Drawk Kwast | Blog

When To Kiss A Girl

by Drawk Kwast – July 3rd, 2009

One of the most important things for a guy to learn is when to kiss a girl. Any girl you ask will tell you that the first kiss is a perfect moment they dream about and if you do it wrong, you’re out of the game. The trick is to know when that perfect moment is. Its time for you to finally learn when to kiss a girl.

Have you ever noticed that the people who are the smartest tend to do the worst with women? The guys in high school who did the best in math and science classes did the worst with girls. The guys on the football team who barely passed their math and science classes did the best with women. The first thing you need to understand about kissing girls is that:

Trying to solve this by thinking about it will only hurt you.

Girls are not a math problem or a science project. This is why the captain of the football team who got hit in the head quite often and smoked too much pot did better with women than you did. Its because he didn’t think about it. He just went with his caveman-like urges.

I was like you at one point, on the internet looking for information I could use to “think” my way past this problem. The more information I read, the worse I got. This is because the more information I found, the more I thought about it.

Have you ever been on a date with a girl and spent the whole time preoccupied thinking about some perfect plan you came up with as to how you would kiss her at the end of the date? How did that work for you? I can tell you how that plan worked for me when I did things like that. Disaster. Not only did things end badly, never how I planed them, but I didn’t have any fun because of the pressure I created for myself with my thoughts.

Things are different now. I never “think” about kissing girls while I am with them, because I just kiss them. How does this work for me? Very well. Because I’m not preoccupied with thinking about the kiss, I am actually having fun with them. As soon as that moment happens, I do it, usually in the middle of the date, sometimes even in the beginning. The best part is that if you kiss during the date, it greatly increases the likelihood that you will be doing much more than kissing at the end of the date, like making breakfast together the next morning. So how do I know when to kiss a girl?

First you must learn to turn off your thoughts and turn on your primal carnal nature. You need to get back in touch with the animalistic part of yourself. An easy way to do that is by:

Paying attention to how women smell.

When a woman walks by me, I breathe in as she passes. As I do this I am NOT thinking about how she smells, I am paying attention to what sensations that smell causes in my body. As you practice this and your animal side starts to wake up, you will notice that some women have a particular “smell” to them that excites you. I’m not talking about the perfume they may be wearing; I am talking about their smell. Once you become aware of the exact smell that gets you going, you will be surprised as your desire level with different women changes. You may find yourself wildly attracted to a 5 just because she has that smell. You may find that you lose attraction for a 10 as you walk up to her and she doesn’t have that smell. Eventually you will find a 10 with that smell, and trust me, your brain will turn all thought off as you start drooling on yourself.

Now you have harnessed the power.

When you are out on a date, you will find yourself asking the question, “Should I be kissing her right now?” The answer is always yes. That question, which is a thought, was triggered by a feeling. That feeling is an urge sent to you by the part of yourself you have just learned to communicate with. What you need to learn now is how to go from that urge to action, from that urge to kissing her. If you go from urge to thought, you missed it. Move slow, but do it right away, before you think about it.

Will this always be the right time?

As you wake up that part of your brain, you will be more in tune with what the girl is feeling. Women tend to mirror the emotions of the guy they are with. The old you was feeling uncomfortable and unsure. So what was the girl feeling when you tried to kiss her? Uncomfortable and unsure. When you are free of thought and in the moment lead by that primitive part of your brain, something else happens. You feel passionate and excited when you kiss her. She will feel passionate and excited as you kiss her.

When you have turned off thought and are in tune with animalistic desire, look into her eyes and make your move because that is when to kiss a girl.

Article Source: www.drawkkwast.com

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Internal Power: The True Entrepreneur

by Drawk Kwast – June 30th, 2009

It always amazes me, looking back on my life as an entrepreneur, that I did my worst work when I was at the top of my game. That’s right; I also did my best when I was at my worst. Back then I thought that I was just lazy when I was comfortable, but the day came that I understood this as a source of power and success.

If everything were running smoothly and resources were in abundance, I lost all motivation. For the longest time I thought that only under desperation could I find creativity and motivation. If you bankrupted me and locked me inside of a cockroach-infested, crappy apartment, with nothing more than a cell phone, laptop, Internet connection, and 13 cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli without a can opener, you would be absolutely amazed at what I can make happen. I would figure out how to open the ravioli with my cell phone, and within a week deposits would start appearing in my PayPal account. I thought this was simply my survival mechanism kicking in. As it turned out, I was neither lazy nor motivated by primitive survival instincts. It is actually a personality trait that few have and even fewer understand.

This isn’t about being able to get stuff done when times are tough. I will spare you that speech, because lots of people have written about that topic already. What I am talking about is where a person gets their motivation from. Is it generated from internal or external validation? That is the million dollar question. The mark of a true entrepreneur is that all motivation is a result of internal validation.

