and deeper in debt. Hmmm, actually, no. Turned 41 this Tuesday without a financial debt in the world… Oh, sure, we’ve still got our monthly bills and all, but everything we own, we own free and clear. I can’t suggest it highly enough to anyone. If you’re struggling with the money thing, Dave has some good ideas to get you on that path.

Anyway, now that I’m officially a year older, any words of advice to you young ‘uns? Sure:

• Unless taking a risk is likely to physically harm you or others, lean towards taking it. My personal ratio of regrets for things undone versus those done is heavily tilted towards the undone side of the ledger. Someone feel free to remind me of this every time you see me!
• What gets measured, gets improved. Have something you’re coming short on? Measure it. In early June, despite half efforts to counter my expansion, I tipped the scales at just shy of 230 pounds. I started an online Weight Watchers membership June 15th, just used their handy dandy mobile app – in other words, no meetings or cardboard tasting food – and weighed myself yesterday at 202 and change. Missed my goal of sub-200 by my birthday, but not by much…
• Play a little every day. I don’t care if you’re 8 or 88. Life is too short, no matter how much time you have left…
• Oh, and as always, wear sunscreen…

As a continuation to my comments concerning the food we eat from earlier today, this was today’s randomly chosen podcast that came up for me to listen to on the way home from work: From On Being – Driven By Flavor.

May as well finish the day’s theme out and pull up Food, Inc. on Netflix…

The ‘ad’ to the left was in our local newspaper this week, which primarily was composed of a large section saluting Nebraska corn growers. Now, I don’t have a thing against our local corn growers. They’re providing what their market — and the government via subsidies — is apparently requesting. But I had to laugh — and cry a little — at the ad, ’cause, well, eating corn certainly doesn’t add any flavor benefit to that hunk o’ meat you’re enjoying. The farmer feeds ‘em corn to get them to the market faster.

Cows, in the natural, don’t particularly care for corn — they much prefer grass.

Corn allows cows to get fatter faster and be ready for slaughter sooner. But there are downsides, including the fact that cows have trouble digesting corn and must be fed antibiotics to prevent them from becoming ill. What’s more, beef from corn-fed cows tends to have more fat.

Apparently, beef is on the mind — the ad brought forth thoughts of the recent brouhaha surrounding Taco Bell and the non-beef beef they use. Is it 35% beef or 40%? Whatever the actual beef content, you can bet that that ‘other’ 60-65% of filler is just wonderful for your health.

Methinks it’s time to spend more on the food we put in our body and less on all the useless crap we fill our lives with…

Well, business wise, did my bit — another 20 landing pages created, advertising campaigns set up, blasts put out there live to the world, blah blah blah. So did make an entirely appropriate level of progress on that front. But it certainly wasn’t the big news of the week.

That particular seat was taken by my chance to welcome another soul to the world. My son and I decided, at almost the last minute, to accompany my wife on her trip down to KC for my sis’ baby shower. Thought it’d be good to go down, check out her & her hubby’s new place. And, of course, poke a little fun at her very pregnant state as I wouldn’t see her gigantic self (not really sis, if you happen to stumble on this… ) before her due date late this month.

Instead, sis decided to skip the baby shower altogether and just go ahead and have the baby the day after we arrive! Just a little early, but the new mommy & baby are doing just fine. Best of all, everyone arrived home yesterday.

And things like this, really, are the true kick in the ass.

Money. Work. Business. No doubt, all necessary things.

But having the opportunity to be there to greet a new life shortly after it make its grand appearance in this world puts those things in their right place, a few spots back.

Welcome to the world little Lea!

Ah, a week later, and I feel pretty well human again. Quite the end-o’-winter cold this time. Still pill popping to kill off the bugs that are hanging on, but the end is near! But the real question: Did I get anything done this week?

