The Simple Guide to Making Money Online

6 Steps Toward Additional Income Streams In Order to Quit Your Day Job.

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.

This is the second post in a series on quitting your day job in order to live and work from anywhere. The first post was on the challenge of preparing to quit your job.

Don’t miss out! Sign up for free updates via RSS or EMAIL.

Last week I wrote a long article on how to prepare to quit your day job. If you missed that post, I definitely suggest going back and reading it.

In that post, I mentioned that it was useful to develop income on the side using the Internet, in order to quit you day job. I glossed over the details of how to do this, in that post.

A number of people emailed me asking for more information, so I decided to write this post in order to help more people start to make a small amount of side income in order to quit their jobs more effectively.

I’ve been working online for most of my adult life — I was part of the professional blogging team at New York Magazine, and Gawker before that. I’ve been a student of the income potential of the Internet for over ten years now.

Recently I began to earn my entire living from this blog and from my e-book The Art of Being Minimalist.

I hope that this article will help you gain independence.

Many people haven’t realized the unlimited selling potential of the Internet.

They’re stuck back in 1982, calling people 1-on-1 on the phone and hoping to make a sale. It doesn’t have to be that way.

You’re much more likely to succeed if you embrace the power of the Internet.

This was made clear to me a few days ago — I was at a bar in Brooklyn, wishing a good friend farewell the night before she crossed the Atlantic for adventures in London.

I found myself in conversations about what I do, with two people. One an old friend, another a random stranger.

1st person, who is on unemployment for 6 months after being fired from his job:

Him: “So, how did you land that job, being a blogger?”

Me: “Well, I didn’t land it, I built it.”

Him: “You can make your own job?”

2nd person, who is working as a temp after not finding much luck getting jobs five years after graduating from college:

Her: “Well, I’m a temp, and I just sit around all day on Facebook.”

Me: “Why don’t you use that time to build an empire and start making $1000 a week on the Internet?”

Her: “You can do that?”

Both of these people got blank looks on their faces and walked away from me when I suggested that they could actually change their lives. This illustrated to me just how unconventional the idea of selling a digital product online really is.

There are only a handful of people actually making the jump to digital sales, the rest of the planet is still stuck back in 1982.

I imagine some of you are already thinking of clicking off this page. You think I’m just trying to sell you something, but I’m not.

I want you to realize how simple it is to embrace the Internet as your job.

If you’re interested in the above statement, I suggest you read this blog post thoroughly. Do not skim it. Do not jump around. Read each word, bookmark this, and then try each step separately until you’ve done everything here.

You can live and work from anywhere, –if you put in the work.

It will take you at most half a day to complete the first 3 of these steps and start making money online. It’ll take you a little longer for the last step, creating your own product, but you’ll get there eventually. Trust me!

The changing reality of Internet communication.

The reality is, you can change your life, and you can make a decent living working online — if you put in the work. I’ve done it. It’s far easier than you might think. I’m starting to believe that one of the biggest barriers to people making money online is their willingness to admit to themselves that it’s possible.

We’re a society that trains people in school to work in factories, and then they get out and their wonder where all of the factories went.

You’re on your own, the only person who’s going to give you permission to work online is you.

The true dynamics of the Internet.

Twenty years ago, the only way you could establish a brand and market a product was:

  1. By spending a ton of money on ads on the television or other media.
  2. By opening a brick and mortar storefront.
  3. By pimping yourself and your friends to a mid-level marketing scheme.
  4. By calling random people on the telephone and crossing your fingers.

All of these options still exist, but the internet bypasses all of the inadequacies of these systems. This means you can skip them, and go straight to the Internet.

On the internet, instead of your relationship being 1 to 1 with a buyer. The relationship is 1 to whoever you can get to come to your website and contact through social media. This can be 1 or it can be infinite.

The power of the digital product.

The internet has revolutionized how products are produced.

The cost of broadcasting on the web has fallen to zero –see Chris Anderson’s Free: The Future of a Radical Price for specifics. This creates a situation of complete selling democracy, and infinite potential, because:

  1. Anyone can create a product.
  2. Anyone can sell a product.
  3. To anyone in the world.
  4. At any time of day.

This creates amazing situations for independent professionals, such as making money in your sleep.

