Tim Ferriss--not the Joker--4HWW, Autograph, done by eponymousx on flickr

This outsourcing thing makes me think: we’ve Been Rubes!  Rubes!

So it’s “smart” to use OPM to build your business.  Doing-it-yourself sucks!

You’re a “sucker” if don’t leverage the hell out of your ability to work and earn.  Tim Ferriss only works 4 hours, yo.

The underlying message here is this: that there is a leveraged ratio that doesn’t but up against diminishing returns.   The more money you spend on spinning some flywheel, outsourcing routine tasks, the more of a businessman you are.  Borrowing money doesn’t mean risk I call bullshit.

The gurus croon: You shouldn’t be working that hard.  Have the ‘good life,’ relax, hire people to work for you.  Hard work is dead.   Ahem.

Outsourcing means you must work “on” and not “in” your business.  And that is a siren song.  But the gist is that people are looking to…not work “hard.”  People are looking to escape the workaday tedium and the application of effort that it takes to make something cool & beautiful.  But dude, repetitious boredom pays off.   It’s precisely what others aren’t willing to do.

Michael Gerber has his uses.  I’m not gonna discount the goodness that he’s brought into the world.  Having a path up and an idea that you have to standardize yourself is cool.   But it begets entitlement and laziness.  It takes away from the standard of excellence.  I can control the tone of voice and the amount of compassion I transmit to someone.  I can bear a burden for my clients.  A script can’t.

Throwing Money At A Problem = Loserdom Throw Heart instead.

When I read the copy for the Outsourcing Conspiracy, Brian Clark and Jon Morrow understood this.  If you’re not an owner you’re not gonna achieve that standard.  When I call people, I can always tell when I’m dealing with someone who has their ass on the line.  You can feel it.  It vibrates.

You don’t leverage yourself because you bring complexity and fragility into your life.  You have to manage people, to chase people with less spark, with a need for security over excellence.  And it’s not possible to do.   It’s got serious diminishing returns.  You might do less paperwork (drudgery), but you’ll do more stress and juggling.

What’s better?  Making $150k a year by hustling and doing the work, say on $180k in revenue?  Or making $180k on $350k in revenue?

When I look at the people I admire they don’t have the same attitude towards outsourcing.   They love their businesses.  They love what they are doing.  And they don’t avoid the work.  They become more efficient, and delegate some of it, but at the core they feel good when work is done & done right.

Getting tinfoil hatty on y’all: who wants you to have complexity?  Folks that sell financial products and services.  The more fragile you are, the more likely you are to take a loan to get you the flexibility ‘you need.’  Flexibility comes with a cost: a background stress load that is always there, and is always creeping into your life.

Flexibility is better than servitude.  The pimps and hustlers get small businesses to have to make poor, moneynow decisions because they are owned by the banks and financiers.

As for me, I’m gonna pay my entire debt off.   I’ll have–tomorrow–a sidebar with what the debt is.  I’ve cut it from $170k to just over 80.  Miles to go though.

Gitomer writes approximately 4 #1 amazon best selling sales each morning, but his best book–and the one you should all buy right now–is the “Little gold book of YES! attitude.“  If you do what that says, you’ll find the energy in yourself to be enthusiastic about working your ass off.  It can be read in an hour, and everyone should buy a copy. If you’re making less money than $500,000 a year then you should read and study this book.  It is the ultimate concierge into personal development.  You should also read all  the books that it references, and then the books that they reference.  This, of course, presumes that you’re going to throw your TV away.

“If you executed about 30% of Gitomers’s advice, you’d have no money worries in about 60 days,” says Chris Johnson, “So that’s the standard to uphold.”

Gitomer’s philosophy is simply put to give value first, and without the suffocation of entitlement that happens when you do that.   He sets an example by writing “sales caffeine,” a free news zine that has mostly good advice…for sales people that goes out to who-knows-how-many people.  He will help remind Chris to give value as much as possible and Chris will do that through freelancer sales videos, free white papers and this blog.   The insane consistency that Gitomer has is also something to behold.

Finally, if there is any doubt whatever about Gitomer’s ability to sell, just take a look at his girlfriend:  

BEING FLAKY is 100% preventable.

And, it only takes a tiny amount of effort in a few key places to be extraordinary.

So, in order to be prepared to get things done, I decided to have two groups of things with me most or all of the time…

One group, I’d have with me 100% of the time. 100% means 100%. In the shower, in the bathroom, wherever I was, my stuff would be with me.

Another group I’d have with me 90% of the time. 90% means 90%–and we’d strive to have the rest close at hand the other times.

Group 1: 100% of the time.

• A pen and paper. (Office max makes cheap, tiny notebooks–OM96732 if you must know—but searching that gets you nowhere because the officemax people hate to make their stuff easy to find on person or the web).
• My mission statement
• My current goals. (Ginsberg has Philosophy Cards that are a good thing to do.)
• My long term goals.
• My affirmations.
• My minimum daily work standards.
• My cell phone (mostly for jotting stuff.)

The problem is, I take showers. But–when you’re in the shower, how often do you think of an EXCITING AND UNFORGETTABLE IDEA that you just KNOW you’ll always remember? And then, how often does that idea dissapear before you can towel off, get dressed, and get moving?

A ziploc bag, baby. Serious as a heart attack. Part of your arsenal. Have it 100% of the time.

The other thing is to buy a stack of business cards and some business card creation software. The stuff makes horrible business cards, but it makes great portable reminders. All you gotta do then is either laminate it or get some business card sleves, and you’ve got mobile reminders of goals, tasks and reminders.

It’s my dad’s birthday, I’m running late–so I’ll post the rest of this in a few hours.