• Precisely no campaigns were entirely completed. As it’s late in the game, I decided to go the eBay mini site route for the remainders. Going to run through my process with the campaigns in bulk, so, I’ll either finish all of ‘em, or I’ll finish none of ‘em. To meet the blast challenge, I have to get the remaining 66 of ‘em live by next Monday! Should be fun!
• That said, I gathered at least 66 files full of raw recent sales data pulled in via Hot Item Finder from some interesting potential niches I found with my Terapeak subscription. What remains is a bit of almost mechanical effort to get these fleshed out and finished up. Still, 66 with other things going on in life? Could be a stretch!
• A few forgotten info sites with Adsense on them have really taken off this week for some reason. Trying to figure what’s going on there in order to replicate it, but I just can’t seem to ferret out any real reason for the traffic increase. I can’t argue with a little extra income, but it bugs me that I’m having problems coming up with a way to systemize the increase…

All things considering, not a bad week by any means. Little completed, but much worked on. Nothing like taking it down to the wire…

What is this all about? What the Weekly Kick in the Ass is…

While nowhere near back to functioning at 100%, I’m at least slowly starting to feel human once again. My major health complaint of the day: ‘Why does everything taste like burnt coffee?‘ Nonetheless, sure beats ‘Where in jeebus’s name does all this nasty multi-hued phlegm come from, and when will it stop?‘ any day. Apologies for that mental image!

Since I’m feeling marginally better the last couple days, I decided to at the very least catch up with my stats collection for my blasting income. While doing so, I let the ol’ mind drift for awhile, and made a few observations.

Owning a Job

Doing tax work this time of the year, as well as via relationships with people in the little rural communities around me, I personally know more than a few who call themselves business owners who really aren’t. What they’ve done is created for themselves a job. Yes, indeed, occasionally a very well paying job. More often than not, a very demanding job. Sometimes even going so far as to surround themselves with an extensive support staff that they consider their employees. Nevertheless, it isn’t truly a business in my mind; it’s a job that is heavily dependent on the owner being there day in, day out, month in, month out, for the ‘business’ to run smoothly. Oftentimes, for it to run at all.

I’ve got one of those ‘businesses.’ In addition to tax work and the online biz, I do a fair bit of PC tech work a good chunk of the year. And a day I don’t walk into the office and get my hands dirty inside a computer is a day when that business makes precisely zero dollars. Just about the farthest thing from passive income as one can get. Honestly, there are plenty of days that I’d be just thrilled to never crack open a case again. And soon enough, I won’t, unless the mood strikes me to add another petabyte to my next PC.

The graveyards are full of indispensable men. — Charles de Gaulle

In a scarier position yet are those employed in one of these ‘businesses’. The day the owner decides to call it quits, or the vagaries of life i.e. death forces that decision on the owner, so goes the business. The owner was the business, and now that s/he’s gone, time for the employees to find a new line of work. Or take on the task of recreating the owner’s job for themselves. Methinks a rather precarious position.

Owning a Business

But while pulling in my stats and massaging them into the desired format, the part about this online income gig that just rocks my world became abundantly clear: While I accomplished almost nothing over the last week+, my online business continued to chug merrily along in my absence, almost as if that fact didn’t really matter. Because, in all honesty, at least on a continual basis, my being present working in the business doesn’t. By design. I have taken great pains to make it so.

It, like any well-designed business, doesn’t need its owner aka me sitting at a desk continually micromanaging every little thing going on within it. What I do isn’t rocket science. And even if it was, to do that well takes a similar process.

Namely, I have systems in place that explain, in often excruciating detail, most of what I do. And what isn’t explicitly explained today gets written down and added to my system as I further optimize what I’m doing. Truthfully, I see that process a more vital part of the business than the actual business of the business.

And why bother? Because, if I can systemize my business, I can do something like hire or outsource to complete those parts of my business that I’ve tired of doing personally. Or, for that matter, all of it. Or multiply my efforts for the price of an employee or two or freelancer or two. Or, pull my system together, pretty it up, put a bow on it, and sell the system itself. Or if I’m tired of all that passive income, sell the whole thing off.

So, I’m left waiting for the bugs to get killed off so I can get back to working on my business. Can’t wait!

Sean didn’t accomplish a damn thing towards meeting his goal this week!

Feel free to berate him…

Not precisely true, in that I did manage to get together some basic sales information to cover the missing six blasts from the prior week as well as all twenty for the one just finished. Finished that up last Monday evening, set the info aside with full intentions to get rolling, and suffered the remainder of the week with I-don’t-know-what.

