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Archives for 2014

December 2014 Goals

December 15, 2014 by Neville

Here’s my December 2014 Goals:

december-2014-goals

Due to the holidays (and fun!) I’ll be traveling a whole helluva lot this month basically till February 2014.

Vail –> Austin –> Houston–> Los Angeles –> India –> Japan

(Btw….anyone gonna be hanging around Tokyo or Osaka from Jan. 14th till Jan 21st 2015?  Come meet up with me and my brother)!

Thanks to this new thing called “The Internet” I’ll be connected most of the time and be able to work from wherever.  I’m also doubling down on stuff now so I don’t have to seriously work whilst hanging with the family.

 

 

The Purpose of Life

December 15, 2014 by Neville

“What is my purpose???”

You know what this question is?

It’s a meaningless fu**ing question that hippies ask to make themselves sad.

A spoon was built for a specific purpose: To get food in your mouth.
A chair was built for a specific purpose: To be sat on.
A cup was built for a specific purpose: To hold stuff.

But those are inanimate objects.

Life on the other hand was created by chance and repetition. And only life that replicates continues to survive.

That means us humans have the exact same “purpose” as dogs, fish, plankton and trees:

You exist to reproduce and assist in the survival of your species.

Hey hippies and lazy bastards of the world endlessly searching for your purpose….there it is!!! The purpose of life has been sovled!

But see, froo-froo thinkers don’t want to admit this. The real answer is obviously staring them in the face, yet they won’t acknowledge it because it’s not the easy answer they wanted to hear.

It’s like asking a successful person what “The secret to success is.” The real answer is usually “A lot of hard work.” But that’s NOT what people wanna hear! They wanna hear some magic clue that lets them shortcut their way through the hard work.

So there you have it. The purpose of life is to reproduce and assist in the survival of your species.

Here’s breaking it down further:

If your penis/vagina is in functioning order, your original purpose is to reproduce:
It’s why young people obsess over fitting in, being cool, and finding love.

If you’re no longer able to reproduce, your purpose is to assist in the survival of your species:
It’s why old people like taking care of grand kids.
It’s why people feel so good when they volunteer.

If you’re not doing things that either lead to reproduction or survival of the species, what happens? You get depressed!

It’s your brain’s way of telling you stop asking what your god damn “purpose” is and go do something that gets you ahead in life or helps your fellow humans.

I’ve seen many people endlessly ask the question “what’s my purpose” and they always tend to get a little depressed about it because they can never find it.

They’re searching for something to give them meaning…..or something to give them “drive”.

What these people need is not a “purpose”, but these two things:

1.) LITTLE GOALS (this one is required).
You will get super-depressed if you don’t have a little goal. A Little Goal can making a certain amount of money, or finishing a project, or learning something new, or being the best in your line of work, or taking a trip, or improving your living situation. Your Little Goals will constantly be changing.

2.) BIG GOALS (this one is not required, but can be searched for).
This big goal should be so big that it can’t be accomplished in your lifetime. It will vary wildly for some people. A lot of people won’t even have one, and that’s alright too. Some people will have a burning desire to end starvation in Africa or some lofty goal, and that’s alright too. If you don’t have a solid Big Goal yet….don’t dwell on it….focus on your Little Goals first and a Big Goal will materialize.

So if you’ve ever been wondering what “Your purpose in life” is. What you’re actually looking for is a GOAL.

And your goals evolve and change in different situations.

If you live in a 1st world country and have a job, maybe your short term goals are to take a trip to the beach with your friends and finally buy that new condo you’ve wanted.

But if you just got kidnapped by deadly ninjas, your new goal is probably to escape. Your beach trip and condo probably seem like pretty unimportant things.

If you live in a horrible place with no opportunity, maybe your short term goal would be to beef up your finances enough to get out, or improve your community to be more like you’d want.
Your goals will be highly affected by your environment.

Your Little Goals will be ever-evolving.

Your Big Goals will be too.

Your “purpose” in life however will remain the same: You exist to reproduce and assist in the survival of your species.

When a musician is jamming the hell out….he isn’t moping around thinking “what’s my purrrpoossee?”
His Little Goal is: rock the hell out and entertain the crowd. And he’s fully engaged in it.

When a pilot is landing a plane…..he isn’t contemplating, “maaaan what’s my purpose??”
His Little Goal is to land the plane safely. And he’s fully engaged in it.

The mom juggling kids while cooking and cleaning at the same time isn’t thinking “What’s my purpose?”
Her Little Goal is to get her kids fed. And she’s fully engaged in it.

If you don’t have a Little Goal, then MAKE one!

-Be the absolute top performer at your job.
-Aggressively learn a new skill. Piano, coding, speed reading.
-Buy my KopywritingKourse and learn how to communicate ← survival of Neville in action.
-Start making extra money for a sweet trip.

