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What Television Has Done To Us

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Put the remote down. It’s not important. Television has given us a false sense of power. You can flip to the channel you like, and if you don’t see anything, you can always flip to the next channel. If you like what you’re watching, you keep watching it.

That’s a lot of watching. At a basketball game, the people who are watching are the spectators. They watch the athletes take shots, get rebounds, block a shot, pass to each other, and basicaly, be successful at what they want to do. The athletes aren’t watching the game; they’re in the game.

We keep on watching other people who are successful. The people who are a part of the TV show get paid. The choices we make while watching television have no impact on who we become.

Have I fully given up television? Not yet, but I only watch 2 shows. I don’t bother surfing or trying to find something else that is entertaining. Television has given us a false sense of power. You have the power to change the channel, but when you put the remote down, how much have you accomplished?

I’m not asking anyone to give it up for good. I do believe that there are too many people watching their favorite shows too long. That’s procrastination up and productivity down.

Give up 30 minutes a day. Then give up an hour every day. What you will be able to accomplish with that extra time will be incredible.

What Gets Shared A Lot?

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I was reading one of Seth Godin’s posts, and I looked at the number of times people shared his post on social networks. The numbers for the post I was looking at and all of the others are impressive. I also knew his statistics are up on Quantcast.

If you type in the URL for Seth’s Blog into Quantcast, you will see how many visitors he gets in a day. Most of the time, he is getting over 10,000 visitors every day, but I decided to look deeper into the statistics. There were some moments when Seth’s traffic skyrocketed. I took a look.

I identified the days when he went from a constant rate of 10,000 visitors a day (or something like that) to over 30,000 visitors on a single day. That traffic stayed on his blog for a few days which meant more subscribers and more sales. I looked at three days in particular.

On the first day I saw Seth’s traffic spike up was when he was giving away a free book to download. The book included advice from many well-known entrepreneurs. The book was over 70 pages long, and at the end of his book, Seth advised his readers to share it.

What happened? According to Seth’s blog post, the book was trending on Twitter for 7 hours, and there were 20 tweets a minute about the book. That’s almost 10,000 tweets about a single book. The place to get Seth’s free book was on his blog.

Seth’s book was also about getting your goals done in the New Year, and since he started giving away the book in December, a lot of people wanted to know how to keep their New Year goals alive.

Another time when Seth’s traffic spiked was when he shared a fascinating picture. There were 3 blocks that compared the death rates per watts produced involving nuclear energy, oil, and coal. The death rate for nuclear energy was by far the lowest. Coal was the highest. It was a stunning picture, and the post was able to sum up the picture nicely.

If we guessed, we all would have thought nuclear energy would have caused the most deaths. The answer ended up being coal. I had to look at the picture twice to see the tiny square for nuclear energy. No one expected it, and that created a lot of buzz.

The other post that got a lot of traffic was an April Fool’s joke about the Kindle Zero which was a free Kindle. By the way, you could also make money with the Kindle Zero by reading challenging books. A lot of blogs featured this post from Seth Godin among the other April Fool’s tricks.

So those were three posts that resulted in a skyrocket of traffic for Seth Godin. There is something we can all take away from this knowledge: be clever, stunning, and give stuff away for free.

With Determination Comes Results

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All of the successful entrepreneurs have one thing in common: determination. In order to be successful, you have to be consistent for a long period of time. Patience is vital towards becoming successful, but so is the determination.

I knew what the word meant, but I decided to look up its definition on Google anyway. Determination is defined as a firmness of purpose. You give yourself a goal to complete, and you do everything you can to achieve that goal.

What kind of results will you get? If you are really determined, you will get all of the results you were looking for. Maybe you were looking forward to creating a new product or getting twice as many clients. With determination, you will be able to see those results and other results you didn’t even think of; the surprises.

Determination will bring you far. Adopt it now, and propser in the future.

Who Are The Over Promoters

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There are a lot of people promoting their products. Some people over promote their product to the point that it is annoying. Those are the products that don’t get as many sales.

You may be wondering if you are an over promoter without even realizing it. These are the ways that people are over promoters:

  1. Writing blog post after blog post about a product.
  2. A pop-up of your product appears on your blog.
  3. People with the really big “Buy Now” button (the big “Buy Now” button should only be used on a website that is all about the product).

 

Are you an over promoter. If your product isn’t getting as many sales, and you are still promoting it, make sure you aren’t being an over promoter.

When Someone Takes A Penalty Kick

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When you make a penalty kick in soccer, you become a hero or a disappointment. You miss the goal, and people won’t be happy. When you make the goal, you’re the hero. All of the fans start cheering for you.

When talking about penalty kicks, everyone thinks about the person kicking the ball. What about the goalie? There are more possible things that can happen to a goalie.

If the shooter has a bad kick that goes well above the goal, no one is going to say how good the goalie was.

If the shooter makes it in and the goalie miss plays it, the goalie is in fault. Everyone cheers for the person who took the shot, but they know that shooter didn’t deserve the goal. They cheer anyway.

If the shooter takes the perfect shot, the goalie admires it, and so does the crowd.

If the goalie makes a good save, the goalie is the one who gets the praise.

We all look at the superstar. The shooter is the one who controls the action. The goalie simply responds to the shooter’s action by diving and trying to save a goal. When the goalie makes a remarkable save, he becomes the superstar.

As you move up in the ranks from average player to the person taking the shot, you become the superstar. Everyone is looking at you. If you succeed, people will cheer for you and more people will know about you.

History Repeats Itself

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There are trends that will reappear. Many historical events have occurred multiple times in different forms. Civilizations collapsing and experiencing golden ages are two of the countless ways history repeats itself.

Business is the same. History repeats itself. Steve Jobs was compared to Thomas Edison. One day, there will be another person who changes the world and is compared to Steve Jobs and Thomas Edison.

Businesses go out of business while other businesses are successful beyond belief. Those are the businesses to look at carefully. Look at all of the successful companies and social networks. All of them involve reaching a lot of people with little work on their end.

There aren’t people who manually check and publish everyone’s tweets and posts on other social networks. It’s automatic. You write what you want to say, and it’s said. When you buy something on Amazon, it gets shipped to you from the USPS, FedEx, UPS, or another source. There isn’t a big truck that says “Amazon.”

These successful businesses involve other people doing the grunt work and a system that works. Want a successful business? Look at the experts.