Monday, 8:29pm
Reno, NV
“The gross ratio divergence of GDP versus market fluctuation causes economic farting…” (I made that up)

Howdy,

So…

… are you loving life today?

I got on the plane this morning just as the markets opened on Wall Street, and kept telling myself “Don’t look, don’t look”…

… but I couldn’t resist.

Especially with my new gizmo-toy iPhone. One touch gives you an updated glance at the Dow.

Oops.

Got on the plane, knowing it would be four hours until I could get another update… and saw that the market was tanking before the opening bell’s chime faded.

Not good.

Now, I’ve weathered multiple economic downturns in my time. I had several direct mail pieces for finanical newsletters in the mail on Monday, October 19, 1987 (also knows as BLACK MONDAY).

Every piece I’d written was bullish, meaning my clients thought the market would just keep climbing and climbing and climbing… and, well you know how that turned out.

Biggest one-day percentage drop in the history of the market.

Decimated investors (especially the fabled “little guy”) (who didn’t come back to the market for a decade), and completely swallowed up the entire Savings & Loan industry.

Now, THAT was scary.

Not to say it’s not a rollicking horror show today.

I don’t even wanna think about how the world goes on, if the Dow starts sniffing it’s own butt below 10,000 tomorrow.

We truly may all be living in caves this time next year.

Hey — it could happen.

But there are a lot of heavy-hitting dudes with a deep stake in NOT letting that happen. (This would be the mythical “they” you hear folks talk about… as in, “did you see what ‘they’re’ doing downtown, building a new mall?”)

Interesting times, no?

I’ll tell you this: I was in a weirdly-decorated room (long story) all weekend long with over 100 of the best online entrepreneurs in cyberspace…

… and almost NONE of them cared a whit about the self-lashing damages going on in the broader economies “out there”.

You know why?

Well, for one thing… many of them are too young to remember any of the prior gut-check recessions the US has suffered. (And the Depression of the 1930s is, like, so last century.)

So they’ve never learned to squirt anxiety acids into their stomachs the way their older peers regularly do when things go south. That’s just an art they missed out on.

But they’re not oblivious, either.

Naw.

They are all steeped in the most basic of basic fundamentals of continued success in busiess: Build and nurture a list, and know how to talk to the folks on that list.

It’s so simple, that 90% of all biz in the world completely and utterly doesn’t “get” it.

A big, good, gooey-for-you list… and the ability to reach them with email, ads, letters, videos and other tools… actually can create an insular world for you.

Let the fools and angels do their thing in the broader markets, selling low and buying high and leveraging like mo-fo’s.

I’ll take a list, and a letter, any day, to cure whatever ails us.

Don’t get me wrong. This current mess is very, very, very bad.

And… take a breath now… it could easily get much, much, much worse.

And we can draw, quarter and hang every perpetrator and greedy bastard who drove us down this dark alley…

… but at the end of the day, we still gotta face some music, and see what things look like when the sun comes up.

There’s a mess to clean up. And nobody gets to party much anymore until it GETS cleaned up.

Nobody, that is… except for well-listed and ad-savvy entrepreneurs.

As proven by the shenanigans all week-end long at Eben’s amazing “Green Room” brainstorm in Chicago these past few days.

Prospects still roam the countryside. And they need shit. Sometimes more desperately than before the economic implosion.

Things will either get better (after this current spate of horror plays out)…

… or things won’t get better.

You can’t control things outside your control.

You can, however, make excellent use of the tools you have at hand.

Remember: The Top Dogs aren’t all that scared.

Concerned, sure.

But not scared.

It’s just “Game On” at a higher level.

Stay tuned.

What are YOU doing to water down the adrenaline as news cycles get more and more gruesome?

Love to hear your thoughts. (Not your freakin’ politics, though. This is a marketing blog, not a partisan forum for flogging politican opposites.)

Business, guys. What are you doing to keep the gears churning, and your spirits high in these trying times?

