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I mention the 80/20 rule frequently in my writings so I thought it was about time to write a proper introduction to the concept. I believe it’s fundamental to every business person - to every human being - so if you have never heard of this rule, please read on and absorb everything I’m about to tell you, it could potentially change your life.

The 80/20 rule sounds like a statistic and in some ways it is. Personally I’m not a big fan of maths and beyond basic web statistics like pageviews, impressions, unique visitors - and when I stretch myself - conversion rates and split testing, I try and avoid all complex numbers. I work better with feelings, ideas and concepts.

The good thing about the 80/20 rule is that you don’t have to understand statistics to be a believer. Yes it has foundations in economics and yes, it was “proven” using statistical analysis by a man named Pareto, but it is not meant to be understood only by economics professors.

Here’s what the Wikipedia has to say about it:

The principle was suggested by management thinker Joseph M. Juran. It was named after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed that 80% of income in Italy was received by 20% of the Italian population. The assumption is that most of the results in any situation are determined by a small number of causes.

I can’t remember exactly when I was first exposed to the 80/20 Rule but I know when it first really hit home. I was in my local bookshop and I picked up a copy of Living The 80/20 Way by Richard Koch. Koch took the 80/20 Rule and made it his own by writing a series of books on the topic. Living The 80/20 Way fit me well because it discussed living life productively seeking maximum satisfaction by focusing on your passions (Koch has written other books focusing on the 80/20 Rule for business and managers that I didn’t enjoy quite as much). At the time I sometimes accused myself of being lazy for not “working hard” but I realized what I was doing was living an 80/20 lifestyle and in fact probably being a lot more productive than those working harder than myself.

What Exactly Is The 80/20 Rule?

By the numbers it means that 80 percent of your outcomes come from 20 percent of your inputs. As Pareto demonstrated with his research this “rule” holds true, in a very rough sense, to an 80/20 ratio, however in many cases the ratio can be a lot higher - 99/1 may be closer to reality.

It really doesn’t matter what numbers you apply, the important thing to understand is that in your life there are certain activities you do (your 20 percent) that account for the majority (your 80 percent) of your happiness and outputs.

You may have expected me to say that 20 percent of your activities produce 80 percent of your financial rewards, and that is true, there are probably a handful of activities you do each week that produce your income. You can definitely apply the 80/20 Rule to most aspects of your business or working life, however I believe your overall happiness and satisfaction are much better variables to focus on. Money certainly plays an important role in your happiness and your money is influenced by 80/20 relationships, but it is only a component that leads to your overall well being, which should be your primary concern.

80/20 Examples

There are many economic conditions, for example the distribution of wealth and resources on planet earth, where a small percentage of the population controls the biggest chunk, which clearly demonstrate the 80/20 Rule. There are business examples such as 20 percent of employees are responsible for 80 percent of a company’s output or 20 percent of customers are responsible for 80 percent of the revenues (or usually even more disparate ratios). These are not hard rules, not every company will be like this and the ratio won’t be exactly 80/20, but chances are if you look at many key metrics in a business there is definitely a minority creating a majority.

At a micro level just by looking at your daily habits you can find plenty of examples where the 80/20 Rule applies. You probably make most of your phone calls to a very small amount of the people you have numbers for. You likely spend a large chunk of your money on few things (perhaps rent, mortgage payments or food). There is a good chance that you spend most of your time with only a few people from the entire pool of people you know.

I’ll present to you how the 80/20 Rule applies to my life and how I have used the concept, although not always deliberately - it’s just the way I construct my life (for maximum pleasure!) -to improve the efficiency of my output and enhance my overall lifestyle.

My 80/20 Life

In my life I’ve noticed plenty of 80/20 ratios and generally they relate to my core competencies and passions. I really enjoy writing articles such as this, recording podcasts and interacting with other business people through Skype and blogging. In terms of rewards, the two-to-four hours or so per day that I spend writing - when I’m in the creative zone and my best work comes out almost effortlessly - is my money time. My articles and podcasts work hardest to generate income for me, create business opportunities and allow me to express myself creatively. I get the most financial and intrinsic satisfaction from this time.

I expect you could tell me a similar story about your life. During times you really enjoy yourself your output is at its peak. Your passion activities probably don’t pay your bills at the moment, which unfortunately means that you can’t sustain your life by indulging only in what you enjoy. I’ll talk more about transforming your life to a financially stable and personally fulfilling 80/20 format later in this article.

During some times in my life I struggle and waste time performing activities I don’t enjoy or I am not good at. For example bookkeeping is not high on my fun list. I don’t always like managing keywords in Google AdWords campaigns because I don’t have the patience to thoroughly test the variables and track the numbers. The same can be said for things like Google Analytics. These activities are more numerical in basis, I’m not a numbers person so when possible I leave these tasks, along with other activities like programming, graphic design and proofreading to other people, the specialists who enjoy them.

