Scott “The Honey Badger” Car… l… son…
Posted on | December 8, 2011 | No Comments
That’s my new name! I love this video! So damn good!
Rock Star Entrepreneurs
Posted on | October 25, 2011 | No Comments
Jason Calacanis
Do you want to be rich as an entrepreneur? People are doing this every day. Jason Calacanis started with a blog, and ended up selling Weblogs, Inc for $25 million. Jason is a genius in entrepreneurship! I’ll talk more about Jason later in the blog, so keep reading. What is rich?
Scott Carlson 1999
As an entrepreneur I have started an S-Corp; Purchased, rented, and sold houses, and many small projects. This all started when I first moved to California and I found all my money went to bills. It was expensive as hell to live here! I was just making it and then got laid off! My boss had quit to take another job. The new job was going with a salesman and answering customer questions. To get this job he had to be AIX certified. To help him practice, his new company gave him a small computer that ran AIX. These are special built computers for AIX. I thought how cool would it be to have one for my own testing. I asked how much a used one would cost me, and they could get me one for around $900. A few months later around 1999, I was on Ebay and came across someone selling the exact cases, with mother boards, for $35 each. I bought a pallet of them! But let me go back in time… I was living on a boat for a year. When I got laid off from work, I took trips to Mexico, and then Dallas. Upon returning, I found everything I owned was stolen. They even stole the trash and trash can! They took the floors and stripped the boat to a shell. I had no insurance, homeless, with only some dirty clothes in the back of my Vette, the computer I had bought for $900, and about $50 cash. So couple days sleeping in the cramped Vette, I went to my girlfriend who lived in a very small studio apartment, and asked if I could stay with her. I had treated her really bad before I left. I was just mean as hell after I got laid off. I was mean to everyone. I was into bodybuilding, benching 405lbs, and everyone just got out of my way. So I did not think she would let me stay with her. But she did and I was able to sell the $900 computer for $500. She got me a job interview where she worked, and I got the job. So most of my first and second paychecks are getting spent on this pallet of servers. These servers are not complete, they are missing lots of parts. We are living in a 480 square foot studio apartment. So I had to rent a storage space close by, and it took forever to get the computers there, using the Vette. I made about a thousand calls and emails and got the parts I needed for about another $30 each. So I got the first computer built and running for around $80. I put it up on Ebay and it sold a few days later for $500! I had a nice paycheck and the Vette was being paid by the auctions! My car payment at the time was $580 a month. I did this for about a year before IBM decided to do the same thing, flooding Ebay with $50 servers. At the end I was clearing about a thousand a week! Damn it felt good! That was rich! For a year, I was on top of the world! I know it’s not a lot of money. But to me it felt like a million. I had seen an opportunity and taken it.
Tim Ferriss
There are other people who have made millions just like this. They do not have a boss except for themselves. If they want to go to South America for a year, they have a business or website that pays them. Tim Ferriss calls this the New Rich in his book the four hour work week. This would not be rich for everyone. Some people like the security they feel from a normal job. So this style of work would be stressful for them. That’s why everyone needs to figure out what is rich for them. For me it’s the deal. I love to make deals. I will make a deal in Mexico for a beer. My wife gets mad when I brag about the great deal I got on whatever it is.
Gary Vanerchuk
Then you have people that start a blog like this one. They turn it into a million dollar business like Gary Vaynerchuk. He started a blog about wine. Then made some podcasts. Then got on TV with what is called a “purple cow”, he ate dirt. He really was on David Letterman comparing wine to eating dirt. He was a huge hit. Then he wrote a book about it called “Crush It”. It is a great book and he is like an over caffeinated elementary kid. The “purple cow”, is a book by Seth Godin. It’s a really good book about marketing. He talks about how when you are driving and you see cows. At first you are thinking oh look at the cows. Then after you see them over and over they just blur out. Now if there was a purple cow in the mix, you would think… “Oh my god look at that purple cow!”. This is how people like Gary eating dirt stand out.
Winklevoss brothers
Mark Zuckerberg did not do anything except make a purple cow. In the movie it was like he had this great new idea. Well there was already Friendster and MySpace in the market doing the exact same thing. The Winklevoss brothers had the idea of a MySpace type dating site exclusive for Harvard. Which Mark Zuckerberg took that idea and made a MySpace site exclusive for Harvard. The purple cow was the fact it was exclusive. When he opened it up to other colleges, they got private invites to the party. It’s like when you drive by a building and see people waiting outside. You want to know why. You want to know what is going on in there. You want to see whatever it is. When google mail started, you got 10 invites to give to friends. This caused a huge amount of people wanting invites. This is the purple cow. When I launch Sosu.com, my purple cow is going to be a roast. I’m going to roast all the popular entrepreneurs on the front page. They will have to look. My website will be seen by the best in the industry. Nobody has done this, so it will be unique. It will be funny and it will make my site known to a lot of people. Now if I didn’t have this “purple cow”, how would my site get seen? How would people find out about my site? It would take forever to grow. If someone steals my idea, I’ll be pissed and I’ll know who to make an enemy.
