not at all about politics, possibly politically incorrect, but full of useful ideas and questions. -- #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller

::::::::

A lot of people tell me that I do a lot of work and get a lot done. I guess it's so. But I'm always looking for ways to function more effectively. Perusing the Amazon bestsellers list a week or two ago, I noticed the book, THE 4 HOUR WORKWEEK, by Timothy Ferriss.  He's a 30 year old hotshot entrepreneur from Princeton, but he raises some interesting ideas and concepts. It caught my attention because, now that I'm working almost exclusively on the web, I could live just about anywhere. 

Here are some excerpts from his book:

Since I'm a quotation junkie, let's start with some quotations he cites:

You have comfort. you don't have luxury. And don't tell me that money plays a part. The luxury I advocate has nothing to do with money. It cannot be bought. it is the reward of those who have no fear of discomfort.

Jean Cocteau, French poet, novelist 

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

Mark Twain

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists

Many a false step was made by standing still

fortune cookie 

 

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize winning physicist

Civilization had too many rules for me, so I did my best to rewrite them.

Bill Cosby

Once you say you're going to settle for second, that's what happens to you in life.

John F. Kennedy 

I can't give you a surefire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure; try to please everybody all the time.

Herbert Bayard Swope, American editor and journalist, first recipient of the Pulitzer Prize

Now, here's a quote from Ferris, and then a bit on his ideas:

"For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your job? The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn't conspire against you, but it doesn't go out of its way to line up all the pins either."  

 

Gold is getting old. The New Rich (NR) are those who abandon the deferred-life plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the New Rich: time and mobility. This is an art and a science we will refer to as Lifestyle Design (LD). 

People don’t want to be millionaires — they want to experience what they believe only millions can buy. Ski chalets, butlers, and exotic travel often enter the picture. Perhaps rubbing cocoa butter on your belly in a hammock while you listen to waves rhythmically lapping against the deck of your thatched-roof bungalow? Sounds nice.

$1,000,000 in the bank isn’t the fantasy. The fantasy is the lifestyle of complete freedom it supposedly allows. The question is then, How can one achieve the millionaire lifestyle of complete freedom without first having $1,000,000?

 The best part of the book, which I'm not finished yet, are the questions he asks, such as,

 How do your decisions change if retirement isn’t an option?

 

He asks, and I'm paraphrasing, What would you do if there were no way you could fail? If you were 10 times smarter than the rest of the world?  Create two timelines-- Six months and 12 months-- and list up to five things you dream of having, being and doing. And he advises "Be sure not to judge or fool yourself. If you really want a ferrari, don't put down solving world hunger out of guilt.

I got to this point in the book, and stopped. And I thought. I put the book down and came up with a few ideas about OpEdNews. Then some ideas about my other business, futurehealth then about my personal life, my family, then things that are more dreams than nearterm realities.  I worked at getting more specific. By the time I was finished, I had eight pages of notes. Now, I must confess, I've begun the process. Last year, I gave up a business-- running conferences-- that I'd done for 15 years-- and which grossed over $100,000 a year, with minimal expenses. Of course, the new path has been to pursue building OpEdNEws.com. It was a very scary decision and I did not let go altogether of some of the other things I was doing, but I made up my mind to drastically change the way I did them too. 

Ferris He explores the idea of making a jump in your career to something very different. With the economy tanking, many people face a situation where their career no longer offers the hope or even the income it once did. One friend of mine, who's made a very good living with his jewelry store, is facing a perfect storm  of bad news. People now buy technology as gifts, the price of gold has skyrocketed to the point of unaffordability. and the economy's downturn has moved people far away from buying unnecessary items, like jewelry. Yet my dear old friend, at 57, is terrified, or paralyzed, when it comes to thinking of alternate options. 

Ferris addresses this. Actually, the fear of changing jobs, of taking risks, is very common.  

He takes you through a series of steps:

1- Define your nightmare, the absolute worst that could happen if you did what you are considering.  What doubt, fears, and "what-ifs" pop up as you consider the big changes you can-- or need-- to make?....

2-What steps could you take to repair the damage or get things bak on the upswing, even if temporarily?  Chances are it's easier than you imagine. ....

3-What are the outcomes or benefits, both temporary and permanent, of more probably scenarios?

4-If you were fired from your job today, what would you do to get things under financial control.  ...If you quit your job to test other options, how could you later get back on the same career track if you absolutely had to?

5- What are you putting off out of fear? Usually, what we most fear doing is what we most need to do.  

6- What is it costing you-- financially, emotionally and physically-- to postpone action?

7- What are you waiting for?  

 Ferris devotes a lot of the book to innovative ways to spend less of your time doing rote, repetitive things, and how to delegate work. He observes that you can often live for less in exotic vacation-type places than it costs to live at home. 

I'm enjoying the book because it is helping me to ask some good questions and getting me to re-evaluate my choices, my habits and my ways of working. Just the list I put together last night made it worth the investment.

For more info on the book, free chapters, a newsletter, etc., go here. 

Authors Bio:

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

more detailed bio:

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.

Rob Kall Wikipedia Page

Rob Kall's Bottom Up Radio Show: Over 400 podcasts are archived for downloading here, or can be accessed from iTunes. Or check out my Youtube Channel

Rob Kall/OpEdNews Bottom Up YouTube video channel

Rob was published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com for several years.

Rob is, with Opednews.com the first media winner of the Pillar Award for supporting Whistleblowers and the first amendment.

To learn more about Rob and OpEdNews.com, check out A Voice For Truth - ROB KALL | OM Times Magazine and this article.

For Rob's work in non-political realms mostly before 2000, see his C.V.. and here's an article on the Storycon Summit Meeting he founded and organized for eight years.

Press coverage in the Wall Street Journal: Party's Left Pushes for a Seat at the Table

Talk Nation Radio interview by David Swanson: Rob Kall on Bottom-Up Governance June, 2017

Here is a one hour radio interview where Rob was a guest- on Envision This, and here is the transcript..

To watch Rob having a lively conversation with John Conyers, then Chair of the House Judiciary committee, click here. Watch Rob speaking on Bottom up economics at the Occupy G8 Economic Summit, here.

Follow Rob on Twitter & Facebook.

His quotes are here

Rob's articles express his personal opinion, not the opinion of this website.

Join the conversation:

On facebook at Rob Kall's Bottom-up The Connection Revolution

and at Google Groups listserve Bottom-up Top-down conversation