The way I see it, if you have something to offer people, you should product a digital product and sell it. You can’t lose money, because the distribution is free.

What’s the worst that can happen? You create a product and no one buys it. This means that no one needs it. If no one needs what you offer, you probably need to reevaluate what you’re offering.

The minimum you need to start.

I write about being minimalist, so I’m not going to go overboard recommending what you need to use in order to make money online.

Some people will tell you that you need to invest in all sorts of infrastructure in order to sell online. This is absurd.

Everything you need to sell online can be yours for free. Don’t spend any money until you’ve made money, it’s just absurd to be buying expensive software when there are free alternatives.

That’s not to say that you don’t want to upgrade eventually when you need more advanced technology, but don’t do this until you’re making at least $50,000 a year off your website. Then you can actually afford the expensive stuff.

That being said, I’ve recommended a few products below, that I believe in and I’m an affiliate for, that will help you learn. If after reading this you’re still scratching your head as to how to begin to earn money online, these educational products can go a long way towards filling the gap in your knowledge.

These products aren’t requirements, they’re simply options if you need additional learning in order to be able to take this path towards success.

It’s not necessary to dish out a lot of money in order to find success online. You can learn everything you need to for free by reading blogs and experimenting on your own.

The minimalist tools for making money online.

1. Why you need a blog.

Your blog is your home on the Internet, you need to make one now if you don’t have one already. Go to WordPress.com to sign up for a free WordPress blog to get started.

Eventually you’ll want to get your own domain name and hosting, but don’t worry about that until you start to find some success online.

  1. Start blogging at least twice a week.
  2. Set a schedule and stick to it.
  3. Write content that is extremely useful to people.
  4. Pick a niche market as your focus.
  5. Make it easy to subscribe to your blog via RSS and email.

Some people will tell you that you need all sorts of other things for your blog. Don’t worry about those things now. Just write good content. If you’re trying to escape your day job, you don’t have time to spend hours messing around with little blog widgets.

Writing good content is 80% of your blogging career, the rest is just extra. If you find yourself spending 20% of your time on content and the rest of the time checking your stats or otherwise wasting your time, stop!

Focus on content, and you’ll find blogging success.

Read Problogger and Viperchill to learn more about how to blog successfully.

If you need additional education, I highly recommend Darren Rowse’s e-book 31 Days to a Better Blog.

2. Social networking.

Sign up for two social networking services. If you have a pulse, you’re probably already on Facebook. If you’re not, join.

The second service I want you to join, if you haven’t already, is Twitter.

Why only two? Because you need to focus. If you’re on 10 social networks, you’ll never have time to be good at any one of them. If you pick only two, you will be able to be effective on at least two platforms and start to develop a significant amount of traffic to your blog from these sources.

Install tweetmeme and Facebook share buttons on your blog, and start pushing your content out to these services every time you post.

Next, start social networking with other bloggers who interest you.

The best way to do this is to retweet their posts every single time they post, this will show that you respect and admire them.

You can follow me on Twitter here.

  1. Ask bloggers questions.
  2. Start conversations.
  3. Interview bloggers for your blog.
  4. Be helpful.

Don’t spend too much time on social networking. 30 minutes a day is just enough. Social networking is 20% of your traffic, so don’t spend 80% of your time there — believe me, you will be tempted to do so. Social networking can become an infinite feedback loop — you need to do it, just don’t spend all of your time doing it.

Focus on content for your blog, and let the social networking happen naturally.

To learn more about social networking, read Chris Brogan’s blog and read Trust Agents the book wrote with Julien Smith.

Also check out Chris Guillebeau’s Unconventional Guide to the Social Web for some more in-depth learning if necessary.

3. Create a movement.

Once you create a blog, the next step is creating a movement — read this free e-book by me next.

Then come back to this page in order to learn the power of selling digital products.

4. Sell someone’s product first.

Before you invest all of the hours in creating your own product, try selling someone else’s product on your blog first.

When I first started my blog, I was an affiliate for Leo Babauta’s A Simple Guide to a Minimalist Life. Selling for Leo provided a small amount of income for me while I built my business, and helped me learn how to effectively sell online. I chose this e-book because it was a huge inspiration for me. It made me think how to apply minimalism to my own life, and how to write about minimalism so that others could accomplish their ambitions in order to live happier.