Comment section is open and waiting for your wisdom…

Stay frosty,

John Carlton

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Monday, 7:30pm
Reno, NV
“He… could… go… all… the… way…” (Berman, MNF of days gone by…)

Howdy,

Do you ever get any of those weird epiphanies about life?

The ones that burst into consciousness like the first bloom of dawn… after a particularly dark and ominous night?

They aren’t necessarily the kind of insight that drops you to your knees and propels you off into a completely different direction.

But they are a critical plot point in your life’s story.

Here’s what just happened to me (and see if you can’t identify with it):

For the last week (has it only been that long?), the global news has been a horror-show.

Politics is tearing the country apart (again)… we’ve got a financial mess that may make the dot-com bust look like a picnic… and, personally, I’ve got biz pressures building up in my head like the Mother Of All Brain Farts.

So, I’ve diving into every distraction within my grasp for Miller Time. (Miller Time, for the uninitiated, is the built-in “reward” I insist all my freelance students create for themselves. It’s main task is to help you officially call an end to the day, which helps prevent burn-out.)

(I came up with the idea while working with Halbert, as a coping mechanism. Without a set point in time where I said “That’s it — done for the day”, the pressure of the tasks at hand would suck me into even longer work hours…

… and that’s not good.

In fact, that’s bad. Very bad. I burned out once, and that’s all it took for me to never, ever, ever want to do it again. Required three years of remedial goofing off to be able to catch my breath.

And I was young, too. I’ve had students ignore my advice on this — dudes in their twenties, cooking with peak internal fuel — and flame out like a dunked match.

Miller Time is serious play time. You quit working. You have a little fun. You give it a freakin’ rest.)

So, anyway…

Obviously, I have a much different philosophy about stress than most business owners.

I don’t avoid stress. In fact, if there’s something stressful on the plate for tomorrow… well, that’s the first thing I wanna dig into.

No avoidance on this monkey.

However…

… neither do I regard stress as something “good”.

It is (and current research backs me up) probably the source of all the bad shit in your health profile.

So how you DEAL with it… is probably one of the most important decisions you make early in your career.

Because you’ve got to make dealing with it a habit. Breaking the stress up and jettisoning it from your system must be on your “A” list of things to do each day.

Otherwise… you’re putting that career in serious danger of short-circuiting.

For me, toys play a big part of “steam removal”. I’ve loved games and toys my entire life — and that’s what guitars, cars, iPhones, Web-surfing, Twitter, cable TV, iTunes, barbeques, and every quest you engage in for anything outside Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is: Games and toys.

It’s been a long, long time since anyone could claim to have a handle on how civilization works. The well-educated dudes of the early Renaissance MAYBE could claim a decent savvy in every skill and knowledge-base in exisitence.

But that’s simply not possible today.

Humans have never been in this situation before — where NO ONE has a handle on how the essentials of the civilization works.

It’s like nobody’s in charge anymore. It’s like glancing down the aisle and noticing that the pilot’s gone. The driver has disappeared. No one goes into the boiler room anymore, because no one knows what to do in there.

A large part of the mob deals with this sense of not being in control… by zoning out. I doubt there has ever been this large a percentage of the population zomibified before in history. Just willingly oblivious.

In my experience, you can’t really hide from stress, though. It builds up, it festers, it infects every joint and synapse in the system.

For those of us who are incapable of ignoring the blinking warning signs now flashing… (and our global engine has been overheating for a very long time)… it’s more important than ever to manage stress.

You do NOT make it go away by eating it like candy. It won’t leave unless forced out.

Thus… to be effective today (and oh my God do we need effective people in the mix right now)…

… you gotta choose your battles. You can work every day. You can gear up and charge monsters every time you go into “work mode”.

But you can’t do it 24/7. You’ll fry.

So… playtime becomes an essential tool.

What rocks your Miller Time boat may change, often, thoughout your life. That’s to be expected.

So you gotta keep a tab on your own responses.

You know what makes you happy… what sucks you in so thoroughly and pleasurably that you forget the smell of the trenches for a while.

Don’t focus on the “what”, however.

