No Action, Talk Only (NATO) - An Insomniac’s Rant
I realise I have been guilty of the NATO disease (how can you be guilty of a disease?). The ratio of my ideation, planning and discussion to actual implementation of said ideas, plans and discussions is disproportionate, leaning heavily to the theoretical rather than the practical side.
No worries. Like any good utilitarian, I shall remedy this with more plans that heavily favour actions rather than more complicated theorising. Of course, testing, tracking and evaluating are crucial elements of this experiment as well.
There are a couple of areas in my life that I seek to better -
1. My Livelihood.
My internet businesses are my livelihood. Presently, I am working on a ‘make money online via internet marketing‘ type of project called MoneyMakingTactics.com. Feel free to take a sneak peek at the work in development. I have been learning, testing, launching, failing, relearning and generally ‘doing’ internet marketing since 2002 and I’ve surprised myself by not launching an internet marketing site of my own to impart my 5 years’ worth of knowledge, information and wisdom to others - until now.
In the internet marketing world, the word ‘guru’ has been bandied about quite frequently. If by ‘guru’ you mean someone who knows something and can teach it, then by all means I am a guru. In fact, that is what the word ‘guru’ originally means, right, in Malay and (if I’m not mistaken) Tamil? But the internet marketing arena has warped the word ‘guru’ to mean someone who is very successful with a huge list of newsletter subscribers to which they promote their products for massive profits every time.
Literally, you can make thousands of dollars overnight on the internet. Such things are true and not pipe dreams. I’ve had a taste of it myself - a couple of hundred US dollars overnight from selling a 5-page report on how to get traffic from Wikipedia.
My currently running (and nearly 100% automated) project, which you might already know, is Ultimate Secrets of Success. I started it in early 2005. It’s in the success and personal development field. In 2003, perhaps some of my friends will know, I launched my first personal development online business project, Effective Questions dot com. I wrote my first goal setting ebook, earned my first US$1,000 from sales of it, but got distracted by other internet marketing opportunities, school projects and worries about my looming national service.
Now it’s been over a year since I’ve completed my 26 months (24 actually, I ’stole’ 2 months’ worth of leave near the end) of service to the country, and sometime early this year I breathed new life into UltimateSecretsofSuccess.com - the domain name is unconventional (too long, uncatchy, etc), it breaks countless laws in the marketing textbook, yet it makes some money and I have my own cult following of about 300+ subscribers - not to mention I’ve gotten the attention of several fellow (some of them bestselling) personal development authors and experts.
I’m a bit go with the flow and having a clear plan and agenda. I make up new plans or evolve old ones as I go along and see how things develop.
An offshoot, spin-off or ’sister project’ of UltimateSecretsofSuccess.com would be my up and coming FreeYourGenius.com. Think the US$20 Million a year DoubleYourDating.com business model but applied to the accelerated learning, memory improvement and general mental and intellectual literacy enhancement market. An African American teenager named Jermaine Griggs started his niche play-piano-by-ear training online business a couple of years ago and it’s now a multi-million dollar business. The “playing gospel music on the piano” market is not even a modest one (there are less than 50 searches for such things every day according to Wordtracker) - it’s tiny but somehow he’s successfully turned it into a multi-million dollar business.
At this point, it has become clear to me that I might have chosen this path - either consciously or subconsciously - for deliberate reasons. I’m not a perfect and infallible person, but I’ve always felt at ease and most ‘in tune’ when the projects I am doing are about enhancing other people’s lives in whatever ways feasible - be it through my personal development content or my internet marketing software or services.
This is what I believe in - businesses that not only generate profits but improve lives. I believe the 2 should come together, hand in hand. One should never overtake the other. The next philosophy or concept I wish to integrate into my plans is that of helping people help themselves - the “give a man a fish VS teaching him how to fish” idea (which I actually first came across as a mural in my primary school; initially I thought it didn’t make sense, why would a school talk about a man fishing? but now it is clear to me). This is in line with my revolutionary life mission and leads to my next point…
2. My Mission.
Some months ago, I think it was my birth month, August, I started volunteering every Monday to listen to the grievances of local residents (their financial problems, fines, family disputes, etc) and help direct them to the relevant bodies that can help them by writing up correspondence to said bodies for them. It isn’t exactly groundbreaking but it’s my small part to play to help humanity. The past few weeks I had been occupied with other work commitments so I’d been missing my Monday sessions. I do intend to resume in the very near future when circumstances permit.