Many bloggers will let you affiliate market their products for 50% commission. You can earn anywhere from $5-$200 per sale.

I only sell products on my blog that I support, and I think you should too.

Don’t sell anything you don’t believe in.

It’s much harder to sell a product when you don’t believe in it’s benefits. It may take you some time to locate your idea product, and that’s okay. Take your time and pick something you believe in.

Here are a few suggestions to get you started.

Chris Guillebeau’s Unconventional Guide to Working for Yourself (51% commission)

Adam Baker’s Unautomate Your Finances (50% commission)

Glen Allsopp’s Cloud Living (51% commission)

Also, you can become an affiliate for my e-book, The Art of Being Minimalist (50% commission).

5. Create your own product.

Once you’ve sold a few copies of other people’s products, it’s time to create your own.

What is a digital product?

  1. An e-book that helps people.
  2. An audio recording that helps people.
  3. A software program that helps people.
  4. A video series that helps people.

I say ‘helps people’, because that’s one of the biggest questions you need to ask yourself when you create a product. Who is this helping? If the answer is “everyone!” your product is probably way too broad and not interesting enough for anyone to buy it.

Go niche or go broke. You need to create a product for a specific group of people. Scratch your own itch, fix your own problems, and you have a good chance of creating such a product.

Creating a product is different for everyone.

When I wrote The Art of Being Minimalist, I created the product over two weeks of intense writing. I combined this with writing I’d been working on over the last couple of months, and suddenly I had a product. This process is different for everyone.

The truth is that this was a book idea that had been floating around my head since before I’d even started my blog. It was a book idea that was set into motion from the moment that I quit my job in July of last year and jumped on a plane to Portland Oregon.

Everyone has a product idea in them, you just have to find it. A good idea will come to you naturally through the work that you do on your blog.

For more on creating digital products, check out Chris Guillebeau’s Unconventional Guide to Working for Yourself.

Another good resource is Dave Navarro’s How to Launch The **** Out of Your E-Book.

6. Let people affiliate market for you.

Once you’ve finished your product, sign up for a sellers account at e-junkie for only $5 a month –this is free for the first week. This will handle all of your payments and distribution automatically, and allow your community to earn money selling your newly created product on their own blogs.

This is the moment when the real magic happens. If you offer your product for 50% commission, suddenly you can harness the power of others to sell your product. By offering 50% (or more) commission, people will spread your product far and wide across the Internet. Some people will sell 5 copies, others will sell 500.

Imagine if you get 500 people to sell 500 copies each of your product over the course of a year? Even if you’re only charging $10… …well, you do the math, because you won’t believe me if I just tell you.

The infinite potential of reaching people via the Internet makes this possible.

Best of luck in your endeavors!

Now you have the skills to create a small to sizable side income while you’re at your day job. With any luck, you should be able to grow this income to replace your day job, or start a new income stream from the ground up.

Then you can leave your job and start living and working from anywhere! Congratulations, you’re almost free!

This is the second post in a series on quitting your day job in order to live and work from anywhere. The first post was on the challenge of preparing to quit your job.

Don’t miss out! Sign up for free updates via RSS or EMAIL.

This article helped you, I’d love if you could share it with anyone you know who wants to quit their job.

Hit the retweet button, or email this to your friends, this only takes 10 seconds and it’s the single best way for people to discover my writing.

Thank you.





When You Take it All Away, What Are You?

One simple exercise that will make you think.

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.

Here’s a simple meditation:

Imagine or actually do this.

Take everything that you owned away from you. You can do this by going to a park for a day and sitting under a tree, go to the beach and lie on a towel, or perhaps by hopping on a plane with a backpack for a month or two.

Now take a look at what’s left. Contemplate the remainder, without the stuff. The essence of what you really are without all of the junk.

Whatever is left when you get rid of the stuff is you.

When you take away all that you’ve bought, what have you accomplished?

Write this down.

Now write down what you want to accomplish.

Perhaps you still have a small creative empire working without you or within you. Good!

Or perhaps you’ve just been surrounding yourself with distractions in order to forget that nothing you’ve ever done means anything.

Perhaps you’re somewhere in-between those extremes.