A normal person is motivated by external validation. Most people without resources have nothing to draw validation from and they cannot get excited enough to accomplish starting a business. Simply put, they cannot find the motivation to figure out how to build something out of nothing. Give that person a large office, nice business cards, and an important title and they tend to get moving and behave in a way that is congruent with that external validation. The biggest problem occurs when external validation is given to them, rather than earned by them. They then boss people around without actually knowing what they are talking about, resulting in the business falling apart under misdirection. This is why an average person fails at starting a business. They either can’t find the motivation to start from scratch or, if they get lucky and have some resources fall into their lap, they never learn how to build resources, which is what entrepreneurship is all about. The most common thing I see when non-entrepreneurs try to start companies is that money gets squandered to buy stuff that gives them external validation. These are the people who go bankrupt paying for huge office space that they do not need. The only thing they succeed at is building nothing out of something as they exhaust their resources without building mechanisms for profit. The funniest thing to me is that as the business fails, all of their external validation starts to disappear and with it their power at the very time they need it most. Their need for external validation guarantees their failure.

Then there exists a rare breed, the entrepreneur. This is the kind of person who truly can build something out of nothing. The entrepreneur gets his motivation from internal validation. It makes no difference to his self value if he is running things from a one-room apartment or the top floor of a skyscraper. He will be called arrogant and egotistical because he sees his value only inside of himself; he considers his circumstances and assets irrelevant. He believes that he has the power to create money out of nothing and his motivation for success is showing that belief to be true. For him, it’s not what he has; it is what he can do, and once that is done, he can have anything.

Now that you understand that a true entrepreneur is motivated by his internal validation, I will explain what people see as laziness, loss of interest, and lack of motivation once their businesses get going. The entrepreneur gets excited about being able to do what more than 99% of the people on this planet cannot do, create something out of nothing. True entrepreneurs lose interest when the process turns into building something out of something because they see that as a goal anyone could accomplish, so it doesn’t feed their ego in the same way. They are excited only by the difficult things that only they can pull off. The true entrepreneur is a fire starter. After things get going, they hand it off to the management they put in place and leave to start another business. They start that new business with nothing. They understand the power in doing this and know that the man who needs “no thing” has “no thing” holding him back. He gets his validation internally. That internal validation gets satisfaction from being able to create things out of “no thing” – that is the magic!

Consider for a moment that the game of life is won not by getting more, but by being more. Focus on being more and you will see that making silly amounts of money and dating ridiculously attractive women comes easy.

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Economy Proof

by Drawk Kwast – November 20th, 2008

Say of me what you will, but I never pay any attention to the news.

While the world is busy talking of economic collapse, I remain almost oblivious to it. I learned long ago that the only time opportunities are in short supply is when the market is unchanging. As long as things are changing, whether for the better or worse, there is opportunity.

One of the biggest problems with paying attention to the news is the tendency to believe what they are saying. What I am talking about is the power of suggestion. This is the reason companies spend so much money on TV advertisements, because they work. If you sit a group of people in front of a TV set for long enough and keep on telling them the news that “the economy is collapsing,” they start to believe it. Sooner or later, that belief will be reflected in their performance at work. If you keep on telling a person who sells widgets that people just don’t have any money to spend on widgets these days, sooner or later, that salesman will start to believe it. When he does, that belief will become a self fulfilling prophecy as he begins to give up and accept what he now believes. As that salesman gets an ever decreasing paycheck, he has less money to spend with his local butcher. When the butcher asks the salesman why he is buying less meat, the salesman will reply by saying, “the economy is getting bad.” The butcher will tend to believe the salesman as he tells of his slumping sales. The butcher has good reason to because he isn’t selling as much meat to the salesman. The butcher with less money in his pocket and a good story to tell will spread this to the remainder of the town.

So what am I telling you? There is no recession? Nope. I pay the same outrageous prices at the gas pump and grocery store that you do. What I am telling you is that you will not win by rolling over and playing dead. That only makes things worse. Successful people know that the best time to make moves is when the economy is going down.

There is too much competition when the economy is going up and everyone has the resources to do anything. It’s when times are tough, when 90% of the competition has given up, that’s the time to make your moves.

Consider the butcher from our above example. If the economy “goes bad” in his town and every other butcher shop gives up and closes, who has all the business when the economy inevitably gets better? He does. No matter how bad things get, as soon as people start buying more meat again, they will be buying all of it from him. Sure, as the economy continues to get better, other people will open butcher shops and compete for that business, but the advantage is always to the first person with an open store and existing customers.