Some of my time is spent procrastinating or working inefficiently doing activities that provide very little benefit. This often occurs when I am tired or below peak physical condition. I sometimes lack the mental throughput to motivate myself to be productive (and boy, my writing stinks when I’m tired!), but I’m working on it and getting much better at reducing time wastage. When I’m in this state it’s smarter for me to study - read books and ebooks - because I’m not capable of producing quality output, but taking input - learning - is a good use of time when I am not there 100 percent mentally.

80/20 Business

When I look at one of my businesses, BetterEdit.com, it’s very clear that a small handful of repeat customers account for most of the income. The customers who become longterm users, who gain the most from the services and fit well demographically and socially with the business model, are key. They provide 80 percent of the value but only represent 20 percent (or much less) of the overall people that use the business. My job is to determine the best way to attract and convert more customers into longterm users.

With blogging I learnt (and teach in my Blog Traffic Tips newsletter) that there are a handful of activities that I do every day that produce the most results. Breaking things down further, there are usually a key 20 percent of elements within an individual blog article (think article headline) that have the most dramatic affect on results. The numbers of course are not clean 80/20 ratios but there are definitely dominant factors at play.

In a business sense, finding the 80/20 ratios is crucial for maximizing performance. Find the products or services that generate the most income (the 20 percent) and drop the rest (the 80 percent) that only provide marginal benefits. Spend your time working on the parts of the business that you can improve significantly with your core skills and leave the tasks that are outside your best 20 percent to other people. Work hardest on elements that work hardest for you. Reward the best employees well, cull the worst. Drop the bad clients and focus on upselling and improving service to the best clients.

How You Can Live An 80/20 Lifestyle

When you start to analyze and breakdown your life into elements it’s very easy to see 80/20 ratios all over the place. The trick, once your key happiness determinants have been identified, is to make everything work in harmony and avoid wasting time on those 80 percent activities that produce little satisfaction for you.

The message is simple enough - focus on activities that produce the best outcomes for you. This applies to both your business/working life and your “other” life (I think they are all part of your “life” but people often prefer to distinguish them). The problem for most people is how to make a living from what you really enjoy, so lets focus on that…

I’m sure you have heard the phrase “struggling artist”. The stereotype where a creative person, musicians, actors, writers and artists, struggle to get discovered and work long hours on horrible day jobs, often in retail and hospitality, until hopefully they finally break out, get discovered and become famous. It shouldn’t surprise you that the ratio of struggling artists who actually become famous enough to live off their craft also follows an 80/20 Rule - only a small few of the overall total manage to get that far.

The same can be said for entrepreneurs. How many of you now reading this article are working day jobs, jobs you probably don’t like much, while you work hard after-hours to get your dream business up and running?

In truth, and this is a sad fact, most people in the world work jobs they don’t like and only truly live their passions on weekends and outside of working hours. Only a small sample actually live their passions day in and day out, how they want to and when they want to. If you want to become one of the special few so you can live your passions on your terms there are a few things you can do.

Focus On Your Passions, Not Material Possessions

The simple fact is not everyone can be a famous artist. Not everyone will start a million dollar business. I’m not going to tell you stop striving for those goals, I’m working on them myself, however you can work smarter TODAY to find greater fulfillment, and that is what living an 80/20 lifestyle is all about. Best of all, your likelihood of becoming one of the famous artists or entrepreneurs is enhanced if you tweak your life to follow the 80/20 Rule because you tap into what you do best more often.

The first thing you must decide, and this is often the hardest step, is to determine what it is exactly you have passion for. Some people can answer this question easily - “I want to be a famous pianists/singer/poet/author”, “I’d like to run my own real estate agency/coffee shop/advertising company” etc. Others may have a general idea “I don’t want a day job” or “I want to run a business” but the specifics are not sorted yet. If you are not sure what your passions are all I can suggest is test yourself. It’s usually easy to determine what you DON’T like so keep doing that until you find what it is you DO like.

Outputs Vs Inputs

I’d like to make a point about outputs vs inputs before moving on. Most humans are good consumers - we are good at taking inputs. Chances are you can easily rattle off a bunch of things you do enjoy about your life: eating out at nice restaurants, consuming junk food, reading books and magazines, going to parties and dance clubs, watching movies and DVDs, listening to music, meeting new people, surfing the net, having sex, playing sports and shopping. All of these activities more or less are inputs which means you consume the outputs of other people.

You may consider the activities I just mentioned passions but it’s hard to find a sustainable passion if all you do is consume. To foster an 80/20 lifestyle you need to locate activities that are passions for you because you create output for others to enjoy. Yes you can get paid to have sex, watch movies, eat at restaurants and read books, but chances are you won’t find it fulfilling or sustainable for very long OR you will be required to provide something back as part of your involvement - that’s your output, the value you create.

It’s okay to love eating out at restaurants and claiming your passion is food, if your intention is to also create output by starting your own restaurant, or a restaurant reviews website or a newsletter or magazine or becoming a chef. If you enjoy listening to music you might also enjoy producing your own music or covering the music industry as a journalist on your own blog.

