these slick skimmers come up with.

Raising A Young Skimmer

So my son just started Cub Scouts last month.

They are selling *fancy* popcorn as a fundraiser.

But, guess what, I have a serious problem encouraging him to get out there and SELL.

You see the 3-pack displayed above? They are mere 8 ounce packages of cheese popcorn.

LOOK AT THE PRICE!!!

Actually, they are a little cheaper if you buy from a scout - the bargain price of only $30 total.

In fact, the cheapest item on the roster is 11 oz. of caramel corn for $9. Then the choices ramp up fast with the next cheapest item being $16 for 20 oz. of butter toffee popcorn.

My wife just dressed the Prince up in his scout uniform and took him to see the neighbors.

Get this - one bought bought $16 worth and another bought $56 worth!

THEN, someone driving by on the street stopped them in their tracks, asked to buy, and went for a freakin' $40 order.

Oh yeah, at least one of the neighbors was also charitable enough to buy a pumpkin ($10) from the Prince. Last week his grandmother bought about 20 pumpkins out in the Hamptons for him to mark-up and resell out in front of the house. Last week, in about two hours time, I believe he sold 12-15 of them is now firmly in the plus column.

Not for nuthin' but these old New Yorkers have waaaay too much money - piles and piles of it.