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An Open Letter From The Desk Of Rich Schefren

Dear Fellow Business Builder,

What you now hold in your hands is a snapshot of my research over the past 12
months with my thousands of clients (including many of the most successful marketing
gurus) and the biggest direct response companies on the planet.

You see, our world is changing… our personal lives, our businesses, and everything
that surrounds us – they’re all changing.

In a blink of an eye certain weaknesses are all of sudden strengths, and a number
of strengths are now irrelevant. Disorders have become natural gifts, and a select few have
already leveraged them to build thriving businesses with incredible profits.

Here’s my promise to you:

If you understand and apply the information in this Doctrine, you can build a very
successful business in record time. Regardless of your past… Whether you’ve been
successful or not… No matter how many times you may have tried. Because right now,
with this information, your ability to profit enormously has never been more certain.

Back when I finished the Manifesto Trilogy, I thought I’d never write another report.
In fact, I was so certain I was done; I named it “The Final Chapter”.

But I was wrong.

The Calm Before The Storm

Something dramatic is happening in the marketplace…

it’s not email deliverability rates,

it’s not Search Engine Optimization,
it’s not the shift from salesletters to video,
nor is it pay-per-click, banners or any other paid advertising methods.

In fact, it’s nothing technical whatsoever.

It isn’t because marketing is less effective, although many will say it is. Or that there
is a lack of money, although there will be for many marketers.

It’s far deeper than any of these things- it’s the unfortunate price of admission
many entrepreneurs will have to pay as we enter a new era.

There’s been a fundamental shift in the currency of our entire economy.

People have simply reached a saturation point in their lives – all the cool technology,
all the nifty gadgets, and many of today’s modern conveniences have turned on us.

For entrepreneurs who don’t “get it” this is going to be a growing problem like an

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undetected terminal disease slow
wly eating away and destroying the abilitty to market
effectively and profit.

But it doesn’t have to be th

his way. Because right here in “The Atte
ention Age Doctrine”
I am going to show you how you can keep blasting on, earn massive profits, and grow your
business as fast as you desire.

2 ½ Years Ago Each off These Entrepreneurs Acted

d On My Last
Prediction And They’ve All Become Millionaaires…
This Time The Signalss Are Even Stronger, The Pro
ofit Potential
Even Greater, And d The Probabilities Are More
e Certain
Right now I feel even more certain than I did back in February of 2005.
2 Back then I
spotted an emerging trend onlinee before anyone else did. The sharp incrreases in
competition screamed out to me tthat the winners would be the first marrketers to build
systemized well running business ses.

I acted immediately on this s trend. I set up a pilot coaching program. Only 25 clients
were accepted for this initial test--run. 12 months later the results they achieved
a are now
legendary. Here are just a few of the stories you might recognize:

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 With results like these, my prediction proved to be dead on. So I rolled out the
coaching program and to put it mildly, it was an extraordinary success.

Fast forward to today, Strategic Profits helps thousands of entrepreneurs grow

their businesses faster while working less. And demand for our programs keep growing
with each new success story.

In 2006 we clobbered our 2005 numbers by a factor of 30x. And by March of 2007
we already surpassed our annual 2006 sales. That’s great news for the thousands business
builders who are now living their business dream.

But that’s not why I’ve written this doctrine – in fact it has nothing to do with my
coaching program whatsoever.

On the pages that follow I am going to prove to you there’s an even greater
opportunity for you to profit right now. More simply stated – more people will make
more money than ever before. Not only that- I’ll also show you exactly what you must
do to capitalize on it.

Pay careful attention: because if you end up being one of the lucky few to get what I
am about to share… it’s the entrepreneurial equivalent to winning the lottery.

Here’s how it all started: For the past 15 months I’ve been digging around for an
answer to a question I’ve been struggling with. Ever since I began coaching so many of the
marketing gurus I kept wondering…

Why Do 53 of the 75+ Gurus

I’ve Coached Have ADD?
That works out to be a staggering 76% of all the marketing and business gurus I’ve
coached have been diagnosed by their doctor as having ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) .

That’s more than 15 times the supposed national average of 5%. It’s such an extreme
variance… I knew there had to be a reason.

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 And since then I’ve spent an enormous amount of time in search of an answer.

I went through all my old notes and

reviewed all the past recordings of my private
coaching calls.

I took each and every one of my guru-

client’s businesses and put them under the
microscope. I identified, refined and improved
the strategies that shot them to the top. I
even identified a few strategies they weren’t
even aware they were using.

My search continued over months of

intensive, in the trenches, research. Plus
many sleepless nights pouring over countless
academic research papers from different
authorities and universities like Harvard
Medical School, University Of Pennsylvania
and MIT,

All of the research and analysis led me

to a startling discovery I could have never
predicted.

It revealed an amazing opportunity

for entrepreneurs to quickly build profitable businesses right now!

The discovery set off a chain reaction of events that has left everyone in my office
scrambling (including yours truly) to make all the necessary adjustments it required. But
more than anything, I realized...

You and I both stand on the threshold of the greatest wealth-building business
opportunity in history, but for many it could be a gruesome business disaster.

Which side you end up on will be determined by the decision you make in the
upcoming months. That’s why I simply had to write another report.

Listen carefully: It wasn’t my love of writing, my desire to stare at monitors for so

long my eyesight blurred, and it wasn’t that I couldn’t think of at least twenty-five more
enjoyable things to do with my family either.

Nope, not even close! The reason I am sitting here right now is because what I am
about to share with you is so exciting… so incredibly profitable… and so certain
there’s no way I could keep something so powerful a secret.

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 So…Why O
Only The First Segme
ent?
In a little less than three weeks from now I’m
cond
ducting a very special summit for my prrivate clients. It’s
base
ed entirely on the research that led to th
his report.

When I told one of my marketing menntors, Jay Abraham

abouut what I discovered and my plans to rev
veal it to my clients
– he was absolutely floored.

First, he secured an interview with me to get the same

inforrmation to his private clients. Then Jay said I could use the
interrview when I promoted the summit.

When I told Jay I wasn’t planning on promoting the

summmit to the public… that I had never ope ened up even one of
my p
private events to the public, he just starred at me.

It felt like he was staring at me for fiv

ve minutes although
it wa
as probably no more than forty-five seco onds.

Jay then spent the next 300 minutes telling me why I had a respon
nsibility to share
these findings with the public. H
He was relentless…
he didn’t care that I h
had never done it before, he said it was time to start.
he didn’t care that th
he ballroom wasn’t big enough, he said the hotel would
gladly rent us a biggeer room.
he wouldn’t listen to my excuses that there wasn’t enough time
t to prepare – he
told me stories of whhen he was forced to conduct a 5 figure seminar and sell
out within a week.
he didn’t believe thatt my team was too busy to get everythinng done because he
couldn’t think of anyything more important.

No matter what excuse I th hrew at him, he deflected it and put the pressure right back
on me. It was a verbal ju-jitsu

In the ten-plus years I’ve kknown Jay, I’ve never won a disagreemen
nt (let alone an
argument), and this time was no different. We ended our conversation with
w me promising
to do whatever it took to invite en
ntrepreneurs to attend what we both kn
new would be a
historic event.

That’s right. Jay won out, a

and for the first time, I am breaking pre
ecedent am opening
the doors to my exclusive client-o
only seminar to the few entrepreneurs who,
w after reading
“The Attention Age Doctrine”, graasp the need to be there.

I reconvened with my team

m, and gave them their marching orders… …get us a bigger
ballroom… accelerate the preparaation schedule… all other priorities werre now secondary to
this event.

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 I began writing “The Attention Age Doctrine”. But orchestrating the creation of this
new program has been so arduous… getting the incredible lineup of speakers so
expensive… and putting together the integrated curriculum so exhaustive… I just didn’t
have the stamina to finish both the summit and the doctrine.

And since “The Attention Age Doctrine” is vital for your ongoing success – I simply
refused to do a half-hearted rush job on the most important segments – it wouldn’t be fair.

But if I wait until it’s finished, you wouldn’t have the advantage of knowing all of the
forces converging to cause this business shakeout. You wouldn’t get the heads up to start
making your profit moves right now.

Most importantly you wouldn’t have the critical information you need to appreciate
how groundbreaking and important “The Attention Age Doctrine” and my upcoming event
are.

Here’s the rub… if I wait until the report is completed and sit on this critical
information and I don’t share this opportunity I have for you, you would end up with the
short end of the stick. I am forced to release the first segment of the Doctrine right now.
This way you’ll easily appreciate how groundbreaking and important what I am giving you
is for your future.

To Higher Profits,

Rich Schefren
Strategic Profits

PS – The dates of the summit are July 12, 13, 14, 15… For me to go out on a limb and tell
you to change your schedule, to reserve your plane tickets, to book a room, and register for
an event, is not my style.

I’ve no intention of selling you on it. I am offering you an invitation to what I’m sure
will be recognized as the definitive event that launched more online entrepreneurs into 6
figure, 7 figure, and even 8 figure businesses, than anything else online or off.

What I will do is give you an over the top guarantee –and extremely generous
payment terms on the inexpensive price we’ve already established. You can read all about it
here: http://www.strategicprofits.com/live

PPS – I’ve convinced Jay to conduct our interview on a tele-seminar so that you can get
the same benefit as Jay’s most elite private clients. You can get all the details for it right
here: http://www.strategicprofits.com/jayprivate/

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 Why The Doctrine Is
Different (And More
Profitable)Than The
Manifestos
“The Attention Age Doctrine”
is different from the Manifesto
Trilogy in more ways than just the
title.

All three Manifestos; The

Internet Business Manifesto, The
Missing Chapter, and The Final
Chapter, were all centered on a
common theme - The mistakes
Internet marketing entrepreneurs
made that stalled their success.
As a result, strategies, tactics,
and tips were scattered throughout
the pages. Based on the Manifestos
success (each Manifesto achieved
more downloads than its
predecessor) the format seemed to
resonate with many of my readers.
“The Attention Age Doctrine”
is different because it deals with the
future. That means we first have to
get up to speed… to where we are
today.
You are still going to get a lot
of step by step recommended
actions, although this time they’ll
be concentrated towards the end.

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 Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Andrew Caarnegie,
John D. Rockefeeller, And (Your Nam
me Here)
Here’s why: whenever a ma ajor shift happens in our overall econom
my, the business
builders who act fast often get ve
ery, very rich. Business success stories like Rockefeller,
Carnegie, Gates, Dell, Perot, Waltton, and many others, got extremely we ealthy in exactly the
same way.