Only by producing output for other people to enjoy or make practical use of can you expect to convert a passion into a sustainable income. You should understand this already as I suspect the times in your life that you have created something for others or worked on something that benefited other people you experienced the most fulfillment. If you suffer from a lack of direction now, if you are depressed because you don’t even know what your passions are to start applying the 80/20 Rule to, you need to do one thing - start being creative and giving back - produce output! You won’t find fulfillment only by consuming.

An 80/20 Lifestyle Blueprint

To start living 80/20 today you have only to do one thing - focus your energies on what you enjoy.

Part time work - Part time passion

Many people work a full time job and work after hours on a business or hobby or creative talent. If this is you I suspect your ratio is not 80/20 and probably closer to 20/80. You spend way too much time at a job you don’t like, you are probably not very motivated to do it well so you don’t fall into the vital 80/20 employees for that company, and by the time you get home you are too exhausted to spend time on your passion. You feel like you are getting nowhere fast. This lifestyle is not good for anyone since all the relationships fall into the 80 percent that produce 20 percent of the value. You get very little from it and the people you work for get very little from you.

If this currently describes your situation what you need to do is start changing those ratios. Reduce the amount of time you spend at a job you don’t like and increase the amount of time you spend on your passion. You may say you can’t do that because you need the money but I suspect you don’t really need as much as you think you do. Most people can live off part time work but choose to work more because they want more things. You may see your peers enjoying material goods which creates desires in you. Your wants start to outweigh your needs, which is probably the biggest pitfall in our modern, advertising driven, materialistic society.

I’m not saying you have to live like a pauper but I know that your real happiness comes from spending time doing things you enjoy the most, not from earning more money. Chasing the dollar for the sake of the dollar does not work. Chasing passion often leads to a greater income because the quality of your output is so much higher. Focus your energy on increasing investment in your core strengths and you will reap rewards.

Drop your working hours to three days per week and spend more time attracting more clients, booking more singing gigs, finding more time to write your novel or to develop your invention or code your software or find investors or whatever it is you really want to do.

For those of you who have no intention of turning your passions into money generating enterprises this is still a good option. If money isn’t your primary concern but your music is, why do you spend so much time working to earn more money than you need? Yes you need to plan for the future and build assets, but clearly for your musical soul it’s not something that needs to take the majority of your time and energy. You can be happy without that mansion by the sea and you never know, if you spent more time on your music the eventual album sales may one day lead to that mansion by the sea. If not, at least you will be a lot happier for following your enthusiasm rather than the dollar.

If financial freedom is important to you and a big part of your plans look at this step as phase one and work to convert your passions into income generating propositions. Grow your business client-by-client, gig-by-gig or sale-by-sale. keep adjusting your work vs passion time ratio as your business grows to support you and you no longer need your job income. Look for 80/20 activities in everything you do and drop any inefficiencies as soon as you can.

Don’t Let Fear Stop You

The biggest factor that stops most people from chasing their dreams and working towards their real goals is fear. Fear of the lack of security, the reduced paycheck and of the unknown future keeps people locked into routines that are not satisfying. That path leads to sadness, depression, poor health, low income and ultimately an early death. Who wants that!

Don’t let fear be the reason for not achieving your goals. Stop, reassess your real passions, remove the money equation long enough so you can think without worrying about finances, and make plans to move towards your 80/20 lifestyle activities. Maximize what you are good at. Find the activities that produce the most results for you and your business and put your energy where the big rewards are.

Yaro Starak
80/20 Optimizer

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At the bus stop near my house where I catch my ride into town on a regular basis is an unusual piece of graffiti. I often walk to the bus stop, sit down and turn my head to the ground and read the line of words neatly scrolled on the pavement that I guess you can only call vandalism but it seems somewhat inappropriate to label it so -

“You Deserve Happiness”

The first time I read this I had a chuckle because it felt wrong to be reading a statement intended to be uplifting in a format usually reserved for rude comments or political statements. I put it down to the fact that my suburb has an unusually high proportion of new age hippy types with an affinity for positive affirmations. I love people like that. I’m one of them too so I’m living in the right place.

Positive Affirmations

Over the more recent years I’ve worked hard on my own self-talk to improve the way I speak to myself. You probably know your own inner voice quite well. It’s that little trail of thought in your head, that little voice that says things to you throughout the day, that reacts to what other people say, to what you say and what you do. It probably says too much but it has an opinion on absolutely everything so it’s hard to get it to shut-up.

In my recent history my inner voice was part of a problem I had. I can’t wholly blame it for all my issues but it was a major contributor to something I suffered through in my late teens and early twenties. I remember quite vividly the first few times I suffered the symptoms.

I jumped on the bus from university to go home after a day of lectures. I don’t think it was a day any worse than any others. I showed the bus driver my ticket, and being the cool guy that I was went to the back of the bus to sit down with all the other cool back-seaters. I can’t remember what I was thinking at the time but I remember feeling that it was quite inconsequential - everyday worries about university and life - the sort of thing most people would think about when they were a university student.