Instead, focus on how you feel. You will have to alter things — the games, toys, distractions, etc — that trigger the right response often.

And the new stuff is only going to work — only going to help you disengage so you can re-charge — if it nails the wheelhouse of your pleasure center.

At various times, playing music has been “it” for me. But then I go into another phase, and I need something else. Drawing comes and goes — hours spent completely absorbed in putting ink on paper, creating visual worlds from nothing.

Games, too. I played the first Doom like a junkie. No other game since has held my interest like that. Collecting rare stuff, too. Reading history… I’ve been lucky to have a long list of stuff that works.

But here’s the one tip I really can give everyone: One of the most enduring, and most pleasurable, Miller Times available…

… is simply going outside and feeling the universe swirl around you.

Fresh air, the cool breezes of early fall, the coming harvest moon (big as the sky), the leaves changing so fast you can almost see them turn.

Especially now… especially with so many entrepreneurs welding themselves to cyber-space at a desk…

… it’s essential to reconnect with Nature.

In as giddy a manner as possible.

Just my two cents.

What’s your Miller Time consist of?

Stay frosty,

John

P.S. One last funny aside: I dove into the world of Twitter with gusto this week. Not obsessed, but having great fun…

… sorta like the first time Mom let me loose in the Fun Zone at the LA County Fair. (Never been a place like that before, nor since. Total art deco sprawl of mazes, haunted houses, vast wheels that spun you in circles half the size of a football field, tight little capsules that swung like hammers at 3 G’s, pulling your cheeks back as they dove… all of it way too dangerous to ever be allowed today…)

I explored the apps of Twitter-land, strolled into little-travelled areas, spelunked in the nether regions of the software (as far as I could go without using code, I suppose).

And today, a new follower told me that, hey, he was happy to see me on Twitter…

… but, dude, I was tweeting too MUCH. “Cool it,” he implored.

I laughed.

Because I had found a new toy that let fresh air into my system. Fun, distracting, with some of the elements of a game. (Trading witicisms and barbs with fellow word-meisters. That’s invigorating, for me.)

And I laughed because I suspected it was time to put the Mac to sleep…

… and go outside for some real air, too. A long hike, paying attention to things. Soaking up being alive for another season.

I’m stressed, no getting around it.

Lots to be stressed about. Unless you’re a zombie, and that’s not a job I’ve ever gone after. (Can’t meet the basic requirements of accepting bullshit.)

So I need all my tools, and I need to able to use them elegantly… and that requires rest, distraction, and rejuvenation.

Miller Time.

You on my Twitter follower’s list yet?

It’s www.twitter.com/johncarlton007…

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Wednesday, 12:44pm
Reno, NV
“I tot I taw a puddy tat…” Tweety (ask your uncle)

Howdy.

I am now officially tweeting on Twitter.

I originally resisted… but was convinced by Joel Comm to give it a try.

And…

… dude, it’s cool.

It truly is the still-under-used social networking tool of Web 2.0. When you join as someone’s Twitter Pal (I made that up — don’t yet know what you call it when you follow people), you get “updates” by email or phone text.

“Normal” people (meaning, folks not in business) use it to annoy everyone else, by alerting their friends they’re havng breakfast, or feel constipated, or just slammed their fifth Red Bull.

Yawn.

However… hip marketers are finding out this is a fabulous way to keep in touch with customers, fans, colleagues, and the like. (Lots of “pure”, non-selling posts are the rule, BTW. 90% or more are really just interesting chat — key on “interesting” — because overt selling is gauche and looked down on.)

It’s a way to offer a glimpse into your daily life…

… and to keep folks current with anything important you’re doing.

The personal insights are cool, because they help with the bonding process. I mean, I’m kinda curious about how people get through their day. Aren’t you?

It’s like Behaviorial Psych 101, in little snippets.

And since I’m going to Chicago next week — for a Hot Seat event, and to lollygag with about fifty of the richest and hippest online marketers on the planet — I think what I’ll be tweeting about might be…

… you know…

… kinda interesting to you.