Jason Calacanis in his $100k Tesla
That is the other thing about business. It’s called fighting up. When you start a fight with someone bigger than you and they fight back…. You get press. Jason Calacanis is a master at this. He gets tons of press just because he picks a fight.
http://www.businessinsider.com/calacanis-arrington-techcrunch-aol-2010-9
http://money.cnn.com/2010/01/27/technology/jason_calacanis_tablet/
There are tons of these and they are all free! He paid nothing! What you have to do is find an opportunity. Jason is an entrepreneur genius! That is why he has the launch conference, and people are lining up to get in. Michael Arrogant thought he was the reason everyone flocked to his conference. When the smoke clears, we will see it was Jason the entire time. If Mr Arrogant gets mad at me for this, please put it on the front page! lol
Scott Carlson enjoying life in Palos Verdes
Right now entrepreneurs are rock stars.
What is your time worth?
Posted on | October 25, 2011 | No Comments
What is rich? How much value do we give our own time? If you work late for the overtime and miss your sons game… Which is the greater value? You take that money and buy him a new baseball bat. But which do you think he would want? How much did it cost you and your son, to work the overtime?
If you drive two hours each way to get to a job that earns $100k. How much is the job really worth? What value do you put on your own time for those four hours? If you could work 10 minutes away for $60k, and it paid the bills, would you use that time for family? Would you waste it on TV? If you figured up that the value of those hours were worth $40k, would you use them to watch TV? Would you use them to better yourself? Would you use them to workout, learn something new, help your child in school, attend an event, or get a TV dinner and watch reruns?
When going out for lunch do you get the cheap slice of pizza and soda from Costco and rush back to the office? Pick up some kind of value meal from the drive through? Is the difference in cost of the value meal at around $6 and the lunch special at a nice Thai restaurant at around $8, really worth it? Do you really need to rush back to the office, eat with a plastic spoon while reading email? How much value do you put on your time to relax and eat.
Nobody on his deathbed ever said, “I wish I had spent more time at the office.”
–Paul Tsongas
Working for a living
Posted on | October 25, 2011 | No Comments
What is rich? If you had an extra $13 Million, would you buy Sex.com? The former owner of Sex.com, Escom LLC, failed to turn it into a viable business and declared bankruptcy in 2010. Right now it gets 125,000 visitors a day, with nothing but a landing page and some ads. It would break even in 2024. So why does one person succeed while the other fails? Is it just luck?
“I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.” Thomas Jefferson
So then what is more important, working hard, working smart, or being lucky? I think the middle one is the most important. When I was contracting, I made really good money. But I found if I took a day off, I didn’t get paid. I built a computer test environment, people flew in from all over to see it. At the end of the day Millions of dollars changed hands, and I received the agreed amount, minus the time I took off for my Mom’s funeral. When I took a job with paid vacations and holidays, I had to fight for the salary, because they wanted to include the benefits into my salary. That is working hard. Then there is working smart. I had a rent house I purchased for $271k. I put in about $10k fixing it up. Had it reappraised a few months later and took out $100k. I rented it, and made $100 a month profit. Not a lot of money, but I didn’t have to do anything to get it. For a few years I had the $100 profit a month rolling in. When the market started to turn I sold it for $490k, just under three years from when I bought it. Another example of working smart, but which I failed to recognize, was websites. This guy and I made some websites. He made a program that would go each night and search forums looking for logins and passwords. There are forums out there where people exchange this information for paid sites. Mainly they were sites set up where you paid a monthly fee and you could download computer programs, templates, etc… Someone would download everything and then trade with someone else, basically paying for one site, and getting several. I took his data and parsed it out between html tags to make the links. Everything ran automatically, and with popups… lots of them, the sites made about $20 a month. Not a lot of money, so we shut them down. Thinking back we really didn’t have to do anything to make that $20. Take someone like Jason Calacanis of www.Mahalo.com. His company pays people to make “how to” pages for the site. Each page is capable of making the same $20 a month. Take the fact he has about 350,000 pages, and the working smart idea sounds damn good. So my best conclusion is that the sex.com owners failed to work smart. That’s why I like to read books about entrepreneurship. Working smart is a great way to get rich.