Now get this: I am 100% ce

ertain that right now we are entering intto a new economy.
What this means is you now havee an opportunity to be more successful than you might
possibly have ever imagined.

But the fact is… you need tto read this entire document as soon as s possible in order
to maximize your profits. For you ur benefit, not mine… please don’t skip a single sentence
of what I’ve laid out for you. If it w
wasn’t important I would’ve taken it out myself.

In order for you to maximizze your profits you simply must understand the entire
scope of the events and circumstances that have led us here today. If yo
ou do… you’ll be
very glad you did.

Why “The A
Attention Age Doctrrine”
Was Written
As a top business coach an nd author, I’m worried – no, make that disgusted–
d that you
are not getting the quality of busiiness and marketing advice you need… or deserve.

Especially at a time like thiis where missteps can be deadly and op

pportunities seized
can build an empire.

The explosion of so-called ““Expert’s Advice” and “cleverly crafted pitches”

p is coming at
us from every direction… and herre’s the clincher… None of these
“experts” give the same advice e or
can even agree on what actions s
you should take.

Overloadedd
and Confuseed
Entrepreneurs are in the sttrange
situation of having more business and
marketing information available tthan at
any other time in history – and fe
eeling
more confused than ever before a about
how to start and grow your busin ness.

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 What’s missing is practic cal and objective business building ad dvice that works.
Real actionable information you ccan use to boost profits, spend less time working, and even
delegate almost every task to “ove
erseas” or “leased employees” working for
f practically
nothing.

I’ve taken it as my job to ca

are about the entrepreneurial-after-effec
cts of this tidal wave
of uninformed advice. In fact it’ss much more than a job. It’s my life’s pu
urpose – a
passionate commitment to cut th hrough the fog, noise, and deceit so you can grow your
business faster and further while e working less than you ever thought po ossible.

That’s why I’ve written “The

e Attention Age Doctrine” . It contains dozens
d of tips,
techniques, and strategies you caan use right now to make more money and work far less.

If you’ve been confused at a all, I’m here to tell you it doesn’t have to
o be that way. In
fact, inside this Doctrine I’m goinng to expose why 99% of what passes as s expert business
advice today is little more than a set-up for a later sale, or some perverse form of ego
gratification on the behalf of its p
provider.

But I must wwarn you… I’ve got some really strong g

emotions about w what’s currently going on in online bu usiness
so I’m not going to
o win any awards for being Politically Co
orrect
or even remotely taactful for what I’m about to reveal.

So, if my calling out and ex

xposing these dream-shattering lies, and the lying liars
who tell them, disturbs you, thenn here’s your warning because it’s definitely going to get
ugly before we are through.

If you want to keep your in

nnocence and ignorance – look away now
w.

However – you should also know… I’ll be revealing in this Doctrine

e, some of the
smartest and fastest ways to grow
w your business and increase your pers sonal and financial
freedom in 2007.

Hype, Promisses,
& One Timme
Offers
If you’ve been online even ffor a few
short months, you’ve undoubtedlly heard
everything by now in the way of hhype,
promises, and special one-time offers.

I won’t try to over-hype

anything. Nor will I insult
your intelligence either.

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 But I do have a very straigh
htforward, some may even say blunt, qu
uestion for you… Is
your business where you want it to be and all you could hope for?

Better stated… Are Yo

ou Really Making It With Your Business?
B
If not, it’s time we had a se
erious heart to heart talk.

Since almost everything you see online these days about business s building is from
people who need something fromm you, let me say right from the get-go th
hat I don’t need
your money.

I don’t need anything at alll from you.

What I would like, is your a
attention. And that’s what this truly un
nusual doctrine is all
about (more about this later).

The Internet Is An
dible Invention..
Incred
The Internet has already sh
hrunk the investment necessary to get your
y business
started down to a shoestring. Onn top of that, the worldwide interconnecctivity provides a
much larger audience of potentiaal buyers than has ever existed before.

When you combine the loww cost with the world wide reach the Inte
ernet provides, it
represents a tremendous opportu
unity that can easily be leveraged with the
t powerful
business building and marketing
g strategies I teach.

But, great opportunnity invites not only

the ethical, but also temp
pts every two-bit
hustler. Con-men who drream of getting
rich by separating you from
f your hard
earned cash.

They believe the anonymity of the

Internet can be a great tool for making over-
the-top claims and promises they have no
intention of ever deliverin
ng.

It’s the main reason

n why the Internet
today is a marketing junggle where many
gurus make outrageous anda absurd
promises.

“Buy my $29 e-book, and I promise you will earn at least a million
n dollars in ninety
days or less or you can have yourr money back”… (Yeah, sure). Or, “I am m going to sell you
exclusive reprint rights to sell my
y stuff on EBay… along with the other 2000
2 people”… (good
luck).

So let’s bypass the hype an

nd talk very simply and honestly.
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 I am not usually the type to throw mud; I usually just bite my tongue and keep quiet.

But this time I’m taking it all very personally because I really believe what’s
currently being done is destroying many entrepreneurs’ best chances of building their
dream business.

And the timing couldn’t be any

worse. We’re in middle of the
biggest shifts our economy has
seen in decades – it’s creating
incredible opportunities with
more potential in a more
flexible environment that’s
ever existed before.

But up till now no one has said a single word about it– they’re all too
busy screaming their pitches at a full stadium pitch.

Completely oblivious to what’s going on around them.

Think about it:

There’s more opportunity, faster computers,

faster Internet connections, better tools and
software, and marketing “know-how” on the Internet
than ever! So why is it that entrepreneur CONTINUE
to fail online?
I’ll tell you why…

Most of what’s being offered today in marketing or business advice is utterly

worthless and misleading. It’s a one-two punch “Mind Virus” – wasting your time, money
and effort now… and setting you up for bad decisions in the future by infecting your
thinking with half-truths.

Look, in your gut, you know this is true.

If there really were better choices out there to build your business you would have
already found them. You would have already studied them, committed to them, and applied
them and you’d be making an incredible profit in a business that no longer needed you to
continue to grow and thrive.

The fact that you’re not means you still need an answer.

And what I’m suggesting just here works. If my client list and my long list of success
stories don’t say it all, I don’t know what would.

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 You Cann Have A Thrivin
ng
Businesss In Record Tim
me
How can I be so sure? Welll…

First off, you can say I have

e a knack for knowing what’s currently needed for success
in business.

I’ve proved it time and time

e again in my own life. Whether it was clothing,
c music,
hypnosis, Internet marketing, or business coaching I’ve always been ablle to pinpoint the
multi-million dollar sweet-spot in
n the market.

If that wasn’t enough, my c

coaching client’s unbelievable success stories
s proved to the
world I could take business owneers from a complete standstill to million
naires in less than 8
months.

On top of that, take a look at the slide below and see how many off names you
recognize. Each and every one off these business builders enrolled in my
y program to get my
unique perspective on business b building.

Of course I am not writing this to brag (even though I am proud)……. Nor am I writing
to you to tell you how pissed off o
or saddened I am at what I currently see
e happening in
Internet Marketing
(even though it’s sad
and I am mad as
hell).

Nope, the main

reason is I’m 100%
convinced the
information I’m
releasing in THIS
REPORT will make
all those impressive
results we’ve gotten
in the past look like
a drop in the ocean.

And this time,

you can be one of
those “lucky”
entrepreneurs who
build their business
and profit alongside
us.

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 My Coachin ng Program Has Been,
And STILLL Is…“THE” Proggram
Teaching Seerious Players Online
O
How to Systtemize and Grow w Their
Bu
usiness’s Fast
If you know anything about how I work, or have been following my
y work/career in
business you know that I refuse to be a “static thinker” and become complacent with
my success.

It’s my job to keep research

hing, studying, analyzing, and identifyin
ng the most
powerful and critical business ph
hilosophies and profit generating strateg
gies that small
business owners never get a channce to be exposed to.

Of course, I always keep a watchful eye on the Internet marketing

g community where
my roots are firmly planted. Unfoortunately, I’ve been shaking my head in
n disbelief of what
I’ve been witnessing lately.

Things are changing...

Today, the best selling rap artist is white

w (Eminem), the
most successful golfer is black (Tiger Wood ds), the tallest
bassketball player in the NBA is Chinese (Ya ao Ming), the
Frennch have been accusing Americans of beingb condescending
andd not caring about the views of foreignerrs, we now pay for
watter (bottled water is $9 a gallon) while music
m is free (sort
of), and you need 9 different phone numbe ers to reach any two
of y
your friends. And I could go on and on… …

But in times of change and uncertain

nty the biggest
forttunes are made. The quick acting luck ky few who stumble
on the right information are the ones who reap the
mas ssive rewards, profit enormously, and d set themselves
up ffor a righteous future.

Knowing firsthand the incredible oppportunity this

adv
vance insight provides – I actually makee it a point to map
outt changes in the environment at least on
nce a month.

In other words, I am always on the prowl for a big business tidal wave
w coming, so my
clients and I can profit from it. An
nd as I find mapping the best way to vis
sually grasp a
complicated concept, I’d like to shhare my map on the next page.

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 And what I’ve seen come to ogether these past few months is so incrredibly powerful, so
easily “leveragable”, and so certaiin to boost profits of any entrepreneur who
w gets it, I knew I
needed to tell you about it ASAP… …

That’s why I needed to clear my calendar, cancel all my app

pointments, turn off
my cell phone, and g
give up my weekends … so I could write this urgent
doctrine as soon as I possibly could.

Ok.

Now what you see below arre all the collective forces combining to create the spaces
between the cracks in the busine
ess growth ceiling.

In order to follow the chartt, start in the upper left hand corner. Work your way across
(from left to right) –when you see 2 arrows pointing to a box read both off the boxes where
the arrows emanate from.

Don’t worry if doesn’t all m

make sense yet… I know my mind somettimes works double-
time – and ever since I realized how great an opportunity this is, it’s all I’ve
I been thinking
about.

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 Besides, you’ve got the whole rest of this doctrine to get hip to this, and for me to
show you how to use it to your advantage.

Once you understand what’s going on in the map, you’ll already realize its potential
future effect.

There are very big ideas inside this Doctrine, me and a few people have already made
a fortune with what I am revealing here.

The Current Health Of

Entrepreneurs & Their Businesses
I don’t need to tell you how difficult it is for entrepreneurs to succeed these days.
You’re right in the middle of it.

And even those of us who have tasted some success realize it isn’t exactly as easy as
those who haven’t would think.

Between finding and keeping great employees, developing marketing plans that bring
in the cash, and keeping clients happy even after you achieve success maintaining it isn’t
so easy.