Everyone reaches a point of no-return with their stuff.

We humans reach a tipping point, when we’ve accumulated so much meaninglessness in our lives that there’s no going back. The form that this meaninglessness comes in is different for anyone. For some it’s buying the entertainment center, for others it’s their first house, for some it’s drinking every night to make the pain go away.

From that moment forward, every dream is just a dream — they can never become reality.

The dreams become so hard to make reality when you have to pay someone to move the entertainment system.

So you sit around dreaming about visiting Bali for the rest of your life. But you never actually go — except maybe for an extended weekend.

How can you replace your junk with real, meaningful, challenges and experiences?





The Minimalist Guide to Leaving Your Soul-Crushing Day Job

The first step to leaving anything is preparation (but not too much of it.)

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.

This is the first of a three part series on using minimalism to leave your day job in order to live and work anywhere.

Don’t miss out! Sign up for free updates via email or RSS.

If you’ve been following this blog long, or read The Art of Being Minimalist, you know that I left my job last August in order to launch my minimalist business and live and work from anywhere.

If you’re in a situation like I was a year ago, –the monotonous repetitive days, the future of my creativity rapidly dying,– I imagine you want to do this too.

You want to be like Colin Wright, and country hop every four months. Or like Karol Gajda, making a reasonable living online while crafting a hand-made guitar in India. Maybe you want to be like Tammy Strobel and start a very small writing business to support your car-free lifestyle.

Maybe you want to be like you! That’s even better.

It doesn’t matter what ideal life you imagine, you just need to know that it’s possible.

Before I get started: whenever I write these types of things, I always get comments from two kinds of people who think I’m nuts.

The first is the people with kids, “oh it’s so hard, I could never do that” crowd.

I know, it’s so much easier to quit your job when you’re single and in your twenties, but it’s not impossible to change your life just because you decided to procreate. Leo Babauta started his own business and quit his job through minimalism, and he has six kids! You can too, no excuses!

The other group of people who comment are the ones who claim to love their job.

Great! I’m so happy for you, don’t change anything.

But, if you really love your job, why are you reading a blog post about leaving your job? Go read and comment on something else! …unless you actually secretly hate your job, in which case you need to ask yourself some hard questions. Don’t just deny everything until you wake up one day 15 years down the road and wonder where your life went.

Now then, let’s get to business…

The obstacles of leaving your job.

Quitting your job is never easy. There are a number of obstacles to overcome in order to even think of going out on your own.

1. Overcome your fear of certain death.

Everyone told me that if I quit my job during the greatest recession, I’d end up living in a mud hut down on the other side of town swigging malt liquor out if a sipper cup.

This is the opposite of true. I’ve found that the biggest growth opportunities are here, right now. Everything about the way we’re doing business is diversifying immensely. The time to start your own very small business is now, as there have never been more opportunities to reach out and find the tribe that will support your goals.

So ignore every horror story that you hear. These people are trying desperately to keep you from making a change –and who can blame them? If you can do it, it looks badly on them if they’ve settled for mediocrity.

Don’t listen to their pleas to be realistic.

The worst possible thing that could happen to you, if you do this, is probably not nearly as bad as you think. It’s really hard to fail hard in our society, as long as you have some basic common sense about you.

2. Realize that you’re going to need new non-work friends.

I’ve lost touch with every single friend I had at my old job — except the ones who left too. The common bonds that create an instant social network at a job are shallow indeed. When you’re talking about entrepreneurship, and they’re talking about maintaining the status-quo, this creates an instant barrier to communications.

Automatically assume that anyone who you work with now is not going to go out of their way to support your quest for freedom. Find help elsewhere, meet other people who have made this journey — the Internet is a great place to do this– these people are invaluable, and will tell you not to settle when you’re thinking or giving up.

That being said, some people will support you! That’s great, don’t fire your friends if they’re helpful. Fire them if they’re holding you back by telling you that you can’t succeed.

3. Dare to dream unrealistically.

I wrote recently about the need to be completely unrealistic. You need to write down an unrealistic goal and start to live and breathe it every single day. This can be simple, or more complex. Make it crazy though! The sky is the limit, and trust me, people have been up there too.

Everything crazy has been done already, so you might as well do it again.