There’s a built-in limit to tweeting. You can’t go over 140 characters… so you’re forced to be brief. And thus, not waste anyone’s time. (Though, hot threads can get deep fast.)

Anyway…

I’m tweeting as “johncarlton007″.

To log on as a “friend”… and get all my updates… go to www.twitter.com/johncarlton007
and sign on.

That’s it.

First big update has already gone out: I’m interviewing my crazed young pal Jason Moffat on how to use Twitter for advanced marketing. He’s got it figured out.

The phone call will be recorded, and posted on the Radio Rant coaching site.

What?

You’re not a member?

That’s dumb. Just go to www.carltoncoaching.com, scroll down to where we discuss the Radio Rant coaching club…

… and sign up for a free month.

Free! No obligation to stay on longer.

It’s the best deal in getting marketing info out there. Stan and I do multiple shows each month, and you can get ANY question you have answered, and any problem solved.

Anyway, gotta go. Got Jason on the line…

Man, he’s really got Twitter nailed, too…

Stay frosty,

John Carlton

P.S. Update — the call with Jason ROCKED.

For the first time in a loooooong time, I’m kinda excited about a new technological toy.

I’ll be tweeting from Chicago and elsewhere… and I promise to not play nice.

Not sure how often I’ll tweet yet. Jason does it a couple of times a day, but it’s an untested measure. I’ll just do it when the mood strikes, for now, and see how people react.

Now… go buy my stuff (as my pal Kern would say)…

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Monday, 7:54pm
Reno, NV
“Dude, you’re harshing my mellow…”

Howdy,

Let me know what you think about this, will ya?

It seems, at first, to be a light-weight subject…

… yet, really, it’s one of the foundations of living a good life.

I’m talking about the people you surround yourself with.

But not the way you’re thinking.

This may even jar you a little bit. Here goes:

Early in my career, I realized that grown-up life isn’t all that much different…

… than what goes on during recess in the third grade.

There are outsiders, insiders, cliques, teams, gangs, winners and losers galore.

No matter WHAT grisly experience you had in grade school…

… you’ve got company.

It’s brutal out there.

And then you become an adult…

… and it’s the SAME SHIT all over again. Hierarchies, power-grabbing, humiliation plays, one-up-manship, and clubs you can’t belong to.

The ranks of entrepreneurs I know are filled with “recess survivors” who finally gave the finger to “The System”, and went off on their own.

As amazing as it seems, you really can get on with life without the “gotcha” games and pettiness of “Life With Bullies, Prom Queens, and BMOC’s”.

However…

… that’s not the realization I want to share with you today.

Nope.

Instead, the second part of that epiphany (that life is just a replay of third grade recess) is this:

Regardless of whether you “won” or “lost” in the social-climbing bullshit you’ve suffered through in your time…

… it can all still be a blast…

… if you have the right people around you.

In other words… it’s not whether you win, or lose.

It’s how much fun and insight to life you get during the adventure.

Let’s use me as an example.

Cuz I don’t mind telling embarrassing stories about myself:

I had a very mixed record of social “success” coming up the ranks… both in school, and in early adult life.

I was okay at sports. Just good enough to make the team and suffer the anxieties and physical/emotional debt of vicious organized games. And just under-powered enough to get cut from every attempt to make varsity. So I got to play… and I got to experience the arrid loneliness of the bench and the exit door.

But I sucked, utterly and without redemption, at most social interaction. Girls scared the bejesus out of me as a kid… flummoxed me as a teen… and toyed with me after that.

I was so unprepared, so confused, and so clueless about dealing with standard issues of dating and being a cool guy and feeling like I belonged… that, if I were a character in a novel, you’d roll your eyes and say “No way could anybody be that much of a loser!”

Yeah.

That was me.

But get this:

I still had a BLAST.

Even when Life dialed up the most humiliating, emotionally-scarring horror possible to a shy, skittish introvert like me…

… I was able to shake it off, and show up the very next day smiling and ready for more.