I could go on and on but the facts tell the whole story…

“Over 544,000 Small

Business Close Each Year”
U.S. Small Business Administration
Let that financially devastating statistic mentally marinate for a second…

Before going any further – understand what that nightmare statistic means. Think
about all of the humiliated and humbled bankrupt entrepreneurs;

• How they invested all they had (sometimes even what they didn’t have) and lost
it all!

• How they worked harder than ever before with nothing to show for it but a pile
of debts.

• How they gambled with their pride and lost.

• How public their failure was, how the whole world can see it

• How their failure carries over to their families, their kids, their employees and
their families too.

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 I know how this feels firsthand -- and it sucks. I consider myself lucky to have been
able to have barely escaped the clenching fangs of this bear trap when one of my companies
was on the line.

To make this daunting number of 544,000 business closings more real, let’s break it
down. First, we’ll divide it by the number of days in the year, 365.

544,000/365 = 1,490
Businesses Close Each
And Every Day
Gadzooks! That’s a lot of
business closing each day. And
that’s including weekends too!

Think about that number

when you go to sleep tonight –
1,490 of your fellow
entrepreneurs are entering into
what’ll most likely be the most
difficult, embarrassing, and
humiliating low point of their lives.

But I don’t want you to have to

wait for tonight to get this on an
emotional level. Besides you might even conveniently forget about this altogether. And who
could blame you?

Entrepreneurs by their very nature are optimists.

We prefer to focus on the great opportunities in front of us rather than the potential
catastrophe’s we hope to avoid.

Knowing that let’s break the 1490 daily business failures down right now. We’ll
divide the 1,490 daily business closing by the 24 hours in a day.

1490/24 =
62 Businesses Close Each And Every Hour
Each And Every Day.
Holy S#%T! 62 businesses closing each hour. That’s a depressing statistic isn’t it?

Especially when you realize it means…

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 More Than
n One Small Bussiness
Disappeaars Every MINUTE!
And left in its wake… the n
nightmarish entrepreneurial after-effects
s the owners
experience, along with everyone a
around them.

In the time it’s taken to rea

ad the last sentence - another entrepren neur and their
business vanished. By the time y you’ve finish this doctrine – dozens of sm
mall business, will
be wiped off the face of the planet forever.

It’s obvious… entrepreneu

urs need help.

And most are smart enough h to realize it too. But figuring out who and where to go to
get the expert help they desperately need turns out to be a challenge. Th he search for real
world profitable advice becomes aan unexpected odyssey of never ending detective work.

There are so many so-called business experts these days it’s hard to know who’s got
the chops.

The stakes are incredibly h

high too, because the penalty for the wro
ong decision can be
total and complete financial devaastation.

If you fall victim

to the wrong advice,
you and your already
struggling business
can immediately sink
into the business
dead-zone, not able to
withstand the damage
of another bad piece
of amateur advice.

I don’t want to
get too far off topic
here – but this is
important.

If you’ve
identified with what I
just said, what about
your clients and
prospects – what fears
do they have, and how
do they evaluate who
they buy from.

18 | P a g e
 The Real Reason Why More
M
neurs Are Strugggling
Entrepren
Obviously, there isn’t only one reason why so many businesses arre failing – bad
ideas, poor cash management, ba ad hiring, obsolete solution, and the listt could go on and
on.

But even so, I’ve noticed th

hat there’s been a very big shift taking place in our
society and most business and entrepreneurs haven’t noticed it yett. And it’s this
oversight that’s responsible for m
more business failures and false starts th
han anything else.

We have less free time thann ever before, we are working harder thaan ever before, and
we have all this wonderful techno
ology but our lives are only getting more
e and more
complicated.

The chief reason is that wee’ve entered into a new era, and it seemss as if no one is
noticing. Just so we’re clear – th
he single biggest factor causing entrepre
eneurs to struggle
and fail is they’re not noticing tthese critical changes. Instead, most entrepreneurs
e just
keep plodding along so they continue to follow outdated and ineffective strategies
s never
designed for the current environmment.

The
“Information n Age”
Is Already O
Over
That’s right.

It has passed.

And now, we’ve quickly enttered a new age –

an age I call:

The “Attention
n Age”

19 | P a g e
 What Happens When the World
Around You Changes
In a previous report I wrote about my love of tennis

I remember as a kid watching the legendary Bjorn Borg. At the time Borg played
with a wooden racket, like everyone else. And he won a lot of major titles.

The he retired.

A couple of years later he came back, but by then all the top tennis players were
using more powerful rackets (metal, graphite, etc.).

It wasn’t pretty what happened to

Borg. Inferior players with better
rackets creamed him. He stayed loyal
to his wooden racket never to win
another major tournament

Obviously, Borg knew the rules of

tennis. He still had the same winning
strokes. But the context and,
consequently, the rules for winning
changed. The more powerful rackets
gave a competitive advantage to anyone
who used them. Borg with his weaker
wooden racket didn’t stand a chance.
That’s why he was never successful
again.

Just to be clear… Borg might of

still been a "better" tennis player – but
his talent was shut-down by the
changing environment.

Bjorn Borg’s story is our story… The rules of the game have changed, and many of
us are struggling. We are still trying to win with a wimpy racket pretending that we are
playing in the same world we were in ten years ago.

But we aren’t… times have changed…

20 | P a g e
 What Happens When You
Change Before Everyone Else?
Here’s the flip side of Bjon Boirg’s story. It’s a great way to illustrate the advantages
you can gain over your best competitors by recognizing and leveraging the changes in your
marketplace.

If you if you’ve studied any business history at all, you’ve probably come across one
of the very first “business gurus” of all time. His name was Fredrick Taylor.

He is perhaps
best described today as
an ‘efficiency engineer’
and a significant
amount of his work
laid the groundwork
for the mass
production methods
used by Henry Ford.

He studied many
different methods of
working in order to
determine what was
the best way to achieve
maximum efficiency on
the factory floors.
Many of his ideas at
the time were quite
revolutionary. In fact,
many are still widely
practiced today.

In his book,
Principles of Scientific
Management (1911), he
argued that
companies should install precise procedures to maximize the efficiency of the work
being done. His system became known as Taylorism which dealt with people, machines,
and processes that would speed up work.

The reason I bring him up now though has nothing to do with his contribution to
modern management whatsoever. You see, his story is the exact opposite of Bjorn Borg’s.

Even though Taylor wasn’t the best player at the time. He won the US Tennis Open
with the invention of a unique oversized racket. There were no standards regarding the size,
shape, and design of tennis rackets back then. So Taylor designed himself a bigger racket

21 | P a g e
that was big enough to make winning a lot easier, but small enough that it wasn’t too
noticeable by other players.

His oversized racket made it easier for him to return tough shots his opponents
thought were winners. The racket also gave him extra power turning his shots into rockets
that were difficult to return.

Even though Frederick wasn’t the greatest player, his new advantage proved too
powerful when competing against the better players with weaker rackets. He ended up
taking home the US Open title because of his unfair advantage.

Leveraging everything you’ve got is where I am leading you in this Attention Age
Doctrine. I’ll show you how you can leverage yourself personally, and leverage your
business so you’ll have an unfair business advantage over other entrepreneurs…. even
if they are better business operators than you are!

The Perfect Storm

The world we’re operating in is changing so fast these days that almost everybody is
scratching their head wondering “what the hell is going on here?”

Well, if you’ve been wondering the same thing yourself then you’ve just stumbled on
your answer. Because I am going to walk you through all different forces to recently come
together on the entrepreneurial landscape.

I call it “The Perfect Storm” because it really is this very unique combination of events
that is currently creating the struggles and lack of business success in the lives of too
many entrepreneurs.

Listen: In order for you to really profit during this unique moment of change… you
must comprehend all the different forces currently coming together to birth The Attention
Age.

There are no shortcuts…no one can do your pushups for you.

We’ve got lots of ground to cover together, so let’s dive in and focus on the changes
that are currently affecting your ability to achieve a thriving business and a personal life all
at the same time.

22 | P a g e
 A Brief Recap of the
Pastt 10,000 Years
In 10,000 years we human ns have been through five ages. And ourr society is speeding
up so fast that depending on you
ur age you’ve either witnessed two or thrree of them.

Up until 8,000BC we lived in the Hunter/Gatherer age. During th his era, people who
could kill an animal for food or se
elect the right items to eat were success
sful and had the
power.

We moved from the Hunterr/Gatherer age to the Agricultural Age when we stopped
roaming and began to put down rroots. Farming made it possible to stay
y in one place long
enough to build a real social stru
ucture for the first time.

You became wealthy throug gh ownership of productive land and kn nowledge of

methods to maximize the yield off food. This lasted until the late 1700s.

The Industrial Age came n next. It started in Europe with the comm
mercial use of the
steam engine, a new invention pa
aved the way for the freedom to no longe
er rely on the
muscle of men.

The world changed rapidly,, with factories leveraging machined prooduction, new
transportation methods from the railroads and the growth of cities as pllaces of production
and distribution.

Then about thirty years a

ago we entered into The Information Age. This age was
initiated by communications sate
ellites, computers, and the historically unprecedented
u
numbers of an educated public.

During this time

the number of white
collar workers
(management) surpassed
the number of blue
collar, or production
workers, for the first
time. It was a wonderful
era for business, for
sure.

But something
happened.

Everything started
to move so fast… the
lines between one
human age and the next
blurred.

23 | P a g e
 The amount of information
exploded. It just kept growing and
growing until many of us developed
information overload.

About ten year ago we entered

into The Communication Age.

Each year brought another way

for us to communicate with each
other. Pagers, cell phones, voice mail,
conference calling, email, instant
messaging, etc.

But with all of the new

technology we all of a sudden found
ourselves connected to a 24/7 “global
economy” all of the time.

The downside of being over-connected led us into another age. About five years ago,
we entered into an age I call…

The Age Of Interruption.

It was during this time that we found ourselves constantly interrupted by our
“plugged-in world”. This shift has had enormous consequences that up until now I’ve
heard very little mention of.

Later on in this Doctrine, I’ll tell you exactly how bad it is – how much we’ve been
negatively affected by this subtle shift.

You need to do to reclaim your independence. Your ability to be an incredibly

successful entrepreneur will multiply when you overcome this new hurdle.

Another powerful force rearing its ugly head during this time is The Paradox Of
Choice. Too much of a good thing can be bad – and that’s exactly what many realized
when they had too many choices to choose from.

But before we get to that – there’s one more “age” I need to let you know about. It all
started about a year ago. That’s about the time we entered into a new era, The Attention
Age.

