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LIBERATE YOURSELF FROM THE PROTESTANT WORK ETHIC | Richard Koch

There are diminishing returns to work, and then negative returns. Nobody – I mean literally NOBODY – can work more than 25 hours a week and be highly productive every hour.  It can’t be done.

Schopenhauer Quotes (Author of ARTE DE SER FELIZ, EL) | Goodreads

“On a cold winter’s day, a group of porcupines huddled together to stay warm and keep from freezing. But soon they felt one another’s quills and moved apart. When the need for warmth brought them closer together again, their quills again forced them apart. They were driven back and forth at the mercy of their discomforts until they found the distance from one another that provided both a maximum of warmth and a minimum of pain. In human beings, the emptiness and monotony of the isolated self produces a need for society. This brings people together, but their many offensive qualities and intolerable faults drive them apart again. The optimum distance that they finally find that permits them to coexist is embodied in politeness and good manners. Because of this distance between us, we can only partially satisfy our need for warmth, but at the same time, we are spared the stab of one another’s quills.” ― Schopenhauer

How To Motivate Yourself To Make More Money Than You Need | Maverick Traveler

Most of the cities where I’ve lived have been far from “comfortable” and “easy,” especially from a perspective of a nomadic entrepreneur. Rio de Janeiro is too dangerous to be lugging your laptop around town and isn’t very nomad work-friendly. Medellin is too bland and boring. Copenhagen is too expensive. Barcelona lacks a coffee shop culture and has slow Internet. Eastern Europe lacks coffee shop culture, has slow Internet and is very cold most of the year. Bali has slow Internet and lacks basic infrastructure. But Chiang Mai is the city to get work done. It truly is “The Digital Nomad Capital Of The World.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Advice on Borrowing Money and Getting Financial Freedom

Money can’t buy happiness, but the absence of money can cause unhappiness. Money buys freedom: intellectual freedom, freedom to choose who you vote for, to choose what you want to do professionally. But having what I call “fuck you” money requires a huge amount of discipline. The minute you go a penny over, then you lose your freedom again. If money is the cause of your worry, then you have to restructure your life.

Moving for Good | Derek Sivers

At first, their values and methods will feel wrong. You’ll feel the urge to tell them how it could be better. (Meaning: more like what you know.) But try to understand a perspective where they are right, and you are wrong. Eventually you’ll realize that your beliefs were not correct — they were just the quaint local culture of where you grew up. You are a product of your environment.

Moving for Good | Derek Sivers

This keeps you in a learning mindset. Previously mindless habits, like buying groceries, now keep your mind open, alert, and noticing new things. New arrivals in a culture often notice what the locals don’t. (Fish don’t know they’re in water.) Don’t think of yourself as visiting. Say that you’ve moved here, and mean it. Commit. Immerse. Go native. Form deep friendships with locals. Ask lots of questions. Ask them to explain things, and show you how it’s done. When they state a fact, ask how they know. When they state an opinion, ask for examples.

Moving for Good | Derek Sivers

You only really learn when you’re surprised. Unless you’re surprised, everything is fitting into your existing thought patterns. So to get smarter, you need to get surprised, think in new ways, and deeply understand different perspectives. With effort, you could do this from the comforts of home. But the most effective way to shake things up is to move across the world. Pick a place that’s most unlike what you know, and go.

Moving for Good | Derek Sivers

You are the way you are because of what you’ve experienced. Your country, family, town, random circumstances, and friends shaped the way you think. If you grew up on the other side of the world, you would have a different set of values and thought patterns. But if you keep experiencing the same things, your mind keeps its same patterns. Same input, same response. Your brain, which was once curious and growing, gets fixed into deep habits. Your values and opinions harden and resist change. If you don’t flex, you lose your flexibility.

7 Psychological Barriers You Must Overcome To Successfully Sell Anything Online | Maverick Traveler

Selling is a fundamental part of any business; in fact, it defines the business. If you can’t sell, you don’t have a business. It’s what separates the 9-5 middle class sheeple from self-made men who go on to make millions of dollars. It’s your ability to create something and persuade others that it’ll benefit them in some shape or form.

Seth's Blog: Holding your breadth

It's tempting to diversify, particularly when it comes to what you offer the world. One more alternative, one more flavor, one more variation. Something for everyone. We get pushed to smooth out the work, make it softer, more widely applicable. More breadth, though, doesn't cause change, and it won't get you noticed. Focus works. A sharp edge cuts through the clutter.

The System Is Fundamentally Fucked | Maverick Traveler

Entrepreneurship should never be viewed as something that you do in addition to your job; it should be viewed as something who you are. Take all your knowledge, expertise and perseverance—everything that’s dear to you—and market it to the masses. Cut out the middleman. Unleash yourself to the world. Instead of fighting the system, let the system work for you. The world is hungry for information, knowledge and original content, so why not provide it?

The System Is Fundamentally Fucked | Maverick Traveler

instead of picking dimes in front of the steamroller (which is what you do when you side-hustle), you must embrace hustling as a way of life. It’s not that hard or stressful. It doesn’t mean you must work 24-7 for many months. It just requires a slight mindset shift, changing the way you think about how stuff is made and sold.