Watch TV news if you must, but realize that not all are suffering economic hardship right now. I know many, including myself, who are making more money month after month as everyone else is telling us how bad things are. We know how to ride the waves. We know that change in any way presents opportunity. Most importantly, we know that it will be us who will be in the best position to ride the next wave of change when things get better.

Rather than giving up, you need to ask yourself where you want to be when the economy changes. Then figure out how to move in that direction. The closer you can get to your goal today, the quicker you’ll get there tomorrow. The most advantageous time to invest resources is when your competition won’t.

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Features vs. Solutions

by Drawk Kwast – November 16th, 2008

There are two factors that will always, without question, separate the successful entrepreneurs from those who struggle. The first is that successful entrepreneurs understand the difference between features and solutions. The second is that they tend to ignore features and take action based on solutions.

A feature is a prominent part or characteristic of something. A solution is an answer to a problem. In some cases it is a prominent part or characteristic of something that is the answer to a problem. Put simply, in some cases a feature will provide you a solution.

The most important aspect of a feature providing a solution is that the solution must be to an existing problem. When a person makes a purchase or takes an action based on a feature that doesn’t solve a pre-existing problem for them, they are wasting resources because they are solving problems that do not exist.

I have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I am the most organized person I know. When I was a young entrepreneur just starting out, I was the most organized business owner I knew. There were two main reasons for this. The first was that I spent all of my time organizing everything. The second was that because I spent all of my time organizing, and no time gathering clients, I never actually did any real work that would mess up my perfectly organized system. My problem was not disorganization. My problem was a lack of clients. Being organized was a feature and a waste of my effort at that point. I should have invested my energy into solving the problem of not having any clients. After that, once I was generating an income, I could solve the problem of disorganization if and when it came up.

Successful people have a specific goal and solve problems on their way toward achieving that goal. Anything that doesn’t move them toward their specific goal is a waste of time and money.

Most people suffer from consumerism. The “new features” looked cool on TV so now they feel compelled to spend money. They are spending money to solve problems that they do not have. Money is a limited resource and the more they spend solving problems they don’t have, the less they have to spend on solving problems they do have.

Some people suffer from analysis paralysis. This is the difference between overloading yourself with information and actually getting things done. One of the greatest tools for research and the greatest cause of paralysis in our time is the internet. You can find information quickly and easily. The problem is that there is so much information that some people never take action as they attempt to read and digest everything. Successful people research just enough to start taking action and then solve problems as they come up. They know that you can only win the game by actually playing the game (taking action). They know that the game is not won by knowing every feature but by knowing how to find any solution.

Managers know that employees are suckers for features. An employee will ask for a raise (a solution for not having enough money) and what will the manger do? The manager will give them a new title. The employee will walk into the office a “supervisor” and walk out a “regional supervisor” with the same pay, a slightly increased workload, and a promise that his next “promotion” will include a pay increase also. The employee got played. And what happens if the employee figures the title game out? Then he gets a parking space with his name on it. It’s just another feature for the employee that doesn’t solve his problem of needing more money. How much did this parking space cost the company? Nothing. For the company it’s a solution because it solves the company’s problem of shutting up the employee without any cost.

Have you ever seen an advertisement from Lamborghini talking about improved miles per gallon? Nope, and you never will. The people who buy Lamborghinis have money by the truckloads and don’t have a problem paying for gas no matter what the cost. Fuel efficiency for the rich is a feature. Successful people tend to ignore features.

Now if you go to the office of anyone who actually owns a Lamborghini, you will notice that all of their decisions are solution based. If you are trying to sell something to the owner of that company, sell solutions, not features. Offer to solve an existing problem for the company at a reasonable price and you will have a sale. Present him with the idea of a hot tub to be installed in the lunch room because “it would be so cool” and expect the idea to be rejected.

What this all comes down to is ignoring some of the comforts (features) and using your resources to solve problems that keep you from your goals. Entrepreneurship is about living a few years of your life like most people won’t, so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can’t.

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Self Sabotage: The Emotional Rollercoaster

by Drawk Kwast – September 14th, 2008

Gary is his own worst enemy. I sit in amazement day after day as I watch him wage wars on himself. Sure, sometimes he is yelling at his girlfriend, or the person at work who he feels doesn’t show him enough respect, but for the most part he isn’t fighting them so much as he is simply just compelled to continuously create drama in his own life. Why does he do this?

I live in Las Vegas, also known as “Sin City.” The tourists that come here have a saying that “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” I’ve lived here for a little over a year now and have come up with my own saying, “What happens in Vegas makes for interesting newsletters for you all to read.” Las Vegas is one of those places where one minute I can be 500 feet above the strip having drinks with movie stars and five minutes later I can be less than a mile away, in the ghetto, smiling at homeless people. We have no shortage of diversity in interesting people. The one commonality all of these people have, including Gary, is that they all seem to crave drama in their lives.