“That all you got, Fate? That’s your best shot, you miserable s.o.b.? Ha!”

You know how I did it? How I survived, and even thrived while being buried in sticks and stones and the arrows of misfortune?

I’ll tell you:

I had buddies to share it all with.

Not just fellow losers, either.

No.

And this is the essential point here: I had a close-knit group of guys (and a few gals) around me…

… who delighted in being alive.

There’s probably some social-math equation I could come up: Your ability to survive and thrive… is directly proportional to the time that elapses between a horrible event…

… and your ability to laugh about it.

With my friends and me, that time was often instantaneous.

We had a lot of practice.

(And I’m not talking about just dating disasters, or heartbreak, or social blunders. I’m including death, financial misery, and the near-total upheaval of normality. The kind of blows that can rock you to your knees.)

Wait.

I’m still not yet revealing the essence here.

The take-away of this tale is not “friends are good.”

Because I will attest that there was a very definable, and very rare aspect of these friends that is absolutely essential…

… and even beside the point of being able to laugh about tragedy.

You wanna guess what that aspect is?

It’s…

…

…

… energy.

This realization came rushing back to me yesterday while I chatted with my best friend from high school. Haven’t seen the dude in two years, but we stay in close touch.

And, mid-way through the call…

… I realized I ached from laughing.

Even though some of the subjects we discussed were illnesses in our families, job woes, relocation horror stories, and other tragedies.

And I was able to put a “quality” on that laughter.

It was bristling with raw energy. The “good” kind of energy.

There really are two kinds of people in the world: Those who bring energy with them to everything they do…

… and the great masses, who suck energy from you like psychic vampires. (That’s a Halbert term, by the way. Privately, we had other names for these types of buzz-killing grim reapers.)

I’ve known a lot of folks in my time. And I’ve unconsciously been putting each and every one through a little test upon meeting them.

The test is simple: Do they provide energy? Or are they leeching it from the air around us?

A party crammed with energy-gobbling vampires is a drag, through and through. Even Vegas can’t salvage a good time.

And yet, just hanging out with a single “mini-solar system” type of person in a drab coffee shop… can be pure bliss.

In business… in life… in games and in every social and quasi-social gathering…

… there is no fun, and little chance for adventure or good stories when the energy level is flat-lined.

And yet… when you are in the company of someone bursting with life-force…

… well, it’s pretty freaking magical.

The most mundane tasks become a joy. (My pal Art and I used to just drive around Cucamonga, with no goal or destination… not cruising, but rather just hanging out, laughing, basking in raw energy and verve and marvelling at the cruel and wonderful adventures Life handed out.)

Life isn’t gonna treat you better when you surround yourself with heat-source types. You’re still gonna take it on the chin, still gonna encounter monsters around every corner.

My mother — after ten months of gruesome chemo — still managed to tell a joke and make me smile… just hours before she passed away.

Believe me — there was nothing funny going on that afternoon.

But I cherish that last “don’t let the bastards get you down” shared moment with her.

If you understand what I’m talking about, you don’t need to know anything else about her to know exactly what kind of special woman she was.

That was over 15 years ago. And the lesson I learned is never far from my thoughts… especially when I’m feeling like Life has it out for me again.

Screw it.

The ride’s too short.

If you’ve got that flame in your soul, don’t let anyone or anything douse it.

We need you in the mix.

We already got enough of the damned vampires hovering…

Anyway, something to consider.

What do you think?

Stay frosty,

John Carlton

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Thursday, 8:40pm
Rancho Cucamonga, CA
Just a block off Route 66 in the skitchy heart of the southland…

Howdy,

Quick note here today.

I’m still in my hometown (yeah, I grew up in Cucamonga, what’s it to ya?), visiting my family. Pop still lives in the same house he bought just after WWII, and it’s hard for me not to feel like I’m 15 again when I’m there.

Not that I feel all young and vibrant.

Naw. More like I get back in touch with how freakin’ clueless I was for the first half of my life.