With information no longer scarce, and an ever increasing number

of new technologies being developed to continually interrupt us,
and too many choices to consider with almost everything, the
resource that has become most scarce is human attention.

I’ve been aware of this shift, in fact I’ve even spoken about it, but I didn’t recognize its
overall importance as the chief culprit in business failure and success until recently.

24 | P a g e
 There’s a lot to discover about the Information, Interruption and Attention ages and
what you must do to significantly profit from these cultural shifts.

We’ll focus on each and how you can overcome the challenges each one presents and
where the big opportunities currently are to explode your business.

New Economies Always

Open Up… New Opportunities
To Build Wealth Fast
The dominant value of the Agricultural Age was land and the wealth that came from
the land. Large landowners were regarded as the wealthy. Farming skill was prized, and if
you could make the land produce more than your neighbor… you got wealthier than he did.
In the Industrial Age, the new economic value became production. Wealth was
created through production.

The more efficient your production and the more effective your distribution the
wealthier you became. Some people got very, very rich – these were the early captains of
industry, the robber barons, whose large corporations created unprecedented wealth.

Their wealth migrated to stock markets, where wealth was defined by the amount of
stock anyone owned.

Today we’re still reminded of our past by the remaining values of these two ages. The
ownership of land, real estate… or ownership of stocks and securities still acts as a
barometer of wealth.

During the information

age it was thought that
information was power. And
for a while it was – until the
amount of information
exploded and the Internet
leveled the playing field (when
it came to the access of
information).

Still today certain types

of information can yield
incredible wealth (like insider
trading knowledge) but overall
the worth of information has
decreased dramatically.

25 | P a g e
 In the Age of Interruption, whoever owned the vehicles of interruption had enormous
power. They could instantly comm mand the attention of millions without even getting their
prior consent.

Of course, over time we gott hip and no longer allowed all interruptters the
same level of access. We develope ed caller id boxes to let us know who waas
calling, email filters to rid ourselv
ves of the excess commercial spam mes ssages,
etc…

And now we find ourselves in The Age of Attention, with so much information
surrounding us and so many inteerrupters trying to get our attention, we
e are left with our
attention as the scarcest resou
urce we have.

Those of us who have learn ned to optimize their own attention alrea ady have a
significant advantage over others s. Our attention is really the driver to ge
etting massive
personal leverage. If I can absorb b five books with the same amount of atttention it takes you
to read one book, you’ll get left in
n the dust over time.

In the business world, busiinesses that captivate the attention of the

t public and are
able to hold on to it are winning b
big time. Right now, the overwhelming number
n of
businesses and websites suffer frrom an anemic amount of attention.

Also, those companies thatt can focus the attention of their employyees on the things
that truly matter end-up fully lev
veraging their talent, while other compaanies suffer from
their employees diffused attentionn on everything from surfing the ‘net to personal issues.

The Interneet Bubble and What’s

W
Going Onn In the Background
The birth and growth of
the world wide web happened
so quickly no one was really
prepared for it. On Wall Street
it caused “Irrational
Exuberance”, during the tech
boom and then destroyed the
wealth of many during the
subsequent Tech-Wreck.

Pundits said the world

wide web was going to
change everything…
including business models.
Obviously they were
wrong…or were they?

26 | P a g e
 It’s important you don’t ma ake the natural (yet incorrect) leap that,, just because “the
promise of the Internet” didn’t ha
appen on stock speculators’ timeline, it’’s not currently
happening – because all the evideence suggests it most certainly is.

Just to be clear, I’m not talking about selling ebooks, affiliatte marketing,
or anything like that. It’s the overall impact the Internet is having
h on our
entire society and cu ulture that’s critical to understand. Beca
ause if you
do, you’ll profit from it – guaranteed.

ou that what occurred with the dot com boom and then
Any history buff will tell yo
bust is a pattern that’s played ou ut in almost every new technology. From m the birth of
railroads to the mass availability of electricity, it’s always the same old story…
s

Innovations always end upp being over-hyped, creating massive dis sillusionment and
an inevitable backlash when theyy don’t deliver on everybody’s wildest prromises. But their
true, longer range potential ten
nds to be vastly underestimated.

How Insideers View Techno

ology
What I am about to
show you will change the
way you look at any new
technology, software, or
trend.

Not only that, but it will

make you a much better
investor and business owner
because you’ll finally know
when it’s the right time to
leverage or invest in a new
technology.

The graph above is

known as a “Hype Cycle”. It Almost every new technology goes through
t this hype
was introduced by a cycle on the way to being mainstre eam acceptance.
respected analyst/research
company by the name of
nts adoption and business application of technologies.
Gartner. The hype cycle represen

sed hype cycles to characterize the hype and inevitable

Since 1995, Gartner has us
disappointment that almost alwa
ays happens with the introduction of a new
n technology.

A certain amount of hype aalways accompanies new technological developments.

d This
is when everyone is talking aboutt a new product, but no one is actually using it for greater
productivity.

27 | P a g e
 When shown graphically, a hype cycle initially climbs steeply as more
m and more
people pay attention to the new technology.

But the curve drops just as

s steeply once public interest wanes, ev
ven though the
new technology has still not evven been employed productively.

Only as the technology beg gins to come of age will its use become more
m widespread.
Eventually it hits its plateau of prroductivity and becomes a natural partt of doing business.

Thee 5 Phases of a
“Hype Cycle” Are:
1. "Technology Trigger"- T The first phase is the breakthrough, pro
oduct launch or
other event that generates significant press coverage and interest.

2. "Peak of Inflated Expec

ctations"- In the next phase, a frenzy of publicity typically
generates over-enthusiasm and uunrealistic expectations.

3. "Trough of Disillusionmment"- Next the new technology enters the "trough of

disillusionment" because it fails tto meet the unrealistic expectations.

4. "Slope of Enlightenme ent" – Even though the technology has lost

l its popularity
with the press, some continue thhrough the "slope of enlightenment" and
d experiment to find
the benefits and practical applica
ations of the technology.

5. "Plateau of Productivitty" - The technology reaches the "platea

au of productivity"
when the benefits become widely demonstrated and accepted.

Raillroads and the

Informattion Superhighw way
Once you realize that theree is a
common pattern to the hype thatt
surrounds new technologies, you u realize
that we are just now in the midstt of the
long-term effects that the Interne
et will
have on our lives.

at
In many ways the hype tha
surrounds the Internet mirrors th
he hype
that once surrounded the birth o
of the
railroads.

28 | P a g e
 Here’s a quick history les
sson: A “railway mania” swept Europe in the 1800s.

A supposed technological rrevolution promised abolishing current time and distance

constraints (sounds familiar, does
sn’t it).

The railways were sold as g goldmine investments that would bring its savvy inventors
millions in returns. And naturallyy the vast majority of people who first in
nvested never saw
their millions… they lost their sh
hirts.

But the railways over an ex

xtended period of time did prove to be genuinely
g
revolutionary and radically transsformed the entire world economy. And A that’s important
because right now the Internet is
s quietly having that same impact on ouur lives.

We make the same mistake

e in our personal lives.

I call it the “Overestimate/U

Underestimate Theory” because most pe
eople tend to
overestimate what they might achieve in 1 year, and dramatically underestimate
u
what they might achieeve in 5 years.

And it’s no differe

ent with our
expectations about tech hnology.

My point is – manny of us are already

discounting the staggerring effects the
Internet has already ha
ad on our lives.

In addition we don’t see thee bigger

implications that are still to come
e.

But we’d better! Especiallly if we want to

be successful in the coming yeaars.

Because not knowing how this trend shakes

ot of wrong
out could cause you to make a lo
guesses and missed opportunities.

For a consumer this can m mean buying the

newest gadget only to be disappo ointed it doesn’t
live up to it’s promise. But then s
see a much better
and less expensive gadget come o out a month later
that blows the older model away.

In business knowing this c cycle helps you

avoid jumping on new technologiies too early. I’ve
seen plenty of business lose theirr shirt because
they focused too much of their atttention on
products or marketing methods tthat weren’t going
to hit critical mass for another de
ecade.

29 | P a g e
 The widespread acceptance e of the Internet is changing so many off our daily activities,
it’s no wonder that our society an
nd businesses are changing so rapidly.

Here’s my advice to you about how to think of the Internet from th

his point forward.

Think of the Internet as a ““general purpose” technology—like electtricity which now

affects the entire economy and ou ur lives.

It is the converging interrsection of innovations in computers and

communications that is causin ng this shift: microprocessors, software e and information
processing systems, data compre ession, data storage and digitization tech
hnologies and voice
and data telecommunications nettworks.

What this means is that tthe Internet is going to continue to magnify

m the results
of future innovations.

It already has dramatically

y changed the landscape for outsourcingg, publishing,
information marketing, startup bbusinesses, and the nature of competitio
on for all of us.

Keep this in mind as we dis

scuss all the current changes we must adapt to later on.

Here’s a look at the profounnd implications for society and for you if,
i for example, you
wanted to start selling informatio
on online in the health field.

Today, there are 181 millio

on Americans online. They are more likely to consult the
Web for health information than their own medical doctor!

Recently, an orthopedic surgeon complained to the New York Time es: “I have people
coming to the office who have dow
wnloaded 50 pages of stuff from the Intternet on minimally
invasive surggery.”

On th
he surface that small
factoid migh
ht just seem
unimportantt – but this isn’t a
unique case – think about all
the areas whhere, all of a
sudden, we are taking back
some of the responsibility to
become well informed.

All of a sudden you are

becoming in nformed in a
hundred, twwo hundred, or
even a thouusand different
areas that you
y didn’t have
any pressurre or desire to
study before.

30 | P a g e
 Unfortunately, that’s just tthe beginning of the pressures to gatherr more, learn more
and know more information. This s leads us to…

Information:

Welcomme to the
“Informattion Age”
Everyone said our lives wou
uld dramatically improve… the
workweek would shorten… free tiime would multiply... remember?

It sounded like we were gettting ready to enter a time of

Nirvana!

So…How’s Nirvana W
Working Out For You?
I’ll get back to our so called
d “era of bliss” in a moment.
First, let’s get a handle on what g got us here.

The Inform
mation Age

It freed us from the IIndustrial age. But the price we

paid was something we nev ver could have projected.
Before economists define a new age, they look to see if
there hass been a change in which
resou
urces are scarce and can lead to
weaalth.

So in the Information Age,

information was the scarcest
resource. If you could capture
it and distribute information
antage.
better than others you had an adva

Microsoft became one of the wo orld’s largest

companies. Because of its role in creaating the platform
that greatly improved our ability to ca
apture and
distribute digital information.