A few days prior to me writing this, Gary and his girlfriend Melinda had a fight. I know because I was there as it happened. I live next door to Gary. It’s the exact script as you hear it on daytime TV talk shows. Melinda is on medication for being bipolar. She skips out on taking her meds, goes crazy, and next thing you know they are fighting. She physically attacks him. He pushes her away a little too hard and she falls. One of her girlfriends calls the police, and next thing you know, Gary is in handcuffs. The punch line to this joke is when she later says, “but I love him.” This reoccurs every few months or so. Now, you would think that Gary would wise up, get a restraining order, and find a “normal” girl, but no, he doesn’t. Not more than 24 hours after the police have left, he tells me that his apartment is just so quiet without her. He misses her. He is nuts! He would rather have a clinically crazy girl nagging and occasionally attacking him than a quiet apartment.

I’m sure you know people who behave like this. Maybe they habitually use drugs to get as high as the moon and then suffer though the hangover after. Maybe they are in a bad relationship like Gary and Melinda. Maybe even you have something repetitive that you do that takes you through emotional highs and lows for no logical reason. It’s time for you to finally understand what’s built into every human that compels us to behave in this way.

Everything I teach is rooted in the science of evolution. If you want to understand why people behave the way they do, evolutionary psychology will give you the answer. Your brain and how it functions is the product of evolution. Evolution is a slow process. The “software” that is running in your head is about 40,000 years out of date. So you are living in today’s world, but your head is wired for the world of 40,000 years ago. This mismatch is the number one cause of all the bad decisions that people make today.

40,000 years ago, life was harsh. If you were alive back then all you thought about was hunting/gathering food, trying to not become dinner for some other animal, and if you were lucky, reproduce before dying at a very young age. Life was very, very stressful. It was programmed into you that survival and huge emotional swings went hand in hand. The reason we developed this over 40,000 years ago was because it was an advantage to us. Your ancestors craved situations like this because it was to their benefit. There were two options back then:

OPTION ONE: Cower in the back of a cave too scared to leave to gather food and hunt. They sit there until they get so weak that they either just die or the first fierce animal that finds them has no problem making dinner out of them. – This group dies out quickly.

OPTION TWO: Be a prehistoric adrenaline junkie. They leave the safety of their cave and risk death as they hunt and fight off animals that are hunting them. As they participate in these feats of bravery/stupidity they find women willing to mate with them (some of whom already have mates who may try to kill them for stealing their women). – Bottom line is that this is a game they will eventually and inevitably lose, but before they do, they will survive long enough to have children. These children are your ancestors. We are all decedents of prehistoric adrenaline junkies because they were the ones who survived. Our brains are wired for desiring huge emotional swings because 40,000 years ago it increased our chances of survival and replication.

As life changed for us over the years and got easier, we came up with new ways to satisfy that evolutionary need for highly charged emotional swings. We replaced hunting tribes with sports teams. We replaced quests for conquest with movies. We replaced inter-tribal rivalry with day time TV soap operas. Our brains are wired for drama and that is why we create it.

So where does this leave us? Are we doomed to create useless drama in our lives to satisfy some outdated evolutionary need? Thankfully, no. We can use the logical part of our brains to actually use this to our advantage.

So how do we do this? The first step is to understand why this exists in you, and now you know the answer. The second step is to choose the emotional rollercoaster you are going to ride wisely.

Stop watching TV habitually. Stop drinking and doing drugs habitually. And if Gary happens to read this, stop getting into relationships with women who are clinically insane.

Like our ancestors, get your fix of emotional highs and lows from things that make your life better via participation.

One hour of strenuous exercise a day will do the trick. GO TO THE GYM! Trust me, when those endorphins start to kick in (once you make habit of working out every day) you will feel great after you workout. As a side note, you’ll hurt like hell when you push it and that will provide the emotional low. If this isn’t enough for you, start kickboxing. Beating the hell out of people and having the crap kicked out of you (in the safest way possible) a few days a week will definitely do the trick. You will actually get in good shape doing this, a benefit to you, rather than Gary who gets his kicks when his crazy chick calls the cops, which is never a good thing.

Another option is to start a business. Starting a business in some cases is almost as good as a serious gambling addition. It amazes me when people come to Las Vegas, look around at all the money the casinos pull in to build ridiculous tourist attractions, and still think they are going to win. Did all these people fail math class in Jr. High School? You want to gamble? Start a business. I speak from personal experience when I tell you that it’s an emotional rollercoaster ride, but at least the odds tip in your favor more and more the longer you play.