It was a great childhood, a gruesome adolescence, and even now ghosts from my past haunt every corner of the neighborhood. It’s Memory Alley.

Always interesting/spooky/insightful to go back to old stomping grounds. I love my family. And I’m still chewing over how that town shaped who I am today…

Anyway, enough about me.

Here’s something about YOU: Since the last couple of posts here, I’ve been pondering long and hard about what “makes” an entrepreneur.

A lot of people — including me — talk about the value of goals in launching any entrepreneurial venture.

Figuring out what you truly want… setting a plan in motion to attain it… and following through.

There is, however, a difference in “understanding” goal-setting behavior…

… and actually DOING it.

And here is what I propose you do this weekend: Give yourself a nice, brutal Reality Check.

Are you spending enough time figuring out what you really want to do when you grow up?

This is not a trick question — most rookie goal-setters need to refine their skills at this over a frustrating period of time.

The first goals you set are likely to be things you actually don’t want, after all. There is an art to looking deep into your own heart and soul, and coming to grips with what REALLY rocks your boat…

… and what will continue to make nice waves in your future.

It’s never enough to want to be “rich”. You must spend time thinking about what “rich” means to you. Not to your buddies, or your colleagues, or anyone else.

You.

And, if you decide you want to be filthy rich… well, you’ve got to do more than just set a goal. You gotta work out your plan to get there.

With lots of little goals along the path.

If you’ve yet to make Dime One online, for example, then a goal of becoming a billionaire online isn’t a goal… it’s a dream. You’ve got to earn your first buck. Then your second. Then start automatic pipelines, and go on from there.

Your first goal may be to weed through all the info available out there… find the resources you feel you can trust… and dig in.

Those subsequent “dig in” steps — the actual goal-by-goal step-ladder that will take you toward your desired destination — cannot be glossed over.

And, there are consequences to consider. You may not yet know what awaits you as a cash-generating genius. But you sure can start to examine how your life changes as you go.

I’ve written multiple blogs about how every detail of your life can morph in strange ways when the money starts coming in. Ken Calhoun, in the last comments section, tells a great story of how friends and family wrestle (often unsuccessfully) with your rise in status, liquidity, and self-confidence.

It’s not always pretty.

The more you “arm” yourself with insight like this, the less surprised you’ll be when you hit each milestone in your quest for a better life.

You’ll be… uh, what’s the word… prepared.

Goals are great. They saved my life.

But I’ve known too many people who ONLY set goals. They never go after them.

Movement is key.

And you’ll feel better about moving toward your goals, if you spend some serious time thinking about them.

Play with them. Mold them. Constantly put them through your “What if?” grinder. (What if you can’t do it with your first idea? Will you try again? Try something else? What?)

The “secret ingredient” of great goal setting… is to cogitate obsessively on the consequences of actually meeting your goals, once you set them. This not only helps you blow through failure… but also creates a “vision” of yourself that keeps your motivation hot.

This requires “forward thinking”… which doesn’t come with the default equipment you’re born with.

You gotta exercise it.

Without goals, you’re just being taken for a ride by Fate.

Goals do not guarantee anything… except, once you take steps to attain them, you will move SOMEWHERE new in life.

And you’ll be doing as much of the driving as possible.

Fate will still screw with you. But you’re no longer helpless.

At first, even five minutes of focused “forward thinking” will make you sweat and want to go do something else.

Get over it. Stick with it.

Soon, you’ll be an ace at peering into the fog down the line, and you’ll be able to exert more control over events than you ever dreamed possible in your pre-goal-setting days.

This weekend, get your five minutes in. Move through the sweat and avoidance.

Jump-start something new.

Let me know how you do.

Stay frosty,

John Carlton

P.S. I just checked with my office… and as I get ready to go to the airport to come home, one of the 5 seats is still open for the Chicago Hot Seat one-day event this September 25.

To get the details, go to www.carlton-workshop.com.

C’mon, people — this is one of those rare opportunities to get face-time with me and Stan. It just may be the virtual ass-kicking you need to get moving…

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