Suddenly out of the blue a feeling of absolute fear gripped me. It felt like it came from nowhere. My heart raced, my thoughts rushed, I couldn’t sit still and I had this horrible feeling like I was going to die. The sensation passed within a few moments.

I went on to experience this many times, sometimes in really obscure places like in the middle of watching a movie at the cinema, walking home just talking to a friend, sitting in bed before going to sleep and listening to a particularly boring lecture. It was all quite random and strange and not something I enjoyed at all.

Eventually with the help of my counsellor mother I figured out I was suffering from panic attacks. My story was not unusual as I read a book about the problem. Apparently one in five people suffer from the disorder at some point in their life. Whether it is because of brain chemical imbalances or for whatever reasons it is quite prevalent in our modern western culture and I was its lucky latest “victim”.

For people who have never experienced a panic attack it can be hard to fathom what it is like. It is pure fear. An awful rush of emotion that causes your body to react in ways it should not react given the present situation. As the book explained to me my panic attacks were the result of a very animal instinct, a fight or flight instinct that in normal circumstances would come on in situations of life-threatening danger. The rush of blood, increased heart rate and alert senses where meant for me to be able to run away from or fight whatever it was threatening my existence, just like any good animal would. However sitting in the movies is not a situation of life-threatening danger so clearly something was messed up.

Learned Behaviour

Over the course of the months and years from the point when I first had a panic attack I went through therapy to help improve my situation. With verbal guidance from my mother and father, a helpful book or two and lots of self-development I managed to curb the problem. I did go through several recurrences especially during difficult times in my life and I can’t really say that I am 100 percent cured even now but I feel totally in control of that aspect of my life.

As a result of that experience I gained a very powerful skillset - the ability to control my thought process. The benefits of being able to do this go way beyond helping me deal with panic and anxiety - I can now control my emotional state by changing the way I think.

Can you imagine how helpful that is? Think about any time you have been depressed, demotivated or reacted adversely to situations with anger, or frustration or self-loathing or hatred or by beating yourself up by drinking too much or taking drugs. While positive thinking and being in control of your emotional state is not a cure for life’s problems it’s pretty close and I am very thankful for it’s benefits.

Positivity Training

Some people scoff at positive affirmations and consider them useless but as anyone who has had panic attacks will tell you, at the root cause of them are the opposite - negative affirmations. As a result of spending most days thinking negatively and repeating self-talk that beat myself up my body reacted with panic attacks. In your case you may not have the same reaction as I did, but if your self-talk is negative it’s holding you back from achieving your dreams and can certainly be a cause of things like depression, feeling like you have no control over you life and an inability to feel happiness.

Here’s an exercise for you in positivity training - you are going to need to expand your awareness somewhat if you haven’t done this before. During today stop and take note of how you react to situations and be aware of what your little voice says to you as you go about your daily activities. Pay particular attention to how you react when other people speak to you, when you receive feedback directly relating to you or something you have done and when you see other people enjoying something you want.

You may be very surprised to notice that your self-talk is terrible and you spend a lot of your day beating yourself up over your inabilities, inadequacies and perceived failures. It’s amazing how easy it is to be down on your life and reinforce that attitude by telling yourself that it’s all your fault or you are just not “lucky” or you have no talents whatsoever. What is the “truth” doesn’t matter, what is important is to change your attitude, react positively AND think positively.

By changing the dialogue in your mind you become the greatest life coach you could ever have. Your trainer will be with you at all times, ready to pick you up no matter how bad your reality is. Then, and here’s where the magic really starts to happen, by simply telling yourself positive things and believing in positive outcomes you want and deserve they actually start to manifest. Whether it’s an active result of your positive attitude, a subconscious motivator or some great spiritual force doesn’t really matter, (and all you negative thinking skeptics will never experience this, not because it doesn’t work, but because you don’t change your attitude), what matters is that you will actually notice an improvement in two of the most important things in your life - you will feel great and you will start to achieve things you used to beat yourself up over because you lacked.

The Key To Happiness

During a particularly angsty period of my life searching for the meaning of it all I went looking online for answers. Who do you turn to when looking for answers? Why Google of course.

I typed in “what is the meaning of life?” and came across one of my now favorite web pages that I often refer people to when they are really down in the dumps and questioning everything. The page is mostly plain text and aptly titled for good search rankings although I doubt the author knows anything about SEO -

The Meaning of Life

This page attempts to answer quite a few questions and while my intellectual side thoroughly enjoyed the discussion it also helped remind me of a very simple fact -

You Choose To Be Happy

Happiness is ultimately not in anyone else’s hands or controlled by any external element at all. It’s purely a choice you can make. As often as I can I choose to be happy. It’s not always as easy as that but by undertaking to change the way you think and create an ongoing positive dialogue with yourself you are both working towards the same goals - that’s you and your little voice - both aiming for happiness.