If you are interested in finding out what disasters happened next for Gary because he was too dumb to leave Melinda, you can read Self Sabotage Part II: The Rollercoaster Crashes.

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Stop Doing What You Hate Now!

by Drawk Kwast – July 16th, 2008

Why would anyone in their right mind spend time getting better at something they hate to do? The concept seems insane, doesn’t it? This is something only a crazy person would invest time into. So why is it then that the majority of the workforce in America does exactly that every day they go to work? Is the majority of the workforce crazy? In my opinion, yes, this is crazy.

Any human being who spends time at anything is going to get better at doing that thing. If you give me the meanest guy you can find from your local biker bar and I make him hangout with an 80 year old lady for a month to learn how to crochet, guess what? Every day he will get better at it. By the end of the month, he will be good at it. Now does this then make a logical point that every guy like this should be doing that? No, that would be crazy! Now you understand that just because you’re getting better at something doesn’t necessarily mean that you should be doing it. Just because you work at a stable and every day you get better at shoveling horse poop, doesn’t mean you should stay at that job.

Let’s take a look at the concept of desensitization. If you are staying at the same job because the longer you are there, the less you hate it, you are again crazy. Your goal in life should not be a job that you hate less by the day; it should be a job that you actually enjoy doing. Desensitization basically states that in any situation of continued exposure to discomfort, over time, you feel the discomfort less and less. It’s not that the situation is getting any better, it’s just that you are getting more used to it. This is incredibly dangerous. You are getting more and more used to being unhappy and poor by the day and the longer you live like this, the less of a chance you will actually do something to better your situation.

The one and only resource that you have a fixed supply of is time. Money can be made and lost easily, and money can buy just about any resource, except for time. Time is the one thing that you only get so much of. With this understanding, let’s look at the use of your time. If you spend 10 hours doing something you hate, you’re going to get better at it. However, if you spend that same amount of time doing something you enjoy, something you’re passionate about; your improvement will be far greater. Logic then dictates that the better you get at doing something, the more money you can make doing it. This is yet another reason to quit doing the job you hate as soon as possible. Sure, you may have to down-shift your income level for a while, but in the long run you’ll end up happier and wealthier. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll get there.

It’s time to debunk the myth that everyone with money is unhappy. What a load of crap! I speak from personal experience on this one. I have lived through times in my life when I have deposited $100,000.00 checks into my bank account and I have lived through times when I pulled lost change out of the washers at a public Laundromat so I could order dinner off of the dollar menu at McDonalds. Here is the real truth about the link between money and happiness that no one else will share with you.

Money buys you more of whatever you had in your life before you had money.

That’s it. That is the equation right there. That’s all there is to it. Simple, isn’t it? Take a drug addict on skid-row and give them a bunch of money, what do they do? Buy more drugs. Show me someone without any friends or money, give them money and guess what? Somehow they end up even more isolated from people. Show me a person who is happy, who loves what they do in life, give them money, and I will show you an even happier person. Do what you love, make more money as a result, and that money will buy you more of what you already had. Go make it happen.

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Success by New Design

by Drawk Kwast – July 6th, 2008

You won’t win today’s wars with yesterday’s weapons. The winners are always the innovators. Show me the man who has improved the most on yesterday’s technology and I will show you tomorrow’s winner.

In evolutionary terms, it’s called the Red Queen’s hypothesis. It states that there exists a constant arms race in every area of your life. Simply put, we live in a competitive world and if we do not evolve and improve faster than our competition, we will lose. The misconception that most people share is that if they simply “get better” at something, they are on the right path to success. This is not true. It is possible to get better at a game and still lose that game. In fact, the tendency is that every participant in any given game gets better, yet still there is only one winner. The reason for this is that everyone playing will get better simply by playing. This process is built into each and every human being. The longer anyone does anything, the better they will get at it. This is the very thing that creates the Red Queen effect. You need to realize that everyone in the game is getting better at it as they play. You must put energy into your improvement just to keep up with everyone else. To win, you not only need to improve, you must do it faster than everyone else in the game you are competing against.

Let’s look at this from the perspective of two men who decide to have a running race. Jim and Karl are both 35 years old. One night while remembering their glory years in high school, they make a competitive bet. They agree to race each other in a one mile running race. The race is set three months from the time of the bet. Jim gets a personal trainer, and hires a nutritionist that came highly recommended by an ex-hockey player who lives next door to him. Within 10 weeks, Jim is running the mile faster than he was in high school. On the 12th week, he loses the race against Karl. How? Not because he didn’t improve, but because he didn’t improve more than Karl had. So how did Karl train? That’s the million dollar question. If Jim would have had those answers while he was training and could have improved on that technology, he would have won the race.

I see this in the business world time and time again and it seems that no one can figure out what is happening. The President of Acme Widget Company will sit down with his VPs completely confused at how month after month his sales people get more training, his costs of doing business get lower, and his product defect rate lessens, yet they lose market share every month. The answer is that they are sinking simply because all of their competition is swimming faster than they are.

When you understand how the Red Queen works, you come to understand the hidden economic factors of the Nth Step. You are about to understand the one thing that most of your competition will never discover on their own. In most cases, putting 90% of your energy into a project is wasting 90% of your energy. I know of no better way to waste resources than to put 90% into something. Never will you rob yourself of more than if you give it 90%. Sadly, this is how most of the world operates.

Sam owns a software design company. Sam is looking for new contracts and finds a request for proposal posted on the internet. Sam has no idea who his competition will be, how many other proposals the client will receive, or what the contents of the other proposals will be. The only thing Sam knows for sure is that there will be one proposal that will win the contract, and every other proposal will fail. This is a classic example of second place being nothing more than the first loser. Only by winning will Sam be able to recoup the costs of writing the proposal.

Sam pulls out his calculator and figures out how much this proposal is going to cost him to generate. His team will spend approximately 90 man hours to complete the proposal. He bases this off of his experience generating proposals similar to it. Sam pays his staff of all sub-contractors $150.00 per hour. Sam will spend about $13,500.00 to generate this proposal. Sam calculates the estimated profit, if he gets the deal, to be between $325,000.00 and $340,000.00. In the past, Sam has closed the deal 1 in 5 times in similar situations. This is because he is in a specific niche market and his team is well known in that market. Sam then calculates the estimated profit (at the low end) of $325,000.00 against the theoretical cost of needing to write 4 more proposals like this ($54,000.00) before he will land a contract. The numbers tell him that if he plays and stays in this game, he will make about $271,000.00 – This is where most business people stop and put the calculator away.

Sam isn’t done with his calculator yet. Sam understands the economics of the Nth step and wants to figure out what it would cost him to do something that he is sure his competitors will not have the resources to do. Sam has already figured out that a proposal will cost him $13,500 to generate. Sam has also just figured out that it would only cost him 10% more to deliver a software demo CD-ROM with his proposal that would serve as a proof-of-concept. Because Sam has written software like what’s requested in this proposal before, he has already written 70% of the code needed for this project. For an additional $1,500.00 he can pay his staff to organize the already written code into a demo CD-ROM that will literally “show” his client what they can expect. The $1,500.00 represents the cost of the Nth step and he would be a fool to not invest it. Sam adds in the additional 10% to his proposal costs that his competitor’s proposals will not include.

Sam won the contract. Sam played smart and played to win.

In the example above, the losers would have been better off to have only invested 15% into their proposal as they would have still lost, but they would have only lost 15% rather than the 90% they did lose. Realize however that even at a 15% loss, after 7 proposals, they will burn through 105% of their budget and they would do this for nothing as they are guaranteed to lose all seven proposals with an investment of only 15%.

The moral of the story isn’t in holding resources back. The moral of the story is to find a game you can compete in and give it 100%. Ask yourself if you are prepared to lose $90,000.00 because you wouldn’t put in another $10,000.00? Are you prepared to work 9 hours for zero results because you wouldn’t put in that extra hour it would have taken to assure winning? Are you willing to risk your bet because you didn’t do everything you could to assure you would win? How often have you set yourself up at the 90% mark and suffered the consequences?

Unfortunately, it doesn’t stop there. Not only do you need to constantly be putting more energy into advancement than your competition simply to survive but you need to acknowledge that the rules of the game are continuously changing as you play. This is the other reason why the winners are always the innovators. They are the only ones that can keep up with the changes in the terrain as they run the race.

At one point in the history of auto racing, all of the tires were the same. One day, someone got the bright idea that if it rained, they should put tires on the car specifically designed for maximum performance in rain. One day it rained, one race car had rain tires, and it won the race. You can imagine that it wasn’t too long after that day that every racing team had a set of special rain tires ready to go for the next time the course got wet. And so the cycle continued as racing teams looked for other ways to temporarily get a leg up on the competition. This is the evolution of the race car.

Make no mistake, history repeats itself. The inner workings of the human brain have not changed in over 40,000 years. This is why history repeats. It makes me laugh when world tragedy hits and everyone cries about how they wish they could have seen it coming. If you want to make better predictions than a psychic on how the United States of America will either evolve or fall apart, start reading about the fall of the other great nations in history. The parallels are so close that it’s comical in a tragic way. People evolve slowly but technology evolves faster and faster by the day. People today behave the same way towards each other as they did 40,000 years ago. They just use different tools and technology to do the same things to each other today. The basic rule is that human nature repeats over and over again as technology evolves faster and faster to better carry out that human nature.

This is a very important concept to keep in mind when you are getting advice from people “who have been there before you.” When it comes to them telling you about human nature, pay close attention. When they start talking about how you should go about doing things, question everything they say. They ran the race years ago and the rules have changed because the technology has changed. The person who sits in the corner office got there 15 years ago. The rules for getting there today are totally different and in most cases, they have no idea what those rules are.

So where does that leave you? Feeling a little uneasy because you don’t have the roadmap to success that you thought you had? You were simply going to follow what everyone else did to succeed? It should actually make you feel better. Why? Because like no time ever before in history, the playing field is level. With the help of the internet, we have seen large corporations destroyed by groups of people at home, with a computer, while in their underwear.

Welcome to the 21st century! You want to win? The winners are the ones who are constantly improving and they are doing it while the competition sleeps. The winners are testing everything, finding new ways to win tomorrow’s game, and they rewrite the rules as they do it. You must learn how to learn and invest enough to win or you will not survive.

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Carpenter & Movie Star

by Drawk Kwast – June 30th, 2008

A wise man wins a brand new car. His friends say to him “you are so fortunate to have won such a beautiful car!” The man replies simply “Perhaps.” A few weeks later the man is enjoying a joy ride in his new car and another driver crashes into him severely injuring him. The man’s friends come to the man’s side and proclaim how bad it was that he was injured in the car wreck. The man simply replies “Perhaps.” While recovering in the hospital one night there is an earthquake and a tree falls on the man’s house crushing his room and his bed where he sleeps. His friends come to his bed side telling him of the damage to his house and how lucky he was to have been in the hospital to which the man grins and replies once more “Perhaps.” Has there ever been a point in your life that everything in your favor appeared to be working against you?

Thomas Edison’s teachers said he was “too stupid to learn anything.” He was fired from his first two jobs for being “non-productive.” As an inventor, Edison made 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb. When a reporter asked, “How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?” Edison replied, “I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.” If Edison would have stopped at his 999th attempt, we would be sitting in darkness.

As a young man, Abraham Lincoln went to war a captain and returned a private. Afterwards, he was a failure as a businessman. As a lawyer in Springfield, he was too impractical and temperamental to be a success. He turned to politics and was defeated in his first try for the legislature, again defeated in his first attempt to be nominated for congress, defeated in his application to be commissioner of the General Land Office, defeated in the senatorial election of 1854, defeated in his efforts for the vice-presidency in 1856, and defeated in the senatorial election of 1858. At about that time, he wrote in a letter to a friend, “I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth.” In 1864 he was elected President of the United States… for the second time.

Albert Einstein did not speak until he was 4-years-old and did not read until he was 7. His parents thought he was “sub-normal,” and one of his teachers described him as “mentally slow, unsociable, and adrift forever in foolish dreams.” He was expelled from school and was refused admittance to the Zurich Polytechnic School. He eventually learned to speak, read, and his math changed reality as we know it.

Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor because “he lacked imagination and had no good ideas.” He went bankrupt several times before he built Disneyland. In fact, the proposed park was rejected by the city of Anaheim on the grounds that it would only attract riffraff. City officials have since changed their views on this.

In 1944, Emmeline Snively, director of the Blue Book Modeling Agency, told modeling hopeful Norma Jean Baker, “You’d better learn secretarial work or else get married.” I’m sure you know that Norma Jean was Marilyn Monroe. Now, who was Emmeline Snively?

After Harrison Ford’s first performance as a hotel bellhop in the film Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round, the studio vice-president called him into his office. “Sit down kid,” the studio head said, “I want to tell you a story. The first time Tony Curtis was ever in a movie he delivered a bag of groceries. We took one look at him and knew he was a movie star.” Ford replied, “I thought you were supposed to think that he was a grocery delivery boy.” The vice-president dismissed Ford with “You ain’t got it kid , you ain’t got it … now get out of here.” Ford gave up and became a self-taught professional carpenter working in the Hollywood Hills area to better support his then-wife and two small sons. Proving that reality is stranger than fiction, George Lucas hired Ford to build cabinets in his home. Ford’s work as a carpenter landed the actor his biggest role to date as Han Solo in Star Wars.

How will they tell your story?

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Function of Doubt

by Drawk Kwast – June 30th, 2008

Why do we have doubt? If there was not some evolutionary advantage to having it 40,000 years ago, we would not have doubt today. Why can’t we just walk around all of the time with our mojo flowing? Doubt is a protection mechanism. The fact that it cripples you from doing certain things is what keeps you alive. You could be 100% totally congruent in your belief that you can fly but if you step off of the side of a 20 story building, you will not have that belief very long. The problem is not that your doubt system exists. The problem is that the software in your head that runs it, and everything else in you, is about 40,000 years out of date. That is approximately how long it takes evolution to catch up so to speak.