Accomplishing a bunch of Little Goals leads to you accomplishing even bigger goals.

Since the purpose of life is to reproduce and assist in the survival of your species…..

Generally anything you do to improve your own value or improve others will make you happy.

Sincerely,
Neville Medhora

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.
–Albert Camus

How The Economic Machine Works by Ray Dalio – YouTube

December 14, 2014 by Neville

How The Economic Machine Works by Ray Dalio – YouTube.

Spending Account 2

November 24, 2014 by Neville

In a land far-far away called ThisPlaceDoesn’tExistVille……everyone spends the same amount of money every month.

That means of all 12 months of the year, a person will spend maybe $4,000/mo for living/fun/bills. Like this:

January spending: $4,000
February spending: $4,000
March spending: $4,000
November spending: $4,000
December spending: $4,000

BAHAHAHA!! In RealWorldLand however, that shit NEVER happens! It’s more like:

January spending: $4,000
February spending: $3,000
March spending: $4,000
November spending: $7,500
December spending: $11,500

Notice those last few months shoot straight up.

Well pretty much EVERY year ever, I notice my spending goes sky-high in the last quarter of the year….and I’m not alone in this.

In October/November/December you tend to: Travel places to see family, buy lots of gifts, go to lots of parties, stay in other places…..basically A LOT OF SPENDING HAPPENS.

But years ago in college I did one smart thing, and that was create a separate spending account JUST for occasions like this.

I called it The Spending Account 2.
(ok…the name wasn’t so creative, but you get the point)!

In college I started stuffing in about $300 bucks a month to the Spending Account 2 account….so by the end of 12 months I’d have an extra $3,600 in the holiday season to spend.

At the time that would cover travel costs, allow me to buy some pretty decent gifts for everyone….and essentially lemme have some extra wiggle room to do/buy whatever I wanted for the holidays:

spending-account-2

Having The Spending Account 2 available for extra money made holiday shopping a lot more enjoyable, when you didn’t have to “budget” to buy stuff on your normal monthly burn rate.

If you have the option to create multiple bank accounts, I’d HIGHLY suggest you create a separate one that let’s you actually enjoy the holidays instead of dread it :)

Sincerely,
Neville Medhora – The Brown Santa Claus
P.S. You’re damn right I made a financial graphic using Emjoi!

November 2014 Goals

November 14, 2014 by Neville

Ahhhhh I can smell the goals in the air.

This month is mainly a bunch of technical stuff such as porting over a lot of my biz stuff to InfusionSoft.

november-2014-goals

There is definitely a learning curve to any new system, but much of the work has been completed.  It’s also super exciting because the amount of extra stuff I can do with a more powerful CRM system like this opens up new doors :-)

Why this guy is still totally poor :: Kopywriting Kourse

November 6, 2014 by Neville

Why this guy is still totally poor :: Kopywriting Kourse.

Why this guy is still totally poor :: Kopywriting Kourse

Awesome ad by GE

November 6, 2014 by Neville

A great ad by GE.  Good script, good visuals and inspiring…..maybe even a tad scary.

Cool demo of 3D printing and the future of colaborative work.

Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman Discuss PayPal and Startup Success – YouTube

October 7, 2014 by Neville

Cool to see Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman candidly talk about hiring fast learners over seasoned professionals, doing new things, and that most of your good ideas for your business will completely change soon.

Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman Discuss PayPal and Startup Success – YouTube:

A Kopywriting Konference

September 15, 2014 by Neville

So this past weekend I was at a conference called “Titans of Direct Response.”

As you may know, the copywriting industry had some of it’s infancy in the the direct-mail industry.

Back in the days before the el interneto, people would send physical mail.  So it was hella expensive to reach a large audience.

So if you wanted to broadcast your message to a large audience in the 1900’s, you could either:

  • Advertise on the TV.
  • Advertise on the radio.
  • Advertise in magazines.
  • Advertise through the mail.

There were a lot of advantages to selling through direct mail.  For one you could TEST different advertising messages to smaller samples, like 1,000 people get mail with pictures, 1,000 people get mail without pictures, and then you can compare which set generated more sales.

The reason copywriters became so crucial back then, was it was EXPENSIVE AS HELL to test this stuff.

Not to mention back in the day it wasn’t so simple to get 1,000’s of letters printed up (today you can literally do it from a desktop printer and a laptop, but not back then).

So it may cost you $2,000+ to send out a single test to 1,000 people.  Since so much money was on the line each time, it was crucial to have someone experienced in sales copy to be writing these letters so you could at least make your money back.

 

…..well the conference I went to this past weekend in Stamford, CT. had all the famous veterans from that industry.

What’s cool is those guys who cut their teeth on direct mail for years generally ALSO kill it when they move to the internet.

The one’s who’ve been around for a long time know that whether it’s direct mail, email, radio, or TV….it’s all about the human psychology behind the purchase.  So they’re adaptable.

