NEWS FLASH! THIS JUST IN! Who needs another myth about how to cut up onions when you can find modern solutions? The photo below says it all.

Eve's Onion Cutting Strategy

Eve is just going to love it when she finds out that I announced this on Facebook. Don’t you think?

This is hilarious. After learning how to do daytrading a few years ago (meaning, getting taken to school for about $4,000 in ‘tuition’), the only remnant I had was a couple of almost worthless stocks. One was Quepasa.com (QPSA). Remember when it came out, backed by local celebrities (including Jerry Colangelo), and quickly shot up to $25 per share? If you do, then you might also remember when it nosedived like nothing this side of an eagle after his prey.

Imagine my laugh, then, when Eve suggested that I look at my Ameritrade account, just for fun. Well, to no surprise, my 3,500 shares of Etravelserve.com Inc (TSER), is still valued at $0.0001, for a total value of 35 cents. They were delisted a long time ago. However, good old QPSA, of which I bought 65 shares at 25 cents a share, closed trading yesterday at $5.39. Wow, that is a jump from a $16.25 purchase to a $350.35 value.

Louis Rukeyser may have been right about there being three animals in the stock market: bulls, bears, and pigs led to slaughter. After spending most of my time in that third category, I’m happy to finally have some personal good news from Wall Street. Now I am going to see where else I can get a 2156-fold increase in investment. Isn’t that more than 200,000 percent?

This afternoon I decided to invent another new recipe. I have always enjoyed cooking. Vegan cooking now makes it more fun than ever. Here is what I call my Eggplant Creole recipe. Here is my cookbook entry, with pictures. Have fun with it!

Keeping It Simple

All I did was to peel and cut up one eggplant and put it into a frying pan with some coconut oil. This is the best cooking oil there is, in case you didn’t know. Olive oil is so twentieth century.

Then I took some leftover green beans, cut them up, and added them to the eggplant.

I chose an Organic Three Pepper Pasta Sauce for the base.

I stirred in some sea salt and my new favorite spice mix, Cajun Spices. (Thus, making it ‘creole’ – fabulous flavors and not too spicy.) Then I stir-fried the eggplant and green beans until they looked a little toasted.

This is when I decided that they needed some red color, so I cut up and threw in a couple of fresh tomatoes. Now they looked fine to my Artistic Iron Chef eye!

Finally, I added the sauce, then covered and let simmer for about 30 minutes. Here is the result … yummy!

Serve On A Bed Of What?

This took a little more vegan-brain creativity. I happened to have some quinoa grain and buckwheat in the cupboard. So I decided to nuke them up together … must be the first time this combination has appeared in human history! … for use where you might normally have pasta. (I’m down on pasta, which is another story.)

Both of these so-called grains are actually seeds. Calling them grains is one of those silly things the USDA does. They are seeds! They aren’t even in the same family as wheat, rye, barley, and rice, all of which produce true grains. Nope. Not even close.

One heads up if you use quinoa and buckwheat is to add about twice as much water as the directions call for. Buckwheat is like a sponge and will soak it up pretty fast, which might keep the slower-cooking quinoa from getting done. Here is what it looks like … brown!

And Now For The Drumroll Please…

The new dish here is accompanied by a few slices of avocado, just to round out the meal. Actually, I served it with salad, too.

This really nice thing about this recipe is that it is really simple. The final dish is delicious, too.

How valuable is your time?

This little exercise will give you an idea for when you set a goal to make a million dollars per year. Imagination is important here, so let’s play with this.

Oh, before I get started, my definition of a millionaire for this exercise is anyone who makes a million dollars per year. It is not really a practical definition. That is not going to stop me here!

First, calculate how many hours that you work in a year. If you want to use a reasonable number, use this typical information for the United States:

A normal work week for most jobs is 8 hours a day for 5 days. There are 52 weeks in a year, and most folks get a two week vacation. So, 8 X 5 X 50 = 2000 hours worked in a year.

Many companies also give 10 holidays, which brings it down to 8 x 5 x 48 = 1920.

Many companies also give 5 days of sick/personal time per year, which brings it down to 8 x 5 x 47 = 1880.

My buddy, Larry, who is self-employed and charges by the hour for his services, says that this number is pretty realistic. So you have 1880 hours to earn an hourly wage each year.

Converting Work Time Into $1,000,000

Repeat the phrase above in a Dr. Evil voice, with your pinkie pointing to the corner of your mouth.