Living In Russia Made Me Realize Just How Utterly Helpless And Needy We, Westerners, Have Become | Maverick Traveler

What is a service? It’s another word for holding your hand, while gently guiding you into achieving a certain task. The more someone else has to do, the less you have to do, and the less you have to do, the less capable you become. That’s why we, as Americans, are conditioned from an early age to seek assistance and help instead of independently figuring things out ourselves.

Want a Unicorn Business? - JamieMcSloy.co.uk

Stuff like niche websites, passive income and asset building are not what you should start with. Actually, niche sites are good for certain things… but they’re not a business on their own. It’s the same with the average asset. These things are what you do to diversify after you know what you’re doing. There’s no sense in hiring a writer to write you niche blog posts when you don’t know what goes into SEO. There’s no point in buying gold if you can’t afford your grocery bill.

Bestselling Author Seth Godin: 'Reassurance is Futile'

"Everything's not going to be fine," says Godin. "You're going to be rejected, you're going to do projects that don't work, you're going to almost run out of money. You're going to have this fail, and this fail, and this fail. So, at that point, the person that reassured you is pretty much a liar, because they said everything was going to be fine . . . . and, in order to become the self-sufficient, self-propelled entrepreneurs we're capable of being, self-reassurance is the only reassurance we can look for."

The Beginner's Guide to Deliberate Practice | James Clear

While regular practice might include mindless repetitions, deliberate practice requires focused attention and is conducted with the specific goal of improving performance.

Top 7 split testing blunders you must avoid – VWO Blog

You have several options when it comes to copy. Hypey versus soft. Long form versus short form. Professional versus personal. And while you may “think” you know what type of copy works the best, it’s impossible to know until you test it. But here’s a tip to get started. In MOST cases, a mix of hype versus soft… long form… and personal… works the best.

Storytelling In Copywriting - JamieMcSloy.co.uk

For most of your sales letter, you’re not selling. That’s the weird thing. You’re setting a scene and building a bridge between your reader’s aspiration and their reality. Copywriting and sales in general work due to weird human psychology quirks, and this is one of them.

Core Business Skills Everyone Must Learn And Master | Maverick Traveler

Being able to design, build a product, write the marketing and sales messages are the three core skills that you need in order to build something truly of your own. These skills are the pillars of any business.

Yes, money does grow on trees – Sovereign Man

We don’t have the power to wave our magic wands and remake the entire world as we want it to be. But we absolutely have the power to seize the opportunities in front of us and remake our own realities into exactly what we want them to be. It’s 2017. You can live anywhere and make money anywhere. You can start a business in a day and start generating income tomorrow. You can reach prospective investors, customers, and employees who live on the other side of the planet. You can raise money for new ventures on dozens of websites without ever having to set foot in a bank. You can invest in countless asset classes in every corner of the world without having to get out of bed. You can protect yourself from every major risk in the financial system with nothing more than an Internet connection. We have so much power to affect our own lives, far more than any politician or government. And THAT is the entire point of personal sovereignty. It’s about being independent and self-reliant, not waiting around for some government to legislate the nation into prosperity. All it takes is a little bit of education… and the will to act.

How to Write Great Copy When You're Not Actually a Copywriter | Articles | Matt Olpinski | UI + UX Designer | New York

In the world of digital marketing, great design exists to support great copy. Not the other way around. Prioritize your copywriting over your design. Fonts, colors, sizes, and spacing are all secondary to choosing the right words.

How to Write Great Copy When You're Not Actually a Copywriter | Articles | Matt Olpinski | UI + UX Designer | New York

If your home page says, “I’m a UI/UX Designer”, you’re forcing your clients to bridge the gap between my services and their goal – a mental task that clients are notoriously bad at accomplishing. But if my home page says, “I design websites & apps that help business grow.”, that speaks directly to my client’s needs and I’ve now got some control over their next action.

Seth's Blog: The two vocabularies (because there are two audiences)

Early adopters want to buy a different experience than people who identify as the mass market do. Innovators want something fresh, exciting, new and interesting. The mass market doesn't. They want something that works.

Is President Trump Doing Management Wrong? | Scott Adams' Blog

A good way to tell whether a pundit or citizen understands the field of risk management well enough to critique Trump’s performance is to ask how they view his history of bankruptcies. If a person thinks those bankruptcies are a sign of poor management, they probably don’t know much about business. But if they understand the few bankruptcies – out of hundreds of projects – as part of a diversification strategy with good risk management that siloed off the losers, you might be seeing someone who understands business.

Not that there’s any inflation, but . . . – Sovereign Man

Nearly 7 in 10 Americans have less than $1,000 in savings. 1 out of every 3 Americans has nothing set aside for retirement. And, according to Federal Reserve data, the median working-age couple has saved just $5,000 for retirement. How is this even possible? How could it be that the citizens of the wealthiest country to have ever existed in the history of the world barely have any savings? Simple. The cost of living has skyrocketed over time.

The Odds of Being Killed by an Immigrant | Scott Adams' Blog

The idea that we can predict the future based on the past is one of our most persistent illusions. It isn’t rational (for the vast majority of situations) and it doesn’t match our observations. But we think it does.  The big problem is that we have lots of history from which to cherry-pick our predictions about the future. The only reason history repeats is because there is so much of it. Everything that happens today is bound to remind us of something that happened before, simply because lots of stuff happened before, and our minds are drawn to analogies.