So some of the biggest guys in the industry were there including Jay Abraham, Dan Kennedy, and Joe Sugarman (I’ve read the books of every single one of these guys).

Price to get in: $3,500.
Chartered cars: $400
Hotel Room: $400
Flight: $500
Lessons Learned: Priceless.

Ripped-off joke from MasterCard: 100%   :-P

NOW HERE’S NEVILLE’S PERSONAL THEORY ON GOING TO CONFERENCES:
You can pretty much watch ALL of the speakers I saw on YouTube for free.  In fact you can probably get MORE information from each speaker for free on the internet.

So why go?

You don’t need to pay $5,000+ to read/listen/watch these guys speak from a stage.  However it’s NEVER about watching the speakers on stage that makes a conference worth it.

It’s about the friends you make at the conference.
It’s about the small connections you make that might turn into something more.
It’s about the “oh yeah I know that guy” conversations you have after the conference.
It’s about getting to hang out with the bigshots in the room in a casual environment.
(And my number one….): It’s about taking hella notes in the conference and then getting to read them later!

I. Love. Taking. Notes.

Mainly because I suck at remembering things.  Like, I really suck.
So taking notes is the only way I remember stuff.

In a month I’ll look back at my notes and allllll the information will come flooding back.  But without the notes my memory is probably 98% erased from the conference.

So my notes are the most prized possession I have from the conference.  What’s funny is that MY notes may not actually mean much to YOU.  But to me they resonate.

So I’d like to share my notes right here.  Who knows, maybe you’ll get something out of them.

Neville's Financial Blog: Tracking the road to financial success

.zip download of 26 jpg images
-or-
.pdf download

Download the Transcribed notes if you can’t read my handwriting:
.pdf download
Word download

(Special thanks to David Lowry at kickball.com for getting these transcribed)!

So obviously one of the main reasons to attend a conference is to mingle with other like-minded nerds.  My friend Ryan did something cool whilst at the Titans of Direct Response conference:

He hosted a fancy dinner at The Capital Grille for 30 people.

He took care of the entire bill, and kind of “moderated” the dinner by assigning seats with people he thought would be good to meet each other.  He also made everyone go around the room and take 30 seconds to introduce themselves, and tell people what help they need.

I thought this would be super-annoying but it actually turned out to be pretty cool.  You got to hear a brief blurb about everyone’s companies, and they get to pose one question they need help with.

Often it was something like “We need help finding more people who do Google AdWords.”  Almost immediately several people would chime in saying, “Hey I know the right guy for you.”

Instant connections made!

Neville's Financial Blog: Tracking the road to financial success

Neville's Financial Blog: Tracking the road to financial success

The highlight was Jay Abraham was at the same restaurant having dinner with his family, and he stopped by to say a few words and even bought the entire group bottles of champagne!

Neville's Financial Blog: Tracking the road to financial success

Neville's Financial Blog: Tracking the road to financial success

Incidentally Jay Abraham was the author of one of my favorite business books ever (Ask Noah, I mention this book all the damn time).  So I brought my well-used copy of the book along to the conference hoping Jay Abraham would sign it.

Success!  Clearly excited for him to autograph my book:

Neville's Financial Blog: Tracking the road to financial success

titans-joe-and-jay

Neville's Financial Blog: Tracking the road to financial success

An interesting side note about this little inscription.  He wrote it with a regular pen on the inside cover whilst standing up.  This means it was VERY difficult to write on since it isn’t a hardback cover.

And it took him quite a while to write out this inscription.  Halfway through I told him, “You know…..I kind of just expected you to write “Jay” on the inside, you don’t have to write much more.”

He responded with something like: “You know, I could easily just write something short, but if I take 30 extra seconds to sign this properly, you’ll much more likely remember this forever.”

(that was paraphrased based off my poor memory).

It’s kind of cool that the most in-demand guy in the room was the one who took the MOST time.

Notice he even wrote out “Kopywriting career”!!!

Welp….that was my experience at Titans Of Direct response.  If you have the patience to read through my poorly-scribbled 26 pages of notes, be my guest!

You can download the notes here:

Neville's Financial Blog: Tracking the road to financial success

.zip download of 26 jpg images

-or-

.pdf download

Download the Transcribed notes if you can’t read my handwriting:
.pdf download
Word download

(Special thanks to David Lowry at kickball.com for getting these transcribed)!

Sincerely,
Neville Medhora – Future Titan

September 2014 Goals

September 10, 2014 by Neville

Here’s my goals for September 2014, a little late….sorry :-/

Some already fulfilled:
september-2014-goals

Much of this part of September I’ll be traveling:

  • Sept. 10th – 13th = Stamford, CT. for Titans of Direct Response.
  • Sept 13th – 17th = Manhattan just because.
  • Sept 18th – 21st = New Orleans for FinCon.

I’m writing this on a plane :-)

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