Remember what the sidewalk tells us -

“You Deserve Happiness”

Yaro Starak
Happy

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Or…Business Solutions Lead To Life Lessons

This article was started in July 2005 and I intended it to become a piece on how to avoid confusion and paralysis when choosing how to educate yourself. I think I may have added it to once sometime since and continued writing it again today. Writing tonight, about halfway through the article, not intentionally, a self development angle became apparent. I’m not one to stop myself when this happens because I believe it often carries the most powerful and helpful (and often confusing) message so I continued writing. Consequently this article may seem a bit disjointed and disorganized but I like it that way, and it has a good message, so I hope you like it too.

******

How do you like the idea of making money from the Internet without lifting a finger? Yeah, me too. They call it passive income. Pure passive income comes from Internet business when the process of prospecting, selling, converting, signing-up, payment and delivery are handled automatically. The customer only interacts with your systems and you wake up to payment received notification emails each and every morning. It’s a beautiful thing.

I’m working to diversify my income streams and reduce my current dependency on Internet business which requires my active participation to operate. This means creating more streams of income that leverage assets I create that function without ongoing inputs from me. I also want to increase my affiliate income since it’s very passive and can leverage the same assets.

Fresh Faced Internet Marketer

I’m young and while I’m not new to Internet marketing I am very much just starting out making it my main source of income. I’ve got a fantastic start given my experiences but there is so much more to learn. Based on emails I receive from many visitors to this blog I suspect you, my reader, are quite likely in the same position as me. You are eager to start earning but you aren’t sure where to begin. If you are smart you will have realized that the best place to start is through education (that’s why you are here right?). You have to learn before you can earn (rap music charts here I come) but even after that decision is made you still face a roadblock - information overload - where do you start studying?

I work in an industry that is saturated with marketing gurus and their information products. It makes sense of course, since if you teach people how to make money online using information products then you would naturally use those same techniques to sell the information. That means whenever I go hunting around to “get educated” I’m bombarded with options. Each and every step of the Internet marketing process has been broken down into minute detail with information products available on everything from the name-squeeze technique to opt-in newsletters, to affiliate marketing, website traffic, search engine optimization, copywriting, keywords, PPC, niche marketing, product launches and all the sub-categories that follow. It’s a crowded marketplace.

Thankfully I’ve made a decision to commit myself to a particular niche market so the concept of “what” I’m selling has solidified. Combined with other forms of income, some online (affiliate programs) and some offline (shares) I’m comfortable with where my income is coming from. I have lots of work to do because not all of those assets I’m going to leverage have been created yet, but that’s the fun part - creating fantastic content for my audience. I’m writing many articles behind the scenes for my products and marketing systems which, combined with my blogging output, will be my pillars for the future.

The problem comes when it’s time to set up new systems and start selling. Some of my important decisions have been made and lessons learnt. I’m happy with AWeber as my email autoresponder and it’s not likely I’ll be changing services any time soon. I’m happy with the companies that host my websites and I register my domains with. I have access to designers and programmers I trust if I need anything done beyond my skill-set. I know how to use Pay Per Click advertising and I’m comfortable that my search engine optimization techniques over time will lead to good results. I have the basics covered but I’m about to head into uncharted territory.

It’s A Brave New World

I’m about to do some things I’ve never done before. I’m about to be a presenter in a teleseminar series (if you want more news about this join my blog traffic school email list). During this year I’ll be writing salescopy for my own products, doing product launches, looking for joint venture partners, creating affiliate programs for my own products, using name-squeeze pages, long sales letters and setting up membership sites. I may not do all of these things but I definitely need to be familiar with them, know the best service providers for them and understand how best to implement them.

And of course, every one of those activities has many information products available that I can buy, study and presumably get educated about. I could collectively spend thousands of dollars and fill my days with reading and listening to newsletters, e-courses, e-books and podcasts. If I did this I wouldn’t have any time left to actually implement the things I learnt and I’d be broke as well!

Life Has The Answers

They say in life all things are the same. This concept is regularly reinforced in my life, sometimes blatantly obviously and at other times more intuitively or spiritually.

Paulo Coelho, author and spiritual leader, teaches us that we are part of the soul of the world and we can communicate with it through everything.

Perry Marshall, Internet marketer and Google AdWords guru, notes that AdWords is like a tree, with keywords as leaves, adgroups as branches and campaigns like stumps. As corny as that may sound to you he’s right and I suspect Perry understands intuitively a lot about life that helps him immensely as a marketer and teacher.

Buddhism teaches that we are all of the one conscious, everything is the same, and if we can exist in that awareness we have no fear and our purpose is simple - to be who we are and create our own reality (cryptic hey )

Why do I bring these examples up? Because for me it’s important to rely on my intuition, my experiences and my awareness to guide me when it comes to making choices. This applies equally to business decisions as it does to any other decisions.

It’s not hard once your self awareness aligns correctly, once you become personally congruent and you calibrate your actions with your inner self. Choices are made by knowing what makes you feel good, simple solutions work best, your strengths are harnessed, you learn as you work and there is no such thing as failure - only experience.

The 80/20 rule works not because of mathematics, or case studies or historical data. It works because that’s how the world intends it to work. That’s how humans work. That’s how life works.

