Category Archive

The movie trailer for Iron Man 3 (it’s worth watching!) opens with our fearless hero saying, “I build neat stuff, I’ve got a great girl, and occasionally save the world. So why can’t I sleep?”

This line, the setup of the movie, the plot and the arc of the story, all point to THE central question every Influential Writer must answer for his or her readers.

Almost every man who walks the earth asks that question:

One of the great virtues of possessing longevity as an Influencer is:

You don’t have to re-do everything month after month and year after year.

Mark Twain only had to write The Adventures of Tom Sawyer once. Shakespeare only had to write Romeo and Juliet once. Moses only had to write Genesis once. Heck, people are still arguing about it 3500 years later.

Cosmopolitan magazine hasn’t produced a single original idea in 20 years, but they still have to re-shuffle their headlines and supermodels every 30 days.

How do you get off the Cosmo merry-go-round and create something that lasts 10 or 20 years or even a century?

Mike Rhodes and I did a webinar on Google Display Network. Highlights from the replay:

*Search is finite. Display is not. Few keywords could even possibly send you 100,000 clicks per day. But GDN is fully capable of delivering that much traffic to your site if what you sell has broad appeal.

Even if your market is small, MOST companies can get more buyers from Display than from search.

*Choosing keywords on the Display Network is a lot like …

Twelve differences between those who dream and those who act:

My 8 year old digs Minecraft. Minecraft is a video game where you build castles and walls and landscapes and moats and anything else you can imagine. It’s like virtual Legos. One day he was showing me a fortress he’d built. He said, “Dad, I’m an ARCHITECT!” “Yes, Z-Man, you are. You are an Architect!” Suddenly I thought of something … Read More

For far too long, people of faith have embraced poverty as though it’s some kind of virtue. In this barn-burning message, Ian Carroll of Greater Chicago Church demolishes this false idol and pinpoints the real tension between poverty and wealth.

The real question is: Do you own your wealth, or does your wealth own you? And what is YOUR wealth going to accomplish?

Roundtable in Orlando was packed. We combined groups 1 and 2 and Michael, a new member whose business has exploded in the last 18 months, was on the hot seat.

He sells a commodity service in the $1,000 range. It’s a brutal, “please quote me a price and show up on the day you promise” market. It’s possible to have a USP but everyone in that biz still circles the “low price” drain.

He has a strong USP, his Google account is in top shape, he has his sales team in place; and his operations and delivery systems are solid.

“What next?” he asked.

Today I’m hosting a 4-Man Intensive and before members come, they get a questionnaire. One of the questions is: “List 5 topics you know a lot about, that most people don’t know you know a lot about.”

I ask this question for a very specific reason: Cross-pollination between fields. I want to know what strengths they bring from other areas of life into what they do now.

That’s because the easiest way to innovate is to bring knowledge and strategies from one corner of the world to some other, completely different corner, where they can be directly applied and everything is brand spankin’ new.

WARNING:

When you do this, somebody ain’t gonna like it.

If you look at everything you do as a science experiment – instead of “Custer’s Last Stand” – you’ll never fail again. You’ll just test your way to success.

Failure = testing. Sure was a revolutionary idea when I first heard it.

Last year, Benji Rabhan at age 26 was honored by President Obama. He made the Empact100 List one of the 100 top young entrepreneurs in the US. Benji is one of my esteemed Roundtable members.

Quoting from Benji’s book, “Failure is Obsolete”: