Drawk Kwast

Weak Economy Success Secrets

by Drawk Kwast – July 23rd, 2009

Being an entrepreneur is about living a few years of your life now in a way that most people wouldn’t, so that you can enjoy the rest of your life the way most people can’t. The most advantageous time for an entrepreneur to spend money is when no one else has any. You are about to learn how to put these two concepts together to insure that you can successfully build wealth in today’s weak economy.

The information I am about to give you comes with a few words of caution: It is designed for entrepreneurs only. I say this because it is powerful and, if misused, it will financially destroy the average person. I will answer the questions of “when” and “how” but I can only point you in the direction of “what.” Follow this advice, choose wisely, and succeed. Now on to the good stuff…

The best time to spend money is when no one else has any. This is when your costs will be the lowest. What I am about to tell you will sound counter-intuitive, but one of the best times to get a new business going is in a changing and weak economy. Not only are your costs of goods and services low, but no one else has any money to compete with you.

Now I can hear what you are saying as you read this. You are saying that you are one of those people who have no money. You are remembering a saying that it “takes money to make money.” You are correct, but I am about to give you perspective that will change everything.

The reason that you have no money to invest now is because your ego has made a slave of you, doing whatever you can to hold on to all of the things you acquired when the economy was strong. Everyone did it. They moved into houses they could barley afford, filled with toys that they spent their last dollar on every month including the new car in the garage. They could barely afford living that way then and even though they are making less money today, they do everything they can to keep those things today. People are silly.

Here is your new plan. It’s very simple. Get control of your ego, and get your expenses down to the absolute bare minimum so that you can invest at the most opportune time, which is now. I am talking about sacrifice. I am talking about operating at the bare minimum. You need food, basic shelter, a phone, and a computer with an internet connection. You do not need cable TV. You do not need beer and cigarette money. You do not need Sparkletts water and other such stupid wastes of money delivered to your home. In most major urban areas, you do not need your car. Get a bicycle, use public transportation, and be amazed how much more money you have at the end of every month to invest. Hey, you want to be successful in a weak economy, this it what it will take. It will take everything. That is what you will have to invest. At that point, the “everything point,” it is only a matter of time before a very interesting thing happens to the wise entrepreneur with resources in a weak economy. They hit a point where they start to profit, and then they can buy all that stuff back for pennies on the dollar. When the guy who lives next door to you hasn’t been able to feed his kids for 3 days, don’t be surprised when he offers to sell you his 3 month old 52 inch TV for $300.00 because he has no other options.

Now we need to figure out what type of business you are going to start and invest that money in. First a point of clarification: A person who has started only one business, let’s say a flower shop, is a florist and NOT an entrepreneur! A person who has started a flower shop, opened a deli, a dry-cleaning business, and a worm farm is an entrepreneur. The difference is diversification. They could wake up one morning, decide to sell Michael Jackson merchandise on eBay and be successful at that also. You see the florist wants to be a florist and will open and operate that business in any economic climate, which can be a financially fatal mistake. An entrepreneur doesn’t have their heart set on one kind of business. They have their heart set on making money. They look at the economic climate and pick a business that suits the climate. Think of the florist as a woman who just bought a new mini-skirt, but the next day she walks out of the house wearing it even though it is pouring rain. The entrepreneur walks out of the house with a rain coat and an umbrella.

We are in a bad economy. It is raining outside. Stop trying to sell flowers and start selling rain coats. Shortly after September 11, sales of emergency supplies and gas masks went up. Start thinking in terms of what people feel they need and what problem you can solve for them rather than “what you want to do when you grow up.” As the economy gets worse, people are using cash advance places more and more and paying the owners of those businesses huge interest. The banking and real-estate system is falling apart, enabling people who are doing loan modifications to get rich very fast by cleaning up the mess. There is opportunity everywhere. When World War III happens, I’ll be the guy who made a fortune selling weapons and ammunition, hiding out safely in the bomb shelter I just built with all the profits. I may not be powerful enough to change the course of history but I am smart enough to ride the waves as they happen.

Being an entrepreneur is about living a few years of your life now like most people won’t, so that you can enjoy the rest of your life like most people can’t. Make sacrifices to invest in something that is profiting more and more as the economy gets worse. Now is the time to build your empire.

Article Source: www.drawkkwast.com

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Bill Gates: McDonalds Employee of the Month

by Drawk Kwast – July 21st, 2009

Today I asked myself what would have happened if Bill Gates would have taken some bad career advice and just gotten a job at McDonalds rather than starting Microsoft. I’m picturing Bill Gates wearing a McDonald’s uniform, including the stupid hat, standing behind the counter at McDonalds, ready to take your order with a smile. This is one of the more amusing images that have ever run through my mind. As an entrepreneur, my brain considers some wild “what if” questions to learn from.

There is something I have to remind myself of on the rare occasion that I eat fast food. It is that if the people working there were competent, they would not be working there. Something will happen, like getting soggy fries, at which point I’ll say to myself, “What type of an idiot could miss the fact that the fries are soggy?” Or, maybe the person at the cash resister just cannot figure out all of the complicated buttons on “order-takey-thingy” and I’ll start to get impatient. At those times I have to remind myself that if they were competent, they would not be working at McDonalds. Competent people are doing things like landing airplanes and getting paid much, much more.

At one point I actually figured out the costs to have a completely competent staff at McDonalds. The cost of my double quarter pounder meal would go up to about $11.97, at which point I wouldn’t buy it. Well, in all honesty, I probably would go just once. Just one time I would like to get things perfect. No ice in the drink. No onions on the burger. Maybe I could get fries that were pulled out of the fryer exactly when the buzzer went off leaving them cooked perfectly. Service with a smile. I know, I ask for too much.

Today I asked myself what would have happened if Bill Gates would have picked the McCareer path. The guy is competent and takes great pride in what he does. We can assume that he would have been a manager in no time. Once he was a manager, I would bet that his location would be one of the cleanest and most efficient restaurants in the chain. Being that he would do such a good job compared to all the idiots around him, he would no doubt get lots of positive reinforcement as to how good he was at his McJob. The saddest thing would be that all of the positive reinforcement would motivate him to stay at that job and prevent him from becoming the billionaire he was capable of being. I am sure in that case his parents would have been just as proud of him. His mother would have loved him just as much. He just wouldn’t have any money.

Just because someone is the best at shoveling horse manure doesn’t mean that they are living up to their potential. In fact, it is the opposite that is true. Anyone who is perfect at what they do isn’t pushing themselves. Consider Bill Gates. He would have been perfectly capable of running a McDonalds, while on the other hand starting Microsoft looked more like a train wreck that he somehow made it through. That is what entrepreneurship is all about. Surviving the train wrecks you create until you lean enough from the experiences to build wealth.

We all know about that underappreciated and underpaid secretary who does all the work and believes that she could never pull it off on her own. She is wrong. How about the starving artist who believes that no one else could love his work? He is wrong also. How about you? What is your passion? Are you a creative person working a not so creative job? Has your self doubt lead you to a life of being good at shoveling horse manure? Just because you’re good at what you do now doesn’t necessarily mean that you should be doing it.

It may be time to start looking at things from a different perspective. It may be that you are limiting yourself because you are good at your current mediocre task. What if there is a billionaire hiding inside you? Do you ever feel like the life you have now may not be the life you were meant to live? If so, it may be time for you to explore the perspective of people who are getting everything they want out of life.

Article Source: www.drawkkwast.com

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START-UP STRATEGY: Stop Lying To Yourself And Start Accomplishing

by Drawk Kwast – July 9th, 2009

If you are planning on becoming an entrepreneur, the first thing you need is a start-up strategy. I am going to give you 7 start-up strategy secrets that will increase your chances of success ten times or more.

Secret 1: Stop lying to yourself and start accomplishing.

For everything that is said and done, so much is said and so little gets done. I frequently receive email from people telling me about their business ideas. Most of these email messages read exactly the same. They tell me how great their idea is and how easy it would be to do. These people aren’t looking for my advice as much as they are hoping I send them back a message telling them how great their idea is. I always reply in the same way. I ask them, “What actions have you taken towards making this happen?” Most people who talk about their ideas are just looking for validation from others telling them, “You are so smart and cool for having such a brilliant idea.” They are never going to take action or do anything about it. They are lying to themselves. The reality is that because they have never taken any steps toward their idea, they have no clue as to what it would actually take to accomplish it. Believing it would be easy makes them feel better, and lets them believe it would be easy for them to be a success. The entrepreneur is a person of great action and little talk. If you truly have a great idea, take action and make it happen.

Secret 2: Know it is possible and find the way yourself.

As I said above, you are going to have to take action, and as you do you will discover all kinds of things standing in your way. There are no problems. There are only challenges. For every challenge that you discover standing in your way, know that there exists a solution. Know that there is no one more excited about your idea than you. Because of that, no one is as motivated as you are to find the solution to that challenge. Know that there is an answer, it can be found, and take the responsibility to find it yourself.

Secret 3: Understand the difficulty reward connection.

There is very, very little that is truly impossible. The fact that something is difficult only makes the reward more valuable because it is available to less people. If you want easy, sell lemonade during the summer in Las Vegas. It is something that anyone can do, and that is why you will not make much money at it. If you want to be as wealthy as the top 5% of the world, you will have to accomplish something that 95% of the world cannot. You don’t need to work harder that the other 95%, just be smarter that the other 95%.

Secret 4: Ready, fire, and then aim.

You will not know all of the roadblocks until after you start your journey. Without action, you get nowhere. The most powerful part of your start-up strategy is that it starts with action and then self corrects as it is moving. It never stops and is always collecting more information as it fine tunes it’s direction. An entrepreneur operates like a guided missile. A decision is made to hit a target and the missile is fired in the general direction of that target. As the missile is in a state of continuous movement toward the target, it collects data on the target and adjusts its course to ensure hitting that target.

Secret 5: Get out of bed every morning for 3 reasons.

Failing to plan is planning to fail. You need to keep a list of 3 things you are working on to bring you closer to your goal. Each day you will take action on each item, and because of it each day you will get closer to your goal until you achieve it. Think of this as your “Challenges List.” If any item on your list cannot be done in one day, that item needs to be broken down into smaller steps that can be accomplished inside of one day. An example of a bad list item would be “write a book.” This will not actually happen in one day. Break it into multiple steps that can be done in one day. Start off with, “Decide what I want to write about. Go to a bookstore to look at similar books already published, taking notes on things I see that I find interesting. Write a chapter outline for my book.” Then write down your list of what 3 things you will get done the following day. Baby steps.

Secret 6: Failure is a requirement.

The biggest factor keeping people from success is the massive failure that it requires. One of the most important things any successful entrepreneur will tell you is that most of our ideas never work. In fact, very few of our ideas ever turn profitable. Keep your motivation and realize that successful people fail more times than the unsuccessful. They never give up and when things finally work out, it’s all worth it. The fastest way to increase your rate of success is to increase your rate of failure and learn something every time you fail.

Secret 7: You don’t know what you don’t know, but others do.

Once you are in a continuous state of action toward your goal, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Chances are good that whatever roadblocks you have hit have been hit by other travelers. The chances are also very good that some of those travelers have written about how they got past those same challenges and posted that information to the internet. Part of your start-up strategy is discovering how others got past the same challenges.

Article Source: www.drawkkwast.com

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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.

Article Source: www.drawkkwast.com

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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.

Article Source: www.drawkkwast.com

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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.

Article Source: www.drawkkwast.com

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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.

Article Source: www.drawkkwast.com

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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.

Article Source: www.drawkkwast.com

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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.

Article Source: www.drawkkwast.com

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