My goal was to become a minimalist in order to live and work from anywhere. It wasn’t nearly as hard as I thought it would be. My primary income source is this blog, which I never thought would happen this quickly — the income potential to earn money online is enormous. You can reach almost anyone.

Your dream doesn’t have to be about making money online, but you do need to have some sort of goal.

4. Be confident when presenting your ideas to friends and strangers.

One of the biggest challenges, when deciding to leave a day job, is the opinions of others.

When you tell your best friend that you’re opting out of the rat-race to pursue a career as a writer, they will look at you like you’re a nutcase. It’s okay that they have doubts, you’re making a change and it’s only natural for them to worry.

That’s why it’s important to present your plans with confidence. Don’t hesitate or shake uncontrollably in fear when you tell people of your plans. Just say in a firm voice, with confidence, that this is the path you intend to tread.

I shared my unrealistic dream of becoming a location independent writer with people, initially they thought I was crazy! Six months later, I’m making a full time living. I’m no longer crazy.

5. Don’t let others decide your fate.

Ultimately, your decision to make a change is up to you. No amount of deliberation with friends and family will make your decision easier. In fact, the more you talk the harder it will be to do something.

Don’t spend a year trying to decide to make a change, just do it.

Now that you’ve overcome some preliminary obstacles, it’s time to prepare for your departure.

Things to do before you jump.

1. Figure out your cash flow.

You need to start figuring out ways to make a small amount of money outside your main job.

Unless you’re crazy, like me, it’s best to have at least your basic expenses covered before you make a jump.

Start by trying to make $10 online doing something other than selling your stuff on Craigslist. It sounds like a small goal, but that’s the biggest hump. If you can sell one digital or even physical product or service, chances are you can scale that.

Once you’ve made your first $10, try to make $10 a day. Then scale up from there until it’s $100 a day, then $10,000 and so on.

It’s important to have the objective in sight when you’re thinking about new cash flow. If you want to make passive income on a digital product, like I do, make that your goal and go straight to working on the product.

Don’t mess around in other areas outside your focus, unless you realize that your product isn’t going to sell more than 5 copies.

There are of course many other ways to make money outside of the online world, that’s just where I make money, so I used it as an example. I also believe it’s a lot easier to make money online than it is in the real world in the current economic climate.

2. Save up enough to survive until you actually have cash flow.

If you don’t have time to get cash flow going, or just have no idea what you’re doing (I was in this boat when I left), at least save up enough to cover you expenses for a few months while you figure out what you’re doing.

Most small business gurus recommend a 6-month cushion. 12-months if you’re a rock star.

Start by getting your finances in order. If keeping track of your spending scares the crap out of you, I recommend reading Adam Baker’s brilliant e-book Unautomate Your Finances in order to get a handle on how much you’re actually spending every month.

If you spend a lot of money every month, you’re going to need to cut back.

My ideal living expenses are around $1400 a month now –this isn’t to say I’m not making and spending a lot more than that, this is just what it costs for me to survive in Brooklyn.

When I was in Portland I spent around $900 a month on living and eating.

When I left my job, I’d saved up $3000 and lived on that for three months. You might need more or less depending on your living expenses.

The less you have to spend, the larger your chance of success.

Worrying about how little money you have to pay for stupid stuff will weigh on your mind and destroy your chances of striking out on your own.

When you work at a day job, you get used to having that steady stream of cash coming in every month. The more you make, the more you rely on. You need to break that cycle now, and start stashing away every last penny, or you’ll never be able to leave.

How can you cut down your expenses so that they’re reasonable?

3. Apply minimalism to your life.

Cut back on everything before you quit. Initially you’re going to be making a lot less than you did when you were employed. Go car-free. Rent your house to strangers. Sell all of your furniture. Cancel every single subscription — especially cable TV, then sell your TV. Call your phone company and reduce yourself to a basic plan.

Do this until your only expenses are eating and renting a small apartment.

Eventually you’ll be making enough from your new business to spend more, but it’s entirely unnecessary to scale back up after you downsize like this.

The stuff keeps you down, rooted to one place, and completely ineffective.

You can’t pursue your dreams if you’re surrounded by crap.