In fact, I continue to suffer with whatever it is as I type, and am making a run up to the clinic after I finish this up. Being like most men, I don’t run to the doctor unless I’m feeling incredibly shitty.

And I am.

So maybe next week we can get rid of the stocks… but personally, I’d be fine if I can just get rid of whatever has decided to camp out in my head!

ed. So doc loaded me up with a boatload of full body antibiotic pills, some eye drop antibiotics (I should have grabbed a few scary closeups of my pair of seriously bloodshot eyes before I started the eyedrops), and some nasal steroids. More meds than I’ve been on for a long time — apparently, had good reason to feel like hell!

[What is this all about?]

Oops, another bout of this winter’s crazy weather has me trapped at home, and my days all messed up. And I let this out initially unadulterated. Despite what it might have said a few hours ago, as a matter of fact, I did accomplish a thing or two towards my goal this week!

1. Blasted away with another six new mini sites while trapped here in the countryside.
2. Quite a bit of stats trolling, ending up with me killing off a handful of fairly high traffic, low-converting mini sites. Already seeing a pretty substantial uptick in per-click earnings from those changes!
3. Continuing my nanoblogging projects. I still overthink this process, but I’m getting better. Plus, I’m learning a fair amount on a few niches I’m interested in anyway!

Not altogether bad for suffering through the continuing doldrums of Winter 2010 with a massive head cold! ‘cept for that losing-track-of-a-day thing…

[What is this all about?]

I’m in the process of replacing my computer at the office, and am going through it to find where I hid all my good stuff so I can transfer them over. Amazing the amount of digital bits we collect over the years.

Stumbled across a little program called SilkQuit that I installed around five years ago at the end of the year my son was born and my father had a stroke. Running it today, this is spit out to me:

You haven’t had a cigarette for four years, ten months, one week, six days, 1 hour, 15 minutes and 50 seconds. 44,451 cigarettes not smoked, saving you $11,112.57. Life saved: 22 weeks, 8 hours, 15 minutes.

A habit I had for over half my life at the time, that I rarely consciously even think about anymore. Nevertheless, I still catch myself, about once a month, driving down the road, reaching into my pocket to grab that long gone smoke.

Habits are an incredibly powerful thing. Develop a few good ones!

If you recall, I set a pair of rather hefty goals to be met on September 1st:

1. A health goal of losing 20+ pounds
2. A financial goal of paying off the remainder of the mortgage

So, how’d I do? Am I now a flyweight with no debts in the world?

Well, no, not quite. Actually, neither goal was met.

I’m still 10+ pounds away from my health goal. But I’m well on the way, and just reset my sticky to read 195 by 12/1. Most days I am successful in keeping 30-60+ minutes of some form of exercise in my routine. I’m also fairly addicted to the tracking provided by my Polar F11 Heart Rate Monitor, which I picked up to allow me to track my progress. I now do goofy crap like seeing how many calories I burn while mowing the lawn or assembling a swing or playing a few rounds of Wii Sports Tennis… So while I didn’t meet that goal, I must say I’m feeling a ton better. And have absolutely no doubt about that number being reached!

As for the mortgage, it’s still there, but we’ve been throwing fairly big chunks at it to kill it off rapidly. Honestly, we now have more than enough sitting in our savings account that I could write that check and be done with it if the mood struck me. But a healthy chunk of that account is our emergency fund, and another chunk is quasi-allocated for next year’s taxes. I haven’t taken the time to research exactly what we will be owing tax-wise come next April, so emptying it would come too close to cleaning out that account for my personal risk tolerance. That, and being a Dave Ramsey acolyte, I don’t believe zeroing the mortgage quite qualifies as an emergency! But, that said, once I do hash out what will be going to the taxman, everything above that emergency fund is earmarked for the mortgage. So sometime early next spring may see a mortgage burning party yet. Look for your invitation…

So, do I feel like a failure because I met neither goal? Absolutely not. I’m well on my way to both, and purposely picked timelines that were going to be very difficult to reach in order to stretch myself. Like I’ve said, the trip is often more important than the destination!