A large cause of our rushing into the information age

w
was the new way money was being made e. During the
Ind
dustrial Age the U.S.’s major exports weere items
manu ufactured in the plants and factories sp
pread throughout
the country.

In the Information Age it sh

hifted to intellectual property delivered in the form of
movies, music, books, software a
and higher education to name just a few w.

31 | P a g e
 I know it’s hard to believee now, but there really was a time wh hen information
was a scarce resource. We need ded information to help solve specific an
nd urgent problems
in business and our personal live
es.

A great example of our desiire for more information is the adoption

n speed of the
printing press. Towards the end of 15th century a man named Gutenbe erg converted an old
wine press into the world’s first p
printing machine.

Only forty years after the in

nvention of the press, there were printin
ng machines in 110
cities in six different countries!

Then… just ninety years la

ater… more than eight million books had
d been printed.
Almost everything printed was filled with information that previous sly had not been
available to the average personn.

The Info
ormation Explosion
In an economy where informmation is both the currency and the product our reaction
was obvious: we directed our ene
ergies and “know-how” to invent things that would increase
our supply of information.

By 1990, in the US alone, tthere

were 260,000 billboards; 11,520
newspapers; 11,556 periodicals; 27,000
video outlets for renting tapes; 36
62
million TV sets; and over 400 milllion
radios.

Add to the list the 60,000 n

new
book titles published every year
(300,000 world-wide) plus every d day in
America 41 million photographs a are
taken, and just for the record, ovver 60
billion pieces of direct response m
mail
come into our mail boxes every year

And that’s all without eve

en
mentioning the computer!

The contribution of the perrsonal computer to the information expllosion cannot be

over-estimated. The personal commputer spawned all of these new inventiions: email, the
world wide web, word processors, spreadsheets, blogs, search engines, rss
r feeds, social
networking, pdfs, powerpoints, ettc…

We’ve all become info

ormation/content producers. More to th
he point, we have
all become more sk killed in generating information than almost anyone has
in managing it.

32 | P a g e
 This makes it extremely difficult to figure
out which information is useful and not
wasteful or, even worse, destructive.

It’s not just the quantity of the

information either. It’s how all these things
(email, documents, the Internet, etc.) come
together… like an orchestra with no conductor.

The net result is we try to

get our work done, but
information seems to get
in the way.

A single publishing company like Reuters produces an astonishing 27,000 pages of

information per second. Whoops… It seems we forgot to ask the question “How much
information can any one person manage at a given time?” Which led us to…

Information Overload
Wikipedia defines it as “The state of having too much information to make a decision
or remain informed about a topic.”

It was only a matter of time, with the amount of information

increasing that we would eventually be overloaded by it. It all happened
too quickly. We went in a blink of an eye from information being scarce,
to way past the point of saturation.

The total freedom and the complete accessibility of

practically all information diluted
information’s meaning and value to
us. It became a curse rather than a
blessing.
It certainly didn’t help that
technology made the retrieval, production
and distribution of information so much
easier than any time before. Our new
technology reduced the natural selection
processes of information.

What I mean is this: in the past,

technological limitations enforced a policy
where only the most important
information was published.

And now with so much irrelevant,

unclear and inaccurate data fragments
surrounding us, it has made it extremely difficult to tell the forest from the trees.

33 | P a g e
 Some experts have defined this as "data smog", which they fairly compare
c to the
ed
pollution of rivers and seas cause
by an excess of fertilizers.

Other experts compare the

current info-glut to health
problems caused by a diet too ric ch
in calories, except it’s stuffing ou
ur
brains instead of our waistline.

Many have speculated thatt

all this information has left us
powerless to really know anythin ng
anymore.

o
We haven’t had the time to
adapt our defenses against
overload break down. Nobody
ever taught us how to manage
this overwhelming quantity of
information effectively.
We don't know how to filterr it.

We don't know how to redu

uce it.

We don't know how to use it.

I’ve broken down our ov

verload problem into six cau
uses:

The first is having more im

mportant information than we can assim milate. For example,
we gather twenty different books on a topic, but we can’t read or review all of it. Many of us
feel that since all of the informatiion is relevant, we cannot ignore any off it without negative
consequences.

The second is being weighe ed down by a never ending supply of infformation we never
ask for, with the fear that some m
may be important and we should know about it.

Take for instance email.

34 | P a g e
 We get tons of unsolicited email messages daily clogging up our email-boxes. They
require our attention only because some may contain relevant or useful information.

Of course, each moment we spend figuring out whether an email message

is junk or not is a moment we cannot spend on one that provides relevant
information.

Or, you conduct a search online and you get back hundreds of thousands, if not
millions of pages as potential sources. We know we can’t go through every result, even
though we may worry about missing relevant information.

The third relates to the speed we are receiving new information.

For most of us it’s too much to process.

It reminds me of a few college courses I took where the professors would attempt to go
through too much information in a single lecture, it was impossible to grasp, capture,
assimilate and work with it all. So I’d walk out of class with the other students, more
confused than when we sat down.

The fourth relates to the value we place on information: With the amount of
information increasing, the value we place on any single piece of information goes way
down…No matter whether it’s important, redundant or just simply noise (clutter caused
irrelevant data).

The fifth relates to contradictions in the information we

review.

One source tells us one thing; the next tells us the

complete opposite.

Of course both sources know more about the topic

than we do, so we end up with the dilemma of dealing with
these conflicted points of view.

35 | P a g e
The sixth relates to our increased information needs. As overall changes in our world
accelerate so does our need for information.

We need new information in order to keep up with all these developments.

Impacts Of Information Overload

Unfortunately the negative repercussions ripple through our personal and
professional lives. We are paying a very high price dealing with all this information we are
responsible for.

Since most people don’t realize all the negative effects,

what follows are some of the more damaging side-effects.

The Line Between Work

and Personal Life Blur
It began innocently enough. At first there was voicemail, then cell-phones, and now
the ability to check work email from home and on the road.

On the other side of the same coin, practically everyone reads their personal emails,
makes personal phone calls, and even surfs the web recreationally while we are supposed
to be working.

It’s grown to such unacceptable levels that most small business owners now feel as if
they’re working 24/7.

Our Work Suffers

All this information coming at us makes keeping track of it all difficult. It puts
pressure on us to multi-task (speaking on the phone while reading and writing email
messages), which leads to an inability to focus.

We easily become frustrated (like when we cannot find a file on our computer).

36 | P a g e
 And along with the
increase in stress comes
a decrease in our ability
to think clearly, and an
increase in our tendency
to make mistakes.

It’s
counterintuitive, but as
the amount of
information increases,
our ability to make
accurate decisions
decreases.

We’ve always lived

in a society dedicated to
the idea that we're always
better off gathering as
much information and
spending as much time as
possible in deliberation.

But new research

and popular books like Blink, by Malcom Gladwell (famed author of The e Tipping Point)
shows us this line of thinking isn
n’t always true. Galdwell shows lots of situations where our
snap judgments and first impre essions actually offer a much better means
m of making
sense of the world.

The Tie Beetween Informaation

and AAction Is Severed
d
It used to be that between receiving new information we had enou ugh time to put it
into use and test it out. Unfortun
nately with the blinding speed we are hit
h with new
information there’s no downtime.. Unless you’re highly disciplined it’ss easy for the tie
between information and action n to be severed

Bestselling business books

s have been focused primarily on this ne
ew condition. The
business community has referredd to it as “The Knowing/Doing Gap” bec cause we simply
don’t have enough time to do whaat it is we know.

Of course the implications of this new dilemma are extremely costtly to businesses
and to our own personal lives. Since all rewards come from what we do, not from what we
know.

37 | P a g e
 Informing
Ourselves to Death
A world-wide survey (Reuters, 1996) found
that two thirds of managers suffer from increased
tension and one third from ill-health because of
information overload.

The psychologist David Lewis, who

analyzed the findings of this survey, proposed the
term "Information Fatigue Syndrome" to
describe the resulting symptoms.

“Information Fatigue Syndrome:

Symptoms include paralysis of analytical
capacity, increased anxiety, greater self-
doubt, and a tendency to blame others.
When people are faced with more
information than they can process, they
become unable to make decisions or
take action.”

Other side-effects highlighted by Lewis

include anxiety, poor decision-making, difficulties
in memorizing and remembering, and reduced
attention span.

David Shenk, author of the book “Data

Smog” cites many different studies showing
information overload causes these “wonderful”
effects:

Increased cardiovascular stress

Weakened vision
Confusion
Frustration
Impaired judgment
Decreased benevolence
Overconfidence
Even with all of these negative effects, most
of us treat information like a junkie who is
constantly in search of their very next fix.

38 | P a g e
 Inform
mation Hoarding –
the Clutter Factor
Another research study by Reuters revealed that despite the prolifferation of office
technology, we were still informattion misers.
Better stated: we feel certa
ain information if kept to ourselves gives
g us an
advantage over others.

We consider information an
n asset – whether we realize the value of
o it or not.

In our attempt to horde thiis intangible goldmine, we create clutterr. The clutter acts
as a continual drag on our lives s by hampering our job performance, sttealing our time
away from friends, families, and p
productive work and fosters an overall feeling
f of
inadequacy.

Info-lustt & Info-Addiction

If you’re an experienced, sw
witched-on consumer you Google sometthing at least once a
day… or even once an hour.

Nobody wants to be the guy y on the plane who paid the most for th heir ticket. So we
research the cheapest available fafare, the different rates the hotels are ch
harging, and the
different prices the car rental age
encies are currently offering.

It’s not just travel that spu

urs our urge for more information. For almost
a every major
purchase an intensive research p project is undertaken. We want the bestt available option for
the cheapest price so we scour th he information superhighway in search of the breadcrumbs
that lead us to the coveted inform mation we are seeking.

ying a book on
If we are thinking about buy
Amazon, we scan the comments and a critiques of
fellow readers to prevent the purchhase of a worthless
book.

Just for a second, think ab

bout how
incredibly addicted to informatiion we all are as
consumers.

Some experts have said thatt we consumers are

experiencing nothing short of an all-encompassing
a
INFOLUST:

“Experienced consumers aree lusting after

detailed information on where to get
g the best of the
best, the cheapest of the cheapest, the first of the first,

39 | P a g e
the healthiest of the healthiest, th
he coolest of the coolest, or on how to become
b the smartest
of the smartest. Instant informa ation gratification is upon us.”

In Internet marketing almo

ost everyone seems to be addicted to infformation, and
lusting after more.