When we do what we are best at, when we focus our energy on what we are enthusiastic about, our output is amazing. It’s effortless, joyful and our path is clear and simple. All external inputs are ignored, there is only the moment and we are being the best we can be in that moment.

Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) is a phrase often applied to business situations. The phrase, much like the 80/20 rule, mimics life. We perform best with one task to complete at a time, when we choose one or few options and aim to make them our specialty.

Does this remind you of something? Yes - isn’t that like Niche Marketing?

It’s all one and the same, everything follows the same set of rules and once you know them, understand them and can align yourself with them, life for you becomes a lot of fun. It’s not rocket science, in fact it’s not scientific at all - it’s about being receptive to what is blatantly obvious, what you already know and experience every day.

Awareness Cancels Out The Noise

The web is massive and there is a stupid amount of people using it. As humans we can only compete effectively by narrowing our focus on specialties. We become the best or at least very good at one or two things so others come to rely on us for them, while we rely on others for different things. We succeed because other people perceive us as having unique talents, albeit in a very narrow area (the long tail anyone?).

When faced with a plethora of choices, information overload and too many paths to select from, STOP. Stop watching what everyone else is doing and start doing something yourself. Cancel out all the inputs and start focusing on your outputs. Look inside yourself, you already know what feels like the right thing to do, so darn well start doing it.

Nothing Is Original

Take blogging as an example. There are millions and millions of blogs out there and people are accusing other people of rehashing content over and over again. And they’re right. Everyone is rehashing the same content over and over again. This article presents messages that you would find at other blogs like Steve Pavlina, mixed up with a bit of Darren Rowse and perhaps some Seth Godin and all the other inputs and experiences that have influenced my life and my blogging output.

Once again I’ll reiterate - it’s all the same.

Your Place In This Space

Your responsibility is to do one thing - what you are meant to do. Yeah, it’s another cryptic answer but if you are reading this and you are doing what you are meant to do and you “get it” well then you simply “get it”. It will make sense and in fact you would have probably heard it already a million times. It’s old news, but I’m sure you appreciate being told again, I do no matter how many times I’m told because each time the delivery method is unique. Hearing it now from myself once again gives me a sense of peace and purpose.

If you don’t understand or you don’t follow, don’t worry, your okay. It’s all part of the learning process and well, life. Just remember to follow your heart, take a few risks, do what “feels” right and also “makes sense”. Keep it simple, avoid excessive inputs, focus on yourself and your perception but always look to expand your awareness. Just be sure to do do something - to give just as much as you get - and you’ll be fine.

Yaro “I knew those mushrooms weren’t normal” Starak

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I just spent my Sunday doing some wardrobe updating (shopping) followed by a swim. I was in a “Mather’s For Shoes” (shoeshop, duh!) shopping for some sandals and a lovely female shop attendant was helping me to pick an appropriate pair (I always take the advice of girls when it comes to fashion, they know so much more than me in this area).

We chatted a bit while I was trying on sandals and it turns out she just graduated a Business degree with a major in PR/Advertising. She was a little forlorn regarding her future job prospects, lamenting on the difficulty of finding work in her newly qualified-for industry, especially without experience. Her shoe selling job was quite casual and clearly she was suffering in the “just out of university and I don’t know what to do” phase of life (I feel the need to mention this article right now - Personal Congruency… At 21? How To Be Confident At Any Age ).

My mind briefly fluttered back to my days studying at university and I felt a momentary kinship with this girl as I remembered worrying about my ability to get work in my chosen study area after graduating. It was a short lived worry however as I quickly decided that having a “career” was not for me, unfortunately replaced with a new worry altogether - how exactly could I earn money without a “career”. Of course fast forward to today and it’s not a worry at all, but confidence is a lot easier in hindsight and with experience tucked into your belt.

I mentioned to my shoe-sales-lady that I also did a business degree and of course she asked me what I ended up doing (what job I got). Nowadays I don’t have an exact answer for this question, which I think is way cool, I like being mysterious.

Perhaps the most common question in the western world when two people meet each other is “what do you do for a living?”, and yes I partake in this ritual with genuine interest, however most occasions I’m given responses like - accountant, retail sales, admin officer, lawyer, IT, music, architecture, etc. All nice square boxes that clearly label what a person does in life. When it comes time for me to explain my calling in the working world the story isn’t so clear cut.

In the past I’ve run with “I run my own business” or “I have my own Internet business” or similar. Then after a few probing questions I’ve dully explained I run a student editing business, which hardly makes me the life of the party since I’m quickly labelled as an “editor”. I’m so far from being an editor that I always feel the need to explain that I run the business and do not do the editing.

Now though I don’t feel right saying that BetterEdit.com is my job either since I don’t devote the majority of my working time to it. It’s the whole Internet “thing” that I feel is my job (bordering on my life at times!).