Working from home
Posted on | October 25, 2011 | No Comments
What is rich? Working from home is the ultimate goal for a lot of people. For me it was how I gained 30lbs really quick! But more companies should use telecommuting. This would save the employee and company in more ways than one. When I was working from home. I would get up in the morning. Log into Sametime (instant messenger) and see who else was on. Check my email, do some quick replies. Then go take a shower, coffee, and breakfast. I worked during the day and often just left the computer on, and people might ask me questions or whatever until I went to bed. The company got more than my 40 hours, and I got the comfort of being home. The bad side of working from home, was a kitchen full of food. I ate chips and salsa all day long. I love chips and salsa. This became a problem. Then the other problem became that the company started expecting me to be on all the time. They saw me on all the time and started expecting it. So working from home really requires a lot of discipline. The other way of “working from home”, is like Tim Ferriss describes as the “New Rich”, in his book The 4-Hour Work Week. This is when you have some sort of business that runs, and you have limited interaction. Everyone should read The 4-Hour Work Week. Tune out when Tim Ferriss talks about himself and how great he is, then tune back in when he gives great information. Take my cigar company for example. I had one employee and myself. If I had two employees, I could have removed myself to do other things. I really owned a job. I was still working and could not stop. I should have hired someone that could have done everything I was doing. This is also another example of working smart. Just think what you could do if you had a business or something going that made money when you slept, went on vacation, and even on holidays. This would not be rich to everyone. Some people like the security they feel from a traditional job. What is rich to me is not rich to them.
The good life
Posted on | October 25, 2011 | No Comments
Pool Day
What is rich? Yesterday here in Los Angeles it was 80, sunny, and just awesome! My nieces and nephews came over for a BBQ. It was so much fun! Watching the kids just makes one think about their future. What are they going to do? What are they going to be? It is so great to wonder about what will be. I think we should all do that in our own lives as well. Stop looking at the past and expecting the same for the future. It is hard to drive while looking in the rear view mirror. The story about KFC where the old man got his Social Security check and said, nope not going to do it. He went out and worked his ass off to make it better. I’m guilty of sometimes thinking, is this it. Kids do not think like that. They have huge expectations and hopes. Does it take a midlife crises to figure out the lose of goals is a huge problem. What are your goals? Mine is building www.Sosu.com and making it the best social network for entrepreneurs. I want to have huge conferences for entrepreneurs. I have an idea for an entrepreneur flag. Blue for the sweat we put in, green for the money we make, and a gold star for us. Its a huge goal and its mine. So what is yours?
Water was cold and they still got in
Better off not getting the job?
Posted on | October 25, 2011 | No Comments
So I started a company and ran it for a few years and it failed. I could not overcome the bad location. I poured every penny we had to keep it going. So like in the movie Good Fellas when you don’t have another drop to give, you bust it out. Well I just moved out, I didn’t burn it down. So now I need a job. I had not had a job in about three years. So I was scared to death. I applied everywhere including Starbucks, Wal Mart, night stocker at grocery store. I filled out job apps everywhere I went. I sent out resumes to every computer job I found on Dice and Monster. Then after a few weeks I got a call. I was so damn excited! The job was working at DreamHost as a help desk person for $30k a year. My last job before I started my company was just under $100k… It’s a big drop! But I wanted anything. So I went to the job interview. DreamHost was in a large building. I get out of the elevator and there is a pool table in the area the elevator doors open. I walk around the corner and a nerf rocket flys by me. I step over a few more and stop at the first desk. There are no lights except from the desks. The guy sitting there waves me off as he is on the phone. So I keep walking. I reach some offices, a guy in a tshirt and shorts steps out of one and says “You must be Scott”. The interview is very short but I thought it went well. I go back through the flying nerf balls and exit the building. I check my email when I get home and there is one asking me for a second interview.
This interview is with the owner of the company. It is in another building in downtown LA. I get lost and about an hour late. But I called. So I meet the owner and he is a young guy about late 20s. I’m 6’1 and I still have to look up, so he must be about 6’6 or more. He has a shaved head, jeans and a white tshirt. He says lets go see some servers. We go to the basement where they have a very nice server area. It is in a shared cage area. He explains how the servers all work together and because most people never use all the space they can move servers around to share and everything works better. We go back up and into a large conference room where he asks me to trouble shoot some tickets. I thought I did well, but he was not impressed. I can tell he is very smart. I am very impressed with everything I had seen. So he tells me I do not get the job. I am crushed. I am crushed over a $30k job. I go home and I’m so upset. A couple days later I get a call for a computer position at another company, I get the job, and its about what I made before I started my company. If I had got the $30k job, I would not have gone on the interview for the other job. So sometimes not getting the job is better than getting the job. Check out the DreamHost blog… http://blog.dreamhost.com/
Blogging for Bucks!