Think about this: More info

ormation products are bought and neve
er read, listened to,
or consumed than are bought an nd read.

It’s the equivalent of torchiing whatever cash you have.

Recent IDC research found d the average knowledge worker spends up to 25% of their
time working searching for inform
mation. It’s a ridiculously large number – what did people
do twenty years ago?

What about you?

How much time do you spe

end searching for information?

How would you rate your s

skill level at leveraging technology to find
d the information
you are looking for?

Why Tryin
ng to Keep Up Is Only
Making Us Dumber
This may be the greatest irrony of information overload.

All of that data flying at you

u by way of e-mail, instant message, ce
ell phone, voice mail
and rss feeds -- could
actually be making you
dumber.

The more
information we try to
suck in, the more we
train ourselves to
default to a shorter
attention span.

The natural result

is it becomes harder to
rally the concentration
required to learn
anything of real value.
Which puts downward
pressure on how much
you’ll make in your
business.

40 | P a g e
 The reason our attention span is decreasing is in the way we are designed . We are
hardwired to automate repetitive mental actions to save ourselves from having to think.

The more times we perform a task, the more we “habitualize” it, and the easier it
becomes. That’s why we can save energy, because we end up putting less thought into
things we have done before.

It’s the same with kids. That’s why experts always tell parents not to allow their
children to watch too much TV.

You should be very concerned about this trend. It’s like you are training
yourself to be stupider and stupider with each passing day.

Many business owners I meet have “habitualized” a short attention span and can no
longer concentrate for any extended period of time. It ends up being one of the biggest
handicaps to getting wealthy in our current economy.

Because our brains are designed to conserve energy, once we’ve habitualized our
short attention span - our brains will fight to conserve energy by defaulting into the
“habitualized” pattern instead of more difficult options.

So we end up not only preferring to concentrate for shorter periods of time, but we
actually default to it when attempting to process information. And it becomes a self-
reinforcing process, only making entrepreneurs less and less likely to succeed.

Well informed, Well Researched

Vs. Lazy + Escape
This has to go down as one of the best forms of procrastination and laziness ever
invented.

The reason: The passive activity of reading and surfing

Internet can fool practically everyone into believing that actual
work is being done!

You know what I am talking about don’t you?

You’ve most likely sensed it in your own activity - the

way the collection of information can so easily disguise
itself as a worthy substitute for doing any thinking on
your own.

It’s been so effective because it’s more self-

deceptive than the obvious cleaning of our desks
before writing. It’s a form of laziness the Internet
encourages, justifies, and deceives us with.

41 | P a g e
 The scary secret is this: if we’re not made conscious of this hideous mind virus, we
can endlessly delay having to do any real thinking whatsoever simply by stacking more and
more bits of data in front of ourselves.

I see this pattern all the time with entrepreneurs who first get online. Sadly a large
number of them never realize what they are doing to themselves – and quit the Internet
before ever applying themselves.

If you are an info-junkie you need to pay extra careful attention here. I know I do. My
strategy is to have timers all over my desk and on my desktop screen – I set them to
countdown and give myself a certain amount of time for research. If I wasn’t disciplined
about it – I would never get anything done other than a lot of research.

If you’ve never realized this before – from this point forward consider yourself
warned. If you choose to willingly fool yourself from now on you know what you are really
doing.

Increasing Complexity Mandates

More Information
The more “tools’” we buy to make or lives and tasks easier, the more complex our
existence becomes.

Think about that for a moment… could you have imagined five years ago that you’d
need to know how to set up a sync
for a PDA, wire a HD TV, backup a
laptop and desktop to a 500 gig
portable drive, find a restaurant on
your GPS, or manage a photo library?

With each neat tool we add into

our lives comes the prerequisite
training to use them.

How much time have you spent

in the past year learning a new
device, software program or even
managing your iTunes library?

I would hazard to guess that

your body of knowledge is greater
than even you would imagine.

And this body of knowledge

takes a little piece of your attention each day, even if just to keep your technology running.

42 | P a g e
 Info-Overlo
oad Coping Strattegies
That Lead
d To The Poorhoouse
Some of the more popular, yet ineffective
e:
strategies many resort to include
Omission – simply iggnoring or
deciding not to process som
me of the
information because there is just too much.

Latching on - Grabb bing onto the first

information found as a way y of avoiding
having to evaluate the dataa. An example
would be using only the firrst result of a
search performed on your ffavorite search engine.

Delaying - postponinng thinking by allowing the information to stack up with

the false thought that we’ll get to it later – but we don’t because new information
keeps coming at us.

Filtering Arbitrarilyy - choosing which information you’ll go

o through without
really making a real choice e. You just go through what you can, orr the first half of the
pile, or a single chapter fro
om a book, etc.

Walking Away – sim mply giving up from the activity all togeth
her. telling
ourselves it isn’t worth the time or effort, we choose to simply walkk away.

Generalizing – we us
se a minimal amount of information to draw conclusions.
Like summarizing the details of an article from simply reading its headline.

e coping strategies leave a lot to be desiired. While they may

Obviously all of these
help temper some of the prroblems caused by information overload d, the price we pay
seems to be too big.

In each of these strategie

es we give up a significant amount off sureness that the
information is correct.

If we have to make any deccisions or take any actions we pay a very

y big price. Because
our conclusions from the distorte
ed information could cause a chain reacction of bad
decisions and faulty assumptionss.

This leads to a tremendous

s waste of time, at the minimum, and ca
an lead to much
worse… failure.

43 | P a g e
 What Haas Your Informattion
Done for You Lately??

Thrivingg With Informatiion

But before you can easily in
ncorporate my suggestions into your ov
verall information
management system, we need to cover a few other negative forces workin
ng against you.

Changing Yourr Perspective On Inform

mation:
JUST IN
N CASE to JUST IN TIME
A good start to getting a ha
andle on your overall
“information consumption” is to ttake a step back
and analyze why (or whether) the e information in
front of you is currently worth lea
arning in the first
place.

For many of us our natural curiosity gets

the better of us.

We make time for what w we think we

may need to know at some futu ure date,
creating an overabundance of infformation that
we need to process.

The net result is we o

often forgo some of the information we really
r
need to know right nnow. It’s no wonder we do this since moost of us
have been condition ned to appreciate “just in case” learnning from
all of years of schoooling.

Think about it… in school that was ALL we were taught. But the rate r of change we
currently deal with (especially in online marketing) makes a lot of the info
formation we are
currently learning outdated beforre we ever get a chance to act on it.

Add to that the fact that th

here’s a “use-it-or-lose-it” aspect to mostt information.

This means if we never appply the information (which we usually don’t if we are
participating in Just In Case learrning) we seem to lose the ability to reca
all it when it’s
needed.

44 | P a g e
 Plus the current information demands placed on us are so high – spending time on
information we may or may not need, which may or may not become outdated, seems like a
bad choice.

In the final analysis Just In Case Learning is a

strategy that no longer makes a lot of sense.
Of course, I’m not saying that there aren't problems with just-in-time learning, too...

It’s just the lesser of two evils. Just-In-Time learning often turns into just-what-you-
need to survive.

And it is the common approach of “crammers” who wait for the last minute.

Oh Yeah… What About Nirvana?

Back in the early 70’s the US Senate released a report that analyzed the social
implications of the 22 hour workweek (by 1985) and a retirement age of 38!

Remember these buzzwords… the "workerless" factory, the "paperless" office, the
"cashless" society, and the "leisure society."

In the 1970s the US Senate It appears that The Seattle-based “Take Back Your Time”
organization, through its Web site and book of the same name, says we're working more
than ever and more than workers in any other industrialized country.

Many don't take earned vacations.

It creates compromises in health, marriages, parenthood, community and social

activism.

"We are not only working faster but even longer, and filling our limited leisure with
busy activities, leading to an increasing sense of time poverty," says Daniel Hamermesh, a
University of Texas economist, who studied time-stress perceptions among higher-income
households in the U.S. and four other industrialized countries.

Remember when a US Senate committee report earnestly discussed the social

implications of a 22 hour work week by1985 and retirement at age 38?

45 | P a g e
 Frictiion Accelerants
You and I are both “knowle
edge workers”.

That means we have to deffine what work needs to be done, what done
d means, and
what it all is supposed to look lik
ke when we are finished.

It wasn’t always that way.

Fifty years ago approximateely 80% of us made our living by makin

ng and moving
things. Back then it was real easy
y to know what you had to do. Just fin
nd the unmade and
unmoved things and then have a at it.

Inherent in the idea

a of “knowledge
worker” is that thinking is
s required to do our
work. I am sure that all makes
m sense to you
– but what shouldn’t mak ke sense is how
many different things wee do (individually
and societal) that reduce the effectiveness
of our own thinking.

So, as knowledge
e workers – our
income is dependent on our thinking, yet
we continually engage in activities that
limit our thinking and
d therefore limit our
earning ability.

Hence, “Incom
me Friction”.

In the next few

w pages we’re going
to cover all the evil objects that cause friction in
your earning ability. Then we’ll go
o over how to remove all of them so you u will find it an easy
slide to making a lot more money y.

Some of the chief culprits

s dragging our incomes down that we
e’ll look at:

• a constant barrage oof interruptions

• continually decreasiing our attention span
• our natural instinctss that interfere with over-learning
• walls we place in fro
ont of ever achieving a “flow-state”
• being surrounded by y clutter
• the seductive force o
of multi-tasking
• the paradox of choicce
• our fear of missing a
anything
• a new trait many of us have adopted known as ADT

46 | P a g e
 The Com
mmunication Agge?
Over the past decade we wiitnessed the birth of an abundant assorrtment of
communication tools.

It’s hard to believe it wasn’’t even that long ago we were without be
eepers, cell-phones,
and email.

And the impact of these too

ols continues to grow while they spread
d across the world
and into the hands of almost everry single individual.

These tools have become so o widespread it would seem unnecessarry to quote statistics
about their growth except for the fact of
how quickly they continue to spread.

The number of cell phone u user

(every minute another 1,000 userrs are
added to the 2.4 billion existing u
usersi).

The global growth rate of In

nternet
use (200 percent between 2000 a and
2006ii), or how many e-mail mess sages
and instant messages compete fo or our
attention every day (an estimated d 62
billion and 14 billion , respectiv
iii iv vely).

We were told they would en nable

us to better communicate with on ne
another. And while it’s true, it certainly
has increased the level of
communication – there have been n some
unintended consequences.

d, Pam.
Take for example my friend

She’s got a cell phone, and

d an organizer. That’s in addition to the land lines she has
on her desk at work and at home e in her apartment. Of course she also has
h a desktop
computer (at home and at work), plus a laptop that she takes with her on o trips.