In many ways I feel like a writer and the romantic in me wants to say that I am a writer. While I do draw some income indirectly as a result of my writing and I use my creative output as a pillar of my online projects, I don’t feel quite right stating I’m a writer, at least not yet. When I’m locked up in some apartment by the beach writing my first novel or even an eBook I might consider myself a true writer and state so with bravado when questioned about my life, but it’s not my label now, it doesn’t fit, at least not yet.

I’m really an online marketer, but that is a very blurry title - What is an online marketer? Internet business entrepreneur, that’s a good one, but doesn’t feel quite right either. I’ve made or make money from affiliate products, advertising, selling websites, referrals, hosting, design, eBay and other ways, but none of those activities fit nicely into a box that I feel comfortable stating as my job.

I’d like to say I’m a student of life - as corny as that sounds - it feels really good right now. I have so much to learn and what I really want to do is indulge in learning in areas that my motivation takes me. That doesn’t just include the Internet and business topics, although they are areas I’m always furthering my education. There are other areas I work on and study such as, psychology, spirituality, existential thought, sport, human interaction and whatever comes my way.

I’ve decided that the best answer to the what do you do? question is to say that I make money through the Internet, quickly clarify that no, it’s not through pornography, leave it at that and see what happens. Sometimes it’s easiest to follow up with “it’s difficult to explain”, especially to those that are not heavy web users, whose eyes gloss over when I mention words like “blog” and “AdWords”. If they are web savvy then perhaps I’ve found an interesting person, someone that shares my affinity for the online world that I’d like to get to know or even better, another solopreneur that may share my lifestyle or have aspirations in that direction. People are always interested when I tell them that I make a full time income with only a couple of mandatory hours of work per day and that statement can be enough to garner interest in a topic they had previously limited to activities like “email” or “browsing” or “research for assignment”. There’s an amazing world working online, and I’m happy to introduce people to it if they show genuine interest.

To the girl that helped me with the sandals today - I haven’t bought any yet so I might be back. She showed enough interest in what I did that I gave her the URL for this blog when I left so you never know, she might be reading this. To everyone else, I’m curious, if you work online how do you describe your daily life to new people you meet that ask that all important question?

Yaro Starak
Student of Life

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I remember when I was in my early twenties, heck, it was only a few birthdays ago (I’m 26 now). Flashback about five years and I was a fresh out of university nobody with a degree in business management that I just scraped a GPA 4 in (this is equivalent to a pass, in Australia Universities grades are 1-7, 4 being a pass, 7 being the best). I spent most of my university days lost. Half the time doing what I needed to get through my degree, the other half of the time indulging in whatever hobby took my interest. Throw in some tennis, a handful of casual jobs and lots and lots of glossy-eyed staring at the beautiful girls on campus and you had my life at university.

It’s not a period that I would want to go through again because it was full of growth experiences and as usual growth is painful. Girls, job interviews, difficult subjects, forced studying of materials I had no interest in whatsoever, failure and success made me generally uncomfortable and unsure of myself for a lot of the time. It all ended and I came out of it alive, perhaps a little jaded, a little bitter, and of course a whole lot lost. No doubt not that unusual for someone in their early twenties.

Don’t get me wrong, it was a period of life my life that I’m glad I went through, I needed to grow as a person. It wasn’t always comfortable but it taught me a lot and throughout that period my confidence slowly blossomed with each new experience. As I’ve grown past the confusing early twenties I’ve realised more and more how vital confidence is, how a person’s congruency with themself is the most important building block for a successful life.

Where does confidence come from?

Reading about, listening to and watching the most successful people, no matter what fields they are excelling in, makes you feel that these people are special. Something about them makes them different from everyone else and you may even go as far as ruling yourself out of achieving similar success because you believe that, for whatever reason, be it luck, genetics, personality or upbringing, something about really truly successful people makes them different from you. It’s as if these people are special and you can not be like them because you lack whatever magic ingredient they have.

To make yourself feel better and gain education you read books and study the materials written about the special people so you can emulate them and be special too. You read the habits of highly successful people. You follow goal setting guides, motivational mantras and build blocks to success. For some reason it doesn’t work for you, further cementing your opinion that really successful people are special and different and you can’t replicate that magic purely through study, self discipline and by following road maps. You just weren’t born to be successful, you were born to struggle.

Famous and successful people are just people

In 1998 I had the luck and skill to qualify for the biggest event in the Magic: The Gathering (a strategy card game) calendar, the World Championships, that year played in Seattle, USA. I had played well, was lucky and made some smart choices at the Australian Nationals to land second place and a spot on the Australian World Championship team. By this time Magic had become a big deal, with three million dollars distributed as prizes each year (first place at the world Championships that year won $36,000 USD). The level of professionalism had increased greatly as a result and there were people playing the game competitively for a full time living. Magic even had superstars, players you read about in magazines, watched on ESPN and cheered for during live web coverage of the big events. In many ways a regular Magic player admired these superstars as special people, people that were very successful in life and possessed a gift or some form of unique talent, much like a young golfer might admire Tiger Woods or an entrepreneur might look at Richard Branson.