The sessions had been eye-opening and a great learning experience. I can safely say 100% of all the cases I attended to, the problems had been caused by money - the lack of it, or the lack of knowledge of properly managing it, or just the lack of opportunities (due to various reasons) to earn a good sum of it.
The more cases I attend to, the more first-hand knowledge or ‘grokking’ I can get. I don’t intend to keep a ‘distance’ in such a way that my experience becomes mechanical (i.e. entering their grievances into the system) nor do I want to immerse myself too much into their problems until I am psychologically affected.
I’ve started to see these problems systematically - where it had gone wrong, what exactly was the cause, what was missing or lacking, what shouldn’t have been there, etc. It all boils down to know-how, mettle, maybe a little luck (but luck can be self-manufactured), nothing that relevant and specific education can’t help. Not only are we enemies to what we don’t know, we are also slaves suffering under the tyranny of our ignorance. Most of the time our problems in life are caused by a lack of information or knowledge in certain areas or contexts. That is the key.
Some people swear by the System - it is everything. Civilisation is either made or broken by it. I say it is true only if people or the human element is included as a crucial (if not the most critical) factor in the System. Milton Friedman’s theories unleashed a genocide when implemented in Argentina. Should the economist be blamed or the dictator Pinochet? Some religious fundamentalists accused Darwin of creating the theory (evolution) that was the intellectual ancestor to Nazism and Fascism (’Survival of the Fittest’). The problems of the 19th and 20th centuries which are now creeping into the early 21st are caused by this ‘objective’, ‘rigorous’ and ’scientific’ (if you will) disregard for all subjective, emotional or human elements and tragically, when theory becomes practice, the ‘objective, rigorous and scientific’ disregard for the human element is also reflected and hence, human beings are seen as no more than ‘objects’ that can be moved about, manipulated or entirely removed to ‘perfect the System’. Ironically, however, greed is also a human trait. So where should the lines that separate objective and human-subjective be drawn? And once the lines are drawn, should they be set in stone, or constantly evolving?
There are several practical paths that my mission can take - how I can translate this vision of eradicating money and establishing a resource-based economy built upon the foundation of justice as opposed to profit and the paradigm of abundance as opposed to scarcity. The current monetary system is to be seen as backward and impeding to humanity’s progress; as idolatry was in pre-Islamic Arabia.
Money is a temporary quick fix that somehow, because of mismanagement of civilisation and resources (such that the few dominates the resources of the many), became a permanent, long-term thing to stay, and if this system of representing real value with fake symbols continues, civilisation will either continue upon a path that will lead to doom or be eternally trapped in a nightmarish loop of booms, busts, short-lived prosperity periods and great depressions.
A new world built on this transcendental economic model must be prepared for the mindset changes, paradigm replacements and even philosophical re-evaluations that it demands. For ages, money perpetrated this illusion upon humanity and we were all addicted to it.
One of the paths that can effectively lead to this revolution is to invest in minds, to invest in the development of human potential as an end in itself, not as a means to use said human potential to generate greater profits. Ironically, this mission of destroying money requires the flowing of money - at first - at least, until we have come to the point where human potential and technology is developed such that we have optimal mastery of resources such that they flow abundantly without end through perpetual renewal.
The micro-finance and micro-credit movement has been instrumental in the third world. Free universal education at all levels is also a fast track towards the realisation of this vision. By free education, I mean all levels, from the basics of literacy all the way to the highest levels of practical or philosophical knowledge - from A,B,C’s and 1,2,3’s, through arithmetic and geometry, all the way to the principles of Friedman’s economics, the finer points of the universal declaration of human rights or the management precepts of Jim Collins. And this education must be relevantly focused upon each individual’s passions, interests and needs; its purpose is to liberate and draw out the best, not to manufacture obedient citizens of the state who do not question authority (especially when it is fit to be questioned).
Since when has knowledge diminished the more we give it away that we have to ration knowledge by charging exorbitant fees and placing premiums upon it, shackling students to bonds (bondage?)?
Education or human potential development is one of the few things that need not consume resources (except for time, energy and some soft resources like memory instruments such as paper or even computers) such that we desperately need to charge money for it or else “education will run out and all our thinking will be depleted”. Think about it. If that were so, our parents would have charged us money for teaching us how to talk, walk and take care of ourselves.
utilitarian, make money online, internet marketing, guru, Jermaine Griggs, resource-based economy