I’m not saying you should go all monk on us, but realistically consider living with your 100 best possessions, and nothing more. This will make you more flexible, so you can move whenever you want and focus entirely on your business when you need to.

Here are a few articles I’ve written over the past month on how to apply minimalism to your life in order to save money:

Two Methods for Less Stuff

The Stunning Truth About Focusing on the Important

How to Focus on Minimalist Income

How to Live with 75 Things

The Ultimate Guide to the Minimalist Work Week

If you’re serious about leaving your job and starting your own small business, I suggest you read the following immediately:

Chris Guillebeau’s Unconventional Guide to Working for Yourself.

Pam Slim’s book Escape from Cubicle Nation.

Timothy Ferriss’s The 4 Hour Work Week.

That’s all for now!

Check back next week for the second part in this series. Don’t miss out! Sign up for free updates via email or RSS.

Don’t forget to check this out: Interview with Everett Bogue: How to Pursue the Reality You Imagine Yourself Living at Tammy Strobel’s Rowdy Kittens.





How to Achieve Freedom At The End of the Television Era

Predictions for your future in the information age.

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.

20 years ago it was incredibly difficult to create a reality that you could effect.

You had control over the people you came in contact with. You could reach out to anyone who you could look up the phone number too.

In order to build anything, you needed to pander to the established media. They thrived on this, of course, because no one had a choice but to talk to them.

Now no one needs the media, and you can see how much of an empty shell it was –reality dumbed down to fit into 20 second sound bites. A 24 news-cycle thriving on the degradation of others. I know first hand, I’ve worked for the media.

For 50 years we sat idly by and watched “Lost”, now it’s time to reclaim your time.

Television domination is over now. Anyone can publish what they believe in. It is fairly easy to gather followers who will support your cause. This blog proves this, and so does every other blog out there with a following.

There is no longer any excuse to not do what you love. Seriously, create your own movement.

There are millions of things you could be doing tonight instead of watching TV. In fact, I’ll go as far as saying that you should destroy it entirely.

If you must watch something, watch TED. Ideas are far better to fill your brain with than the emptiness of the airwaves.

Here are a few of the changes that I see coming in the next five years because of this change:

Everyone will be supporting a community of minimalist businesses.

As business diversifies, so will the support. Twenty years ago big business dominated because they could buy many more television ads than the rest of us. This is why there’s a Burger King in every single town.

With the rise of social media, everyone now has a chance to find their true following.

As society moves away from that drudge and start appreciating quality hand-made work again, we will start to see consumer support move in that direction. Everyone will be the business owner, the marketer, and the consumer. We will support individual’s single-operator businesses from across the globe.

It will become much easier to rise to the top at what you’re passionate about.

It’s already so easy to Gatejump your way to success, and it will become even easier as good ideas float to the top of the cloud faster. All you have to do is create exceptional value, which isn’t actually that hard. Yes, you’ve been trained to do nothing by the TV in your living room for the last 50 years.

You need to destroy it now, and start working on your own projects every single night until an idea worth spreading appears to you.

Go on walks. Get in touch with nature. Start drawing. Get a camera. Take a dance class. Eat new foods. Write something that means something. Finger paint on your wall. Do something that will make people look at you weird, because the weird people are kicking your economic butt in it’s fluorescently lit chair.

Everyone will have to unlock their inner creativity.

Robots, computers, and outsourcing are quickly replacing cubicle drones. If you have no talents and no inspiration in your daily life, you need to up your game. The robots are coming for you.

Anything that can be done better by a computer is not a good career aspiration.

You are an individual, and it’s totally your fault if you continue to take orders and do repetitive tasks all day, and then go home and watch CSI. Make a change, start to design your freakin’ life, and get out of there. You need to become an artist, a creative, and an original thinker if you’re going to get out of the unemployment line.

A college education is quickly becoming less needed.

20 years ago, the only way to access information was through teachers at a school. This is no longer the case. Many universities are at a major disadvantage in the chain of information distribution, because they’re a bottleneck. They contain numerous teachers who haven’t seen the light of day since 1982.

The world has changed a lot since many of the teachers got to these schools, it also moves a lot faster. The real time information available on the net and through recently published books far exceeds the educational ability of larger institutions.

School teaches you to be good at school.

It’s not to say you won’t learn something there, and I did go, but is it worth $150,000? You have to ask that question.