Now for the conversion: $1,000,000 in 1880 hours means $531.14 per hour. Check my math.

That’s all it takes!

The take-home lesson is that, if you are not doing something ever workday to bring in at least $531.14 per hour, then you will fall short of making a million dollars per year.

Wasn’t that fun? Of course, one variation on the above calculation is that you can work one hour for a million dollars, then take the other 1879 hours off. This may seem like outrageous thinking. However, this is clearly the direction that makes the most sense. People at the top of the heap do not work hourly. Revisit Robert Kiyodaki’s Cash Flow Quadrant to see what I mean. Or just play his Cash Flow 101 and see what it takes to get out of the Rat Race.

Okay, that’s it for now. I just wanted to share a little bit of fun with you on a beautiful Sunday morning in Tempe, AZ.

Just a quick note from my intuition this morning…

Earlier this morning my intuitive self struck a blow for clarity. It came as I was thinking of a gentleman whom I met last night. I first noticed him as I was on my way to a dinner conference at Nello’s ‘Health Food’ Pizza Joint. He was bedding down next to a low wall at the edge of the parking lot. My thought at the time was that someone with ‘official authority’ would probably rouse him up before the night was over and either take him in or order him to move on.

We had a lot of food left over from the buffet, so I filled some takeout boxes and took them out to where I had seen our outdoors visitor. He was still there, and after a little noise from me, woke up and accepted my offer. He asked me to sit down and chat while he was eating, so I did. He described himself as a Sioux from Montana, wandering and looking for work, not all that successfully. Upon my asking, he told me his name was Red Eagle. I left after a few more minutes to get back to help with packing up the conference stuff.

Red Eagle. Hmm. Here is when my intuition finally hit me with a ‘don’t-ignore-me-this-time’ whack upside the head. Many years ago I had the experience of finding my animal spirit guide during a Native American shamanic drumming ceremony. My spirit guide turned out to be an eagle. Since that time I have had many more experiences involving eagles. I won an Eagle Award. I took a men’s leadership course that earned me an eagle-head ring, which I wear proudly to this day. I have an eagle photo clipped to the dashboard cover in my truck so I can have it in front of me everywhere I go.

I have had only a few conversations with my animal spirit guide, conversations that I sought during meditation. Last night, I believe, he came to me as Red Eagle. The actions that led me to him were a first. I had never taken food to someone in that situation before, or even approached anyone under those circumstances. Could he, Red Eagle, my animal spirit guide, have summoned me?

Red Eagle and I, we are connected. Carl Jung called the connection among people the ‘Collective Unconscious’. Such a connection goes by many names. I would say that my intuition is screaming at me that my connection with Red Eagle is much closer. Even if I had a scientific explanation for this, it would be unimportant. I believe that I met my animal spirit guide last night. The purpose of this meeting, if I see it correctly, might be just to invite me to talk with him more often. I look forward to it, if anything just to enjoy the beautiful forest outside the workshop of my mind. Of course, I’d bet that he will have some interesting things to say, too. And, boy, do I have some questions for him!

This is hilarious, so I had to post it here for the world to know. As I spend the greater part of my day working at home, which is a blast, I can often go an extra day or 2 or 3 (or more) without getting cleaned up to meet others. The funny thing is that yesterday Eve gave me a new name based on my ‘work at home look’ – i.e., Scruffy. Well, I thought was funny, anyway.

So this morning I am up early (ca. 4:00 AM), excited as usual to see what I can accomplish and how much fun I can have. Doing a lot of cool stuff. However, I just had to take this picture to show the world one of the benefits of self-employment, so to speak.

More later. Now it is time to check my revenue streams from last night. Now THAT is fun!

I just had to put this out to the world somewhere, and this seemed like the best venue. Today I received an envelope from Amazon Digital Services Inc., which contained a check for $25.68, made out to me. This was a pleasant surprise.

To be honest, the Amazon commission rate for associates is a paltry and unexciting 4%. For this reason I haven’t really pursued any marketing through Amazon. Oh, I put up an Amazon store on my golf blog, I published one of my ebooks in Kindle format, and I mentioned some supplements here and there with links through my account. So I never really expected anything all.

The surprise is that I don’t see where the final $17.12 of this check came from. The Amazon associates pages are as obtuse to use as anything I have ever seen on the web. So I will just be grateful for my good fortune, however seemingly small it is at the moment.