On Pam’s computers, she h

has email, Microsoft Outlook with imme
ediate notification
when a message arrives.

She also has a multiplatforrm Instant Messaging program, Trillian,, so she can
message friends and associates o
on Yahoo Messenger, ICQ or MSN Messe enger.

Of course, Pam has her clieents, friends, and family contacts on ea

ach of those
communication tools. So no mattter where she is, anyone she wants to ta alk to or send a
message to is only a button or ke
eystroke away.

47 | P a g e
 Don’t get me wrong, it’s gre eat that these tools
make it possible for us to reach o others at our own
convenience. It’s just that the flip
p side isn’t always as
pretty. Because, now others ha ave the ability to
reach us at their convenience ttoo.
I don’t know about you, buut it didn’t take me long
to realize the irony of all commun
nication. And that is:

“Interruptions are in the eye of

the interrup
pted.”
Meaning, one person’s inte
erruption is another’s
collaboration, acknowledgement or display of
friendship.

It’s gotten so bad for many of us, that I’ve

characterized this era as….

The In
nterruption Age
e
I just got back from Starbu
ucks (my standard is an Iced Venti Black-Eye
Unsweetened). What I saw is a pperfect way to introduce you to The Interrruption Age.

While waiting to pick up m

my order here’s what I saw:

Two co-workers sitting at a table. They were on their laptops conn nected to the WiFi
hotspot there, they were answerin ng emails, using ICQ (probably with peo ople halfway across
the world), answering their cell phones, all while talking to each other.

So Con
nnected… We're e
Actually Disconnected
d
The sheer number of ways that we can be contacted or contact oth hers here and now
continues to multiply And it’s turrning our lives into a series of interruptted interruptions.

In fact, if you haven’tt already been interrupted at least once

e since you started
reading, the odds are overwwhelming that you will be before finishin ng.

Unnecessary interruptions now consume about 28 percent of the average knowledge

worker’s day (about 2 hours a daayv). If we translate that into hours it’s 28
2 billion lost hours
a year to U.S. businesses . At an
vi n average cost per hour of $21 , interru
vii uptions are costing
American businesses $588 billion n each and every year.

If you’re like most entrepre

eneurs you aren’t even shocked by these
e statistics.

48 | P a g e
 You’re living it.
You set time aside to finish
h an important project only to be consta
antly interrupted by
emails, instant messages, phone calls, crisis that need your immediate attention
a in the
office, family, friends, coworkers, and some important late breaking newws.

You end up finishing the prroject late at night when you can be cerrtain you’ll be left
alone.

Just ten years ago it wasn’’t at all like this. Back in those good old
d days if someone
couldn’t walk over to you and dis
sturb you in person, they were forced to o rely on a
telephone.

If they needed to send you something written they relied on the po

ostman who showed
up at your door once a day.

And the flurry of interrupttions keeps getting

worse. For more and more busine ess owners, every
day feels like this - one long para
ade of
interruptions with only the gaps in between to get
our “real work” done.

You’ve Goot 11
Minutes to
Get Your W
Work
Done
In a different study, Gloria Mark, a
researcher at UC Irvine, found prroof that our work
life really is as bad as it feels. Eac
ch knowledge
worker she studied spent only 11 minutes on
any given project before being interrupted.

What’s worse is it would ttake 25 minutes

on average to return to the orig
ginal task.

49 | P a g e
 Most of us feel
powerless to do
anything about it
because interruptions
are often necessary – we
need to discuss
important parts of
projects with others,
take important phone
calls, and so on. But
with so many more
ways to be interrupted,
now more than ever it’s
practically impossible to
keep the interruptions
at bay while getting
done those important
items.

The scary fact is

there’s a hidden cost
to all these
interruptions as well. Mary Czerrwinski, at Microsoft Research Labs, fou
und that 40% of the
time, we wander off in a new dire
ection when an interruption ends, distra
acted by the
technological equivalent of shiny objects.

The New York Times stated d it simply, “The central danger of interruptions, Czerwinski
realized, is not really the interrup
ption at all. It is the havoc they wreak with
w our short-term
memory: ‘What the heck was I jus st doing?’”

The Staggerring Costs of Bre

eaking
Your TTrain of Thoughtt
But no matter what task orr activity we return to (the one interrupted or an appealing
new one), there is still a steep priice to pay.

The University of Michigann and the FAA found that people who sw witch between
different types of tasks – say, ema
ail and surfing the Internet, or writing a blog post and
talking on the phone– lose betwee en 20 and 40% of their efficiency.

It’s just like running a prin

nt-shop, the changeover time for the ma
achines is a
significant part of the total cost a
and time the job takes.

It turns out our brains ope

erate the same way.

ought gets expensive fast as you try to get back on

Breaking your train of tho
track.

50 | P a g e
 That’s why we become incrreasingly inefficient when changing from
m one type of task to
another.

Just like almost every othe

er current business challenge, Peter Dru
ucker (my business
hero) saw this coming long ago. FForty years ago
he wrote in the entrepreneurial mmust read, The
Effective Executive:

“To be effective
e, every
knowledge worker, a and especially
every executive, there efore needs to
be able to dispose of time in fairly
large chunks. To have dribs and
drabs of time at his ddisposal will not
be sufficient even if th
he total is an
impressive number off hours.”

It’s scary how dead on he w

was such a long
time ago. Before we go any furth
her though, I’ve
got some more bad news for you.

It turns out that you not on

nly need large chunks of time to get imp
portant work done,
but being continuously interrup pted makes you dumb.

In 2005, Glenn Wilson, Psy

ychiatrist at King’s College, London gave
e an IQ test to a
group of people who were to do n
nothing but take the test.

He then had them take the

e same test while being distracted by em
mails and phone
calls. Even
though they
were told to
ignore the
distractions,
the volunteers’
IQ dropped an
average of 10
points while
being
distracted!

That’s
more than
twice the effect
marijuana had
in a similar
study (4 point
drop).

51 | P a g e
 Why People A
Are Getting Dumbe
er With
Each New
w Technology Releaase
Here’s the scary part of Dr. Wilso
on’s IQ-
Interruption research– it was donne in
2005!

In the past two years since

e the
study was conducted new and im mproved
ways for us to interrupt each oth
her have
been embraced by the mainstream m.

That’s what led me to devellop the

graph that you see on the right.

For some bizarre reason ea

ach new
communication vehicle that gets
released seems to shrink the amoount of
time in between interruptions.

For example – instant mess saging

is quicker and therefore it can co
ome at us
more frequently than email.

The net result is there is an interruption compounding effect.. Meaning the

frequency of interruptions are inc
creasing, the amount of time in between
n them is
decreasing and the amount of IQ points we are sacrificing increases as well.
w

So we are left with “The IQ Interruption Curve” which clearly show

ws us why, with
each new communication tool relleased to the public, we become stupide er and stupider.

Remember that the very ne ext time you start feeling the impulse to
o buy the next wiz-
bang gadget that lets you talk to anyone, at anytime from anywhere. Ke eep in mind it will
make you dumber, limiting your earning potential even more than its slo ower predecessors.

The G
Genius’s Secret
If you ever looked at someo
one else’s work and marveled at how inttelligent they were,
the observations they noticed tha
at you may not have, hopefully now you
u are getting a clue
as to why.

When a New York Times re eporter interviewed a number of recent winners

w of
MacArthur "genius" grants, an ov verwhelming number of them said they kept cell phones,
iPods, and their laptops off or aw
way when in transit so that they could use
u the downtime for
thinking.

52 | P a g e
 Another example is finance guru Suze Orman, despite an incredible number of
entrepreneurial and media commitments, she refuses to get sucked into the distraction
vortex.

She won’t check messages, answer her phone or allow anything else to come between
her and what she's working on. "I do one thing at a time," she says. "I do it well, and then I
move on.”

Take a Look In the Mirror

Now before you go out and blame all of your work challenges on everyone else’s
incessant desire to communicate with you – you need to get a little introspective.

Experts tell us that we interrupt ourselves nearly as much as we let others do

it! Though we don’t call it an interruption when we are doing it to ourselves, instead we
call it distractions.

It seems that the distracting lure of checking e-mails, surfing the

Internet, participating in forums, instant-messaging and chatting on
the phone is as seductive as an urgent interruption from others!
The first step is to stop fooling ourselves about our capacities to switch
between tasks. We have to resist the "it will only take a minute" impulse to read an e-mail,
check a blog post or make a phone call chat in the middle of a demanding task or activity.

Performance Boosting or
Enslaving Technology?
What’s most striking to researchers studying the nasty effects of interruptions is that
practically no one takes even the most simple steps to reduce the number of interruptions
in their life.
There seems to be such a compulsive quality to our relationships with devices that
intrude on us regularly.

55% of knowledge workers told researchers they open e-mail immediately or

shortly after it arrives – NO MATTER HOW BUSY THEY ARE!

Harvard psychiatrist John Ratey M.D. is on record stating that the neurochemistry of
addiction underlies our compulsive use of cell phones, computers, emails, text messages,
and instant messaging.

“If we could measure it as we're shifting from one thing to another, we would
find the brain pumping out little shots of dopamine to give us a buzz."

It’s gotten so common that it’s even been turned into a disorder. Psychologists now
call our growing addiction to interrupting activities “Online Compulsive Disorder."

53 | P a g e
 Edward M Hallowell a twenty year veteran professor at Harvard Medical School has a
better term for this disorder - Screen Sucking.

What about you?

Have you become addicted to
interruptions in your daily work?

How often do you sit at your desk for

an hour or two working on one task without
getting up or doing anything else (like
checking email or surfing the web, etc…)?

If you are like the majority of people

and you’re being honest with yourself you
realize that it has become a problem.

If you’re checking email more than

twice a day, respond or send instant
messages several times throughout the day,
or seem to always be getting on and off the
phone – then face it… these tools are no
longer boosting your performance.

You’ve become enslaved to

technology.

If you have even a twinge of doubt

whether you’ve got a problem, then you do.

The very first step for you to take is to

stop pretending that all the different
interruptions you are “letting in” are normal,
neutral, and have no effect on you.

Because they most certainly do.

And the main reason is…

As Interruptions
Increase…
Net Worth Decreases

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 Remember just a few pages back, in the beginning of this section I listed out for you
what I’ve called the Income “Friction Accelerants”?

Just to jog your memory I put them here on the graphic on the right.