Don’t go to business school, get a Personal MBA. Read business books, like Jason Fried’s Rework.

You will have to figure out what you’re passionate about.

If you’re stumbling around wondering what you’re actually interested in, that’s okay for a bit. Eventually you need to start doing something though. Sit yourself down and contemplate: what do I really enjoy doing?

If you don’t have an answer, here’s another solution: Stop doing everything you hate doing and see what you’re left with.

The silence of emptiness can be a huge motivator to finding your true calling. Stop running around, start silently contemplating what you want to do for the rest of your life. Once you find that sweet spot, you’ll actually be happy.

What else can you remove to free yourself further?

Once you know what you care about, you have to go further. What ballast do you need to throw overboard to get to the next level? The more junk you remove from your life, the more time you will have to pursue your goals. You will reclaim your dreams. As you remove each task that you hate doing, you will free yourself to make positive choices towards creating great work.

What predictions do you have for the future of the information age?

What steps are you taking to take advantage of the changes?

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How to Live Before You Die

You’ll be dead sooner than you think. No kidding! Really! What are you doing with your life until then?

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.

A few days ago I had a brief muscle spasm in my left arm. It stopped after a short while, but not before I remembered Jill Bolte Taylor’s Stroke of Insight. I’m having a stroke (I thought!)

Anyway I’ll spare you the imagined details, but I’d momentarily convinced myself that I was probably going to die mere days after my 25th birthday.

Well, I’m still here and have regained a normal feeling arm, but there is a way that thinking about your own death can stick with you for a few days.

You can die at any moment, and it could happen at any time.

Here are a couple of meditations on death, in regards to the topics that I write about here at Far Beyond The Stars.

1. You can’t take it with you.

It’s a well known cliche at this point, when you pass on most your stuff goes in the trash. No one cares anymore.  I know some people will disagree with me on this, and have stories to prove me otherwise. There will always be someone who will save a dead person’s stuff, but the majority of everyone won’t.

I’ve seen the stuff that people leave behind. Most of it only has meaning to the deceased.

2. Being safe won’t save you.

So many people live their lives in fear of dangerous things happening to them. In some cases this is justifiable fear, but in a lot of cases it’s not. Staying inside your house won’t save you from death, it will lead to you dying inside from not seeing the world.

Get out and live your life, every single day.

3. Do the best with the time you have.

You only have so much time, do your best with it. If you aren’t happy with your situation, you need to start making a change. Sitting around complaining about it won’t make a difference.

Try to spend every day working toward your ideal reality.

4. Buying stuff is not living your life.

I know, the advertisers tell you otherwise every single day. This is why you should destroy your TV, because the ads are making you feel inadequate, so you go out to the store and buy another pair of shoes. You only need one pair of shoes, make it a good pair and they’ll last you three years. In truth, your consumption is destroying the planet, so stop doing it.

Going to the store does not equal living your life. Instead, seek experiences over consumption, and you’ll be much happier with your life.

5. What would you do if you only had a week to live?

I love this exercise, even if it’s so morbid. Steve Jobs lives his life as if every day is the last, and look at what he’s managed to accomplish.

Take a moment and dreamline what you’d do, if you had only a week to live. Actually write this down. Chances are it won’t involve sitting at a desk waiting until 5pm. Can you make every day into your last week? Imagine how much happier you’d be.

6. Having less can encourage you to find peace and happiness inside yourself.

When you remove all the clutter, you have a huge opportunity to search for the depth of ordinary existence. Many people fill up their lives with junk, because we’ve been taught by advertising that buying stuff will make us happy. It doesn’t do anything but give you a momentary spark of adrenalin.

When you remove all the nonsense, you start to see the wisdom at the basis of reality. This is very hard work, but I believe that every has the ability to ask these questions of themselves. Trust me, the answers are worth seeking.

As for me, I’m going to do my best to create my ideal reality every day.

At the moment, I’m listening to a live string quartet at Tea Lounge in Brooklyn. It’s beautiful.

Today might be my last, I want it to be a good one. Don’t you?

Ash has thoughts on this as well.

Write a few sentences about your last week on earth and leave it in the comments, if you feel comfortable. I’d love to hear how you’ll spend it.

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