Posted on | October 25, 2011 | No Comments
I couldn’t wait to open up the envelope. Inside was a check to me for $20.23. I was so excited! This was many years ago and I gave up before I really got started. Affiliate programs was fairly new and so was blogging. My friend and I got together and wrote a computer program. There were a lot of membership sites out there for almost everything. Then there were sites out there where people exchanged logins. Example… John was a member of a music sharing site. Jane was a member of a joke and funny photo site. They would exchange passwords in a forum. Our program went to these forums and scanned looking for logins and passwords. I would then take this information and run it through a unix korn shell script to clean it up. The end result was rows of website name login password. I then uploaded this to a website. We then spammed the same forums with our site. We didn’t think it was spam back then. We started getting a lot of traffic! We put a few banners on the page and not one person clicked one. I even put under the banner… “Click here to support the site”. Second month went by and we had not one single click. We made a second website with a donate button. Nope not a penny. We were getting lots of page views, but no clicks. My friend got pissed and shut off the second site. I kept trying on mine. I made about every fourth link redirect to my banner. I started to get some hits. And people started getting pissed off. I got an email about how deceiving I was by redirecting them from the stolen passwords. So one day I took some code for a popup and put it in. Now I had about $5 in my account. I then added lots of popups. When leaving the site, it would flood with popups. At the end of that month I had a check for $20.23 mailed to me. It might as well been $2000k to me.
This comes to blogging. One of the coolest things about blogging is that it is so easy. Everyone is an expert in something. And if you are into it, chances are someone else is into it. You might be a huge fan of TV shows like Modern Family or Jersey Shore, or whatever. So start a blog about it. And some bloggers get free stuff! People will send me a book to check out, and its free! You put a few banners up that will pay the hosting bill and maybe even beer money. And it is so easy because it is something you already like to talk about. And setting up the blog is so simple these days. Everything is just a click of a button. Anyone can get an account like at DreamHost etc… and they walk you through it. My next blog is called PugEntertainment.com and is about… well… Pugs : )
It does take a lot of time to get your blog going. This website has only made about $7; And I got one free book. But I know just like before, if I make a few changes here and there it will do better. My main focus for this site is not to make money. I am trying to learn what people like. What style of my writing works. So far the best one is about my Dad the pirate. When I get all this knowledge together I want to write a book called “What Is Rich”, and have it published. But I can’t write a book without knowing what people want to read.
So start a blog and see how you do. You might get on the show and punch Snooki in the face. Or be the next judge in some competition. You might get free books. Who knows but it is a lot of fun to think about what you are going to write about. There are a lot of famous bloggers these days. So to all the bloggers out there… What is Rich?
Top 5 regrets people make on their deathbed
Posted on | October 25, 2011 | No Comments
Nurse reveals the top 5 regrets people make on their deathbed
By Bonnie Ware(who worked for years nursing the dying)
He said "Who can sing better?". Rachel jumped up there! lol
1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
This was the most common regret of all. When people realize that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people have had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. It is very important to try and honour at least some of your dreams along the way. From the moment that you lose your health, it is too late. Health brings a freedom very few realize, until they no longer have it.
2. I wish I didn’t work so hard.
This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship. Women also spoke of this regret. But as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence. By simplifying your lifestyle and making conscious choices along the way, it is possible to not need the income that you think you do. And by creating more space in your life, you become happier and more open to new opportunities, ones more suited to your new lifestyle.
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result. We cannot control the reactions of others. However, although people may initially react when you change the way you are by speaking honestly, in the end it raises the relationship to a whole new and healthier level. Either that or it releases the unhealthy relationship from your life. Either way, you win.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
Often they would not truly realize the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying. It is common for anyone in a busy lifestyle to let friendships slip. But when you are faced with your approaching death, the physical details of life fall away. People do want to get their financial affairs in order if possible. But it is not money or status that holds the true importance for them. They want to get things in order more for the benefit of those they love. Usually though, they are too ill and weary to ever manage this task. It is all comes down to love and relationships in the end. That is all that remains in the final weeks, love and relationships.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realize until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called ‘comfort’ of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content. When deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again. When you are on your deathbed, what others think of you is a long way from your mind. How wonderful to be able to let go and smile again, long before you are dying.