Olle Rade, a young guy from Sweden, enjoyed tremendous success at Magic, winning a Pro Tour and at that point with lifetime earnings well over $50,000 USD and he wasn’t even 20 yet. I really admired Olle. Then there was John Finkel, who back then was known as the best Magic player with well over $100,000 in career earnings. These guys were superstars, overachievers and in my mind sitting on a pedestal above everyone else.

Heading to Seattle I had my first chance to meet and play these superstars of Magic. I’m not one to gush over celebrities but sometimes you can’t help but feel a little in awe of people you’ve read about in the media. Since I knew so much about these famous players and they knew nothing about me I felt I wasn’t on equal terms, I wasn’t confident and in no way did I consider myself one of them.

By the end of the tournament I was exhausted. The little sleep I got didn’t help me play the best cards but the experience I gained was amazing. During the tournament I played Olle Rade and I beat him. It was just like any other match and he was quite upset by the end of it, celebrities don’t like losing either. I lost to some other big names and during our non-playing periods enjoyed getting to know many famous players.

By the end of the week I had completely changed as a Magic player. Despite not performing well I left Seattle with confidence in myself as a player and a new perspective on celebrities. Every superstar Magic player I met was no different from me. Sure some had natural talents that I didn’t, perhaps strong mathematical abilities, but I had strengths in other areas. Magic being a game of skill rewards those that practice and study, luck and natural ability play a part, but in the end it’s people playing people and Magic stars were stars because they had done two things - they worked really hard at what they did because they loved it and they had experience from winning and loosing a lot of matches.

How to be confident at any age

If the Yaro of now sat down with myself at 21 and tried to explain the secret to becoming confident and attaining success I probably would have a lot of trouble getting through to him. It’s hard to be a believer without experience and in hindsight faith is a lot easier, but I’ll do my best to help along all those other people struggling to have faith in themself.

There is only one thing you need to understand, and in fact this is more a faith based decision about your future more than it is a tangible truth if you are young and/or inexperienced.

If you don’t have experience, you are young and just starting out in life, you don’t have a history of events to draw conclusions from. Books, videos, podcasts and education in general are a good starting point but you will never have success, you will never get true confidence in yourself without experience, without taking actions and learning from the outcomes.

The beauty of experience is that it comes from both success and failure. While one makes you feel great and the other makes you feel lousy, the end result is still experience and a new framework of perception you can apply to your future life. This is what experience is. This is what you draw on to create success and this is the essence of your personal congruency.

In many ways I’m very successful right now. In many other ways I’m far from it. I’m not a millionaire, in fact I have very few assets at all. For now lets avoid a discussion of the determinants of life success and I’ll simply state that I have a hell of a lot more I want to achieve and I bet you do too.

Have faith in the power of experience

Each setback in my life was usually brought upon by a lack of patience, a desire to become something else and achieve something quickly (life’s version of the get rich quick scheme). During the major catastrophes in life I accused the world of the usual atrocities, that life was singling me out to suffer, that I had somehow been selected as a victim and that it just wasn’t fair. Each new painful experience in life brings about similar feelings and despite my intellectual understanding of reality it doesn’t make the pain less painful.

Your ability to bounce back, to turn the frown upside down, to leverage failure to create success and find opportunities in the remnants of breakdown is a lifeskill of tremendous value. Don’t let your feelings of confusion and loss make you depressed. Leaving school, finishing university or quitting (or being fired from) a job are opportunities that you rarely get in life. These are powerful turning point moments that in most people’s lives only happen rarely. Major change is not a common occurrence for a typical human being so relish the opportunity when it comes along, don’t drown in your supposed lack of identity.

How to deal with confusion

If you are not sure what to do with your life dip your fingers into as many activities as you can and follow those that make you happy (and no doubt will probably make you money too). Use skills to build assets, don’t trade labour for money because it’s not a good long term strategy. Trade your labour today for asset building for tomorrow and start building passive income supports. It will be hard work and it might seem that for many years and months that you are making nothing (I know I feel like that sometimes), but your future self will thank you for it in the years to come.

An empty slate should not make you sad, it’s just space that’s ready to be filled with your energy and ideas as you test yourself to see what works and makes you happy. Have faith in the power of experience to create personal congruency. Remember that other people are just like you, even the most famous, most successful people. They are not superheros blessed with magic powers. They simply choose to fill their lives with experiences, they grew from failures and successes and eagerly jump into new activities with vigour and passion. They have confidence because they can refer back to the outcomes of events in their lives, they know how to deal with situations so they are not afraid to try. Life rewards those people that take action, who don’t follow the crowd but rather follow their passions.

Remember too that life is not quick. It’s a long ride. You want it to be that way right. Why be so eager to achieve certain things by tomorrow? What are you trying to become so quickly that you are creating frustration and stress today. Persist in the activities that you have motivation to work on over and over again, and not just for weeks, but for months and years. Become good at them and then great at them. These are the skills you will develop because you enjoy them. Eventually they will become your special talents that set you apart and you will be surprised how suddenly others look at you as if you are gifted.

Yaro Starak

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