Whew! Glad I could share that success with you!

Cheers,
Dennis

How can you increase your fitness (muscle strength) by 20 percent within four weeks, with only one workout per week? Here’s how I did it.

This is really cool beans. I ran across a video recently, which led me to a book about fitness. Little did I know what good scientific research on fitness could say. Now I do. I’ve started a string of posts on this topic at my new fitness blog here. This is a post about my results after only 4 weeks:

PersonalFitnessResearch.com

That is a preliminary report on early results. Eight weeks to go, so I will put up more results as I get closer to completion.

Cheers,
Dennis

Professional blogging can be rewarding in lots of way. It is fun. It brings in income. It keeps me fresh in my writing. After spending more than a year learning the technical intricacies of blogging, I’ve set my target on 10 topics. I’ve listed links to each of these blogs here:

http://drdennisclark.com/my-blogs/

I suppose that I’ll pay more attention to this personal blog when I get the others up and running to acceptable speed. I am about halfway there as of today.

Dennis

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The old observation that there is nothing new under the sun is certainly true for marketing. There are so many shiny new toys that offer to help you succeed – books, ebooks, coaching programs, videos, newsletters, memberships – that it is enough to make your head swim. And none of them have anything really new to offer. I have realized, finally, that everything is covered in one of the best books of all time on marketing, even though it doesn’t claim to be about marketing. The book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, is about the techniques of persuasion that underlie all of the main aspects of marketing. I love this book because it cuts through a lot of crap, because it explains how the author, Dr. Robert Cialdini, discovered how to resist marketing hype, and because it is written by an old university colleague of mine. Just a personal bias there.

All You Need to Know

The six points of influence are listed in the figure below. These are widely available on many websites. What I want to point out here is that Dr. Cialdini not only outlined each of these and why they work, he also described how he had been a sucker for them and, more importantly, how he developed resistance to them. This is perhaps the best bonus that he could have included. It has helped me become more aware of when and how marketing is being thrown at me. See what I mean below.

Reciprocity: I’ll do something for you or give you something for free if you give me something back. How about a free report if you just subscribe to my newsletter? That is the most common example of reciprocity on the internet. This one is easy to ‘resist’ if you really wish. Just subscribe, then get the whatever-is-free, then unsubscribe later.

Authority: People are more persuaded if they recognize the influencer’s authority. Celebrities are bought and/or invented for this purpose. This strategy is a name-dropper’s delight. It doesn’t take much to resist this strategy when you stop and think about how little value a celebrity endorsement provides for anything.

Social Proof: Testimonials, testimonials, testimonials! Please don’t ever be suckered by anyone’s testimonial. They are never bad. Heaven help you if you are persuaded by testimonials. This is such a strong component of marketing psychology that it is almost impossible to wade through the countless testimonials (i.e., “social proof”) that clutters sales pages.

Commitment & Consistency: The Encyclopedia Britannica used to be sold door to door. Each sales rep was taught to ask 22 questions, starting with simple ones that could only be answered with a ‘yes’. People have a strong tendency to stay consistent with such answers, even when the final question asks for the sale. Very difficult to resist this one. You have to be able to violate your own consistency to not buy the product or service after you have said ‘yes’ 21 times in a row.

Liking: People are more likely to be convinced by someone they like. This is why attractive or humorous sales people, or sales people who are similar to you in some significant way, are successful. Have you ever read someone’s business story about how they were broke and out of work, etc., etc.? The purpose for this story is to get you to feel an identity with that person. This is the seed of liking, and it is a powerful tool of persuasion. Just keep in mind that it may not be a true story and, even if it is, it doesn’t mean that the product or service will necessarily work for you. Sneaky, huh?

Scarcity: Deadlines, scarcity of inventory, limited time price – all these create a fear that if you don’t act now you won’t be able to get what you want. I can tell you right now that if you ever encounter a web page that says something like, “This page will never appear again, so you have only this one chance to buy [fill in the blank],” get off that page immediately. There is just so much B.S. I can tolerate! The fear of scarcity is one of the most overused and easy to resist of all the six points to persuasion. How to you have a limited supply of ebooks, for pete’s sake? (Yes, I’ve seen that claim.)

Keep these things in mind when you encounter any kind of sales page or advertisement. Your awareness will make you a better customer and a better businessperson.

All the best,

Dr. D