Think of it like this. Let’s say that you want to quit your advertising job and start your own advertising company. For some reason you have this unexplainable fear in your head that keeps you from doing it. It’s almost like you feel as if your possible failure could result in death. It’s completely irrational when you think about it, isn’t it? Come on now, really, what is the worst that could happen? You may run out of money and have to find another job working for someone? OK, so you are back to square one. Big deal. Think about this for a moment, logically. What if right now, you lost everything? What if all of your money, positions, and job were completely gone in an instant? Would you die? Nope. In fact, going through something like that could be one of the best experiences of your life because you would realize how unimportant all that stuff really is. So where does this doubt and intense emotional fear come from? It comes from 40,000 years ago.

Your unconscious brain is not running software from today. It doesn’t know what an advertising company is. It gets forced to replace the world of today with references from 40,000 years ago as it attempts to make sense of things and give you direction. Here is how your unconscious brain gets told the above story.

Let’s say that you want to leave your small hunting tribe and start your own tribe. Once you leave, the leader of your old tribe will never let you back in. If you fail at starting your own tribe, you will actually die. Unless you are 100% sure you can successfully start your own tribe, the risk of most certain death is not worth it. Your unconscious then puts this intense fear in you because it thinks that the fear will stop you. It is trying to keep you alive.

Your unconscious is always trying to help you. The problem is that it has a hard time figuring out what is actually taking place in today’s environment. You must learn to use your logical brain to overcome the outdated programming of your unconscious. Evolution has actually built a mechanism to help you with this also. When you use your logical brain to overcome your unconscious and are successful, you get rewarded with happy chemicals in your brain. This is your evolutionary incentive to logically get past your fears.

Jump out of an airplane. Right before you do, your unconscious will tell you, “jump and die.” Your unconscious doesn’t understand the concept of a parachute because we didn’t have them 40,000 years ago. When you make it safely to the ground, your unconscious will be very confused, your logical brain will have won, and you will have all kinds of happy natural chemicals in your blood stream as a reward. This serves as an incentive to figure out what else your unconscious may be wrong about.

As you start playing with this concept, you will find out that you are capable of all kinds of things that you never even knew you had inside of you. For the person who never pushes past fear, they know not what they are capable of. For the person who pushes past fear, they find out that there exists inside of them a complete set of instructions for completing tasks they never thought they could do. This is a very difficult concept for people who have not experienced it firsthand to understand. This instruction set is held by your unconscious mind and it is your unconscious mind that hides these instructions from you. Believe it or not, it does both for your own good. Let’s go back to the example above of you starting your own advertising company and how your unconscious sees that as starting your own hunting tribe. I will show this example as if your conscious and unconscious were having a conversation with each other.

Conscious: I want to leave my job and start my own advertising company.

Unconscious: If we leave our tribe, they will never let us back in and we will die when we are most likely unsuccessful. Yup, we are going to either starve to death or get killed by a tiger when we have no one to help protect us. Very bad idea!

Conscious: I am doing it anyway.

Unconscious: Can’t you feel this fear? This is me telling you that we are going to die. OK fine. Here is even more fear. How about now? Do you still feel like this is a good idea? Don’t kill us.

Conscious: Here I go. I am doing it.

Unconscious: OK, that is the last straw. I warned you. Here feel this, this is crippling fear. Turn back now while we still can.

Conscious: I just handed in my resignation.

Unconscious: We are going to die.

Conscious: I feel good for having the balls to do that.

Unconscious: Well since there is no turning back now, I better show you everything we know about how to start a tribe.

Conscious: What!?! We know things about how to get a business going?

Unconscious: Sure. All those years of watching others run tribes. I was paying attention to everything. I remember all of it.

Conscious: What?!? You have been writing an instruction manual this entire time and you didn’t tell me about it?

Unconscious: Yes.

Conscious: Why the hell didn’t you tell me that we knew how to do this?

Unconscious: If you knew about all of the instructions I hide from you, there would be no limit to the stupid stuff you would try, and you would kill us in no time.

Conscious: OK, but I have just one more question.

Unconscious: What’s that?

Conscious: Why would you take the time to create all of these instruction sets if you never want to share them with me?

Unconscious: Because if I didn’t, you would actually kill us when you did stupid stuff like this.

There you have it. The biggest secret your unconscious has been hiding from you. Your unconscious will use fear to protect you right up until the point that you are actually doing something. If you can get past the fear through action, your unconscious will then help you in ways you never expected. At the point that you fully understand this, your life will completely change. I know, you are very upset at your unconscious. I was too when I found this out.

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