As you can see,

each income decreasing
force stems from the rapid
increases in the number
of interruption sources all
around us.

In order to lick this

problem the very first step
is to take a closer look at
each of these income
leaches.

This way you can

recognize each of these
business-debilitating
drivers if or when they
rear their ugly head.

Ridding your life of

these is one of the key
factors separating the
frustrated entrepreneur
wannabe’s from the
happiest, most intelligent
and wealthiest business
owners on the planet.

Don’t believe me?

Just run down the

list of these friction
accelerants and think
about Bill Gates, or
Warren Buffet and decide
for yourself if you think
they’ve got any of these
going on in their business
and personal lives.

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 The Chain Reaction Ravaging
Business Owner’s Brains
Look, all the courses you’ve studied, all the ebooks you’ve read, and all the tele-
seminars you’ve attended won’t add up to an extra nickel in profits if you allow your brain
power to be reduced to mush.

But that’s exactly what’ll happen if you let the chain reaction of income friction
accelerants wreak havoc on your critical thinking processes.

That’s why it is critical now that we take a moment to get a handle on each of them.

This way as soon as any one of them rears its ugly head in your life – you’ll recognize
it quickly and yank it out of your life and kick it to the curb.

We’ve already covered the constant barrage of interruptions and what’s causing it so
let’s move on to why so many Internet marketers’ minds are being reduced all the way
down to the…

Attention Span of a Gnat

MIT Professor Ted Selker told the BBC during a recent interview “Our attention span
gets affected by the way we do things… if we spend time flitting from one thing to another…
we can get into a habit of not concentrating,"
And guess what?

Every time you get interrupted, every

time you get distracted you are actually
training yourself to reduce your overall
attention span.

You are actually building yourself a new

habit that continually reduces your ability to
learn, nose-dives your ability to understand the moderately complex, and could ultimately
drop your wealth earning potential into the depths of business failure.

It’s one of the biggest ironies of life isn’t it?

The habits we want to acquire are difficult to practice daily for a long enough period
of time for it to click into place.

Yet, the damaging, destructive, and debilitating habits are just the opposite. We
actually have to fight not to acquire them – because it’s so easy to fall into the daily routine
of unconsciously practicing those activities that build the bad habits.

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 The bad news is… without noticing it you’ve probably already reduced your attention
span significantly and that it’s already costing you money in sacrificed profits.

The good news is that it’s dead simple to regain what

you’ve lost.
The reason is somewhere deep in the recesses of your brain the pathways have
already been built up for you to have the longer attention span you had earlier before you
unknowingly started to shorten it.

Even better, you can build your attention span to levels you never thought possible
with a few simple yet fun activities I am going to show you later on in this doctrine.

The first step to getting your attention span back to the levels you had before is to
simply resist the interruptions and distractions that you have succumbed to in the past.

Too Many Options Will Paralyze,

Delude, Waste Time & Dissapoint
It’s obvious nearly everyone desires to have choices in life. And when we don’t get to
make the choice in an area we may consider as important in our lives – we often resist
because we enjoy our freedom and don’t like being forced to do anything.

But what almost no one realizes is that there’s a very real limit to the number of
choices we can enjoy. And when you cross that line, choice goes from good to bad awfully
fast.

Just because some choice is good, doesn’t mean that

even more choice is better.

The first effect of too many choices tends to be

paralysis. We have too many options to choose from so we
can’t choose at all. I see this all the time in Internet
marketing and with small business owners.

There are so many different ways to market

a business and so many opinions on the right way
to do it. What ends up happening is the
entrepreneur who goes out looking for the “right” way to do things often finds themselves
going down a rabbit trail of confusion which naturally leads to inaction.

And experts tell us they see this all the time – the more choices we have the greater
our belief that there is a perfect solution for us somewhere buried deep within the choices.

What follows is predictable… the stronger our belief that there is a perfect solution
out there (whatever perfect means). So, we end up searching for that perfect solution –
wasting more time than is really necessary or appropriate.

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 Unfortunately it doesn’t end there. Because the more convinced we are there’s a
perfect solution out there the less likely we will be happy with our final decision. Since it
never lives up to the false belief of the perfect solution.

If You Think More Is Better…

Than You Don’t Know Yourself As
Well As You Think
A consistent problem I see in many entrepreneurs is the conviction that more is
always better than less. But the truth is most people don’t really know themselves that
well (or course we all think we do). That’s why most people don’t know what’s good for
themselves.

So entrepreneurs go around accumulating more marketing tactics with the mistaken

belief that the business owner who is familiar with the most marketing tactics somehow
wins in business.

But the truth is the polar opposite. Because as the number of marketing tactics you
know climbs, mastery in any of them plummets. And online this is even more costly than
offline. Since online advertising more closely resembles an auction format than offline, a
competitor that’s mastered a certain marketing vehicle will force you to spend more money
for a worse result.

Bottom line – sometimes knowing too much can hurt – especially if your knowledge
acquisition has been somewhat haphazard in the past.

This personal example should resonate with you – whether in your personal life or
possibly your business life.

Since I spend a good part of my time optimizing businesses you would think when it
came to my own business I wouldn’t need any help whatsoever. But you would be wrong if
that’s what you thought.

I’ve always sought out advice when dealing with my own business challenges. And I
can’t think of a time I’ve ever regretted it. Actually just today I called Internet Marketing
Guru Mike Filsaime to get his opinion on important matter. I knew I was simply too close to
the situation to be objective and unbiased.

After giving me the advice I needed, Mike hit me up for some advice. When we were
wrapping up we actually spoke about this common experience. Both of us were
commenting how ironic it is that it’s always easier to see solutions in other people’s
challenges than it is our own.

58 | P a g e
 The Feature Frustration Bell Curve
Another great example of h
how often the “more is better than less” is wrong is a
phenomenon I’ve labeled “The Feature Frustration Bell Curve.”

I’ve made this mistake of w

wanting more and more features when buying
b technology
gadgets more times than I would like to admit.

I’d go into more detail but s

since I know my wife will be reading thiis I can’t. I simply
refuse to give her any additional ammunition to shoot down the next item on my wish list.

With that said…I finally did

d learn my lesson. I just have way too many
m unused
electronic devices littering my garrage and my home office. I gave up on them
t after wasting a
few hours trying to get them work king as they were advertised.

When you pack too many features in any single tool it gets incred dibly complicated to
master. If you’re a gadget freak liike me, it’s hard to face the cold hard re
eality that
technology hasn’t a device to do e everything that’s easy to operate.

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 From Invincibility to
Mental Exhaustion
Has this ever
happened to you…?
You have a great
weekend and you’ve made
some important
distinctions that you can’t
wait to get working on.

So you start your

Monday fresh and
rejuvenated, ready to tackle
what the world throws your
way and to start making
progress on what you
realized over the weekend.

Yet, by noon your

sense of invincibility has
started to fade into the
background as you are
forced to juggle all the
challenges, complexities,
and opportunities being
thrown your way.

And by the time the

day is over, you look back
and wonder why you didn’t
get any real high leverage
activities done or even
started. You’re exhausted,
yet you’ve got nothing to
point back to and say it
was all worth it. So you
chalk it up to a bad day,
and promise yourself
tomorrow will be different,
but it almost never is.

Not to worry, help is

on it’s way.

60 | P a g e
 So…When is TThe Next Segment Co
oming?
Having covered the areas w
where the Attention Age impacts our
lives and our business, I need to retreat again to work on the steps you’lll
need to take to not only overcomee this new enviroment, but also how to
position your compnay to prfit tre
emendously by it.

In the meantime, I’d like yo

ou to map out the following areas, and
how the are impacting you and your business:

Make a chart of the ttime you spend each day doing non-
productive tasks; em
mail, tinkering with technology to make iti
work, surfing the webb, watching TV… anything you do alone e
that isn’t moving you
ur business forward.
Set a schedule to do one task at a time; allowing only 30-600
d then put it away for completion at late
minutes to do it, and er time. Keep track
of interruptions that prevent you from fully focusing on the task.
Measure the Attentioon others are paying to your business… how many visitors
to your site, how manny opt-ins, sales, etc… mark each as de eclining or
increasing.
Stop taking in needleess information for a week- I’ve covered what the
parameters are.

I have my Acceleration sem minar coming up very soon, where a team m of experts will be
helping me teach the attendees th he principals and tactics to beat inform
mation overload, and
also how to get in front of the atte
ention curve with their businesses.

II’d also like you to listen in on Jay Ab

braham and me as
we exp
plain how this will impact you in the very near future,
and the steps you need to take now.

T
To access it, just register for free at
http://
/www.strategicprofits.com/jayprivate/

Alsoo, the dates of the summit are July 12, 13, 14, 15… I am
offering you an invitation to wh hat I’m sure will be recognized as the deefinitive event that
launched more online entreprene eurs into 6 figure, 7 figure, and even 8 figure
f businesses,
than anything else online or off.

Check out my over the top guarantee –and extremely generous pa ayment terms on the
inexpensive price we’ve already established. You can read all about it he
ere:
http://www.strategicprofits.com/ /live

61 | P a g e
 My Challenge To You:
Last, if YOU have a project or business that you're trying to get off the ground, I've
got an INCREDIBLE opportunity for you.

Imagine if you could call up several of the SHARPEST marketing minds on the
planet...

Imagine if you could suck every DROP of extremely profitable advice from their
skull...

Imagine if their advice was one-on-one and handed to YOU on a silver platter...

I'm talking about PERSONAL advice from Jay Abraham, John Carlton, Jeff Walker,
Mike Filsaime and myself, Rich Schefren. If you need help with your blog or traffic, I’ll also
bring in the best in the business to help you.

These guys typically charge fees such as $1250, $2000, and even $5000 an HOUR!

Imagine if YOU could get ALL OF THEM to work on YOUR BUSINESS?

You could literally implement ONE idea from each of these marketing masters and
triple your profits. Seriously. I call these guys up on a REGULAR basis and ask for help
with my business. And their advice is usually worth SIX and in some cases SEVEN figures.

My question to you is this...

Do you have ANY idea how much THEIR attention would be worth to YOUR
business?

Well here's the deal...

I want to PROVE how powerful the ideas in my latest report are. In fact, I've decided
to create a contest. This is UNLIKE any other contest you’ve seen

If you WIN first prize, you'll get PERSONAL one-on-one one-hour call for advice with
me and each of the marketing experts that I referenced above. If you've got a business or an
idea for a business, getting on the phone and having these guys DISECT your project is
PRICELESS.

At a minimum, it's worth about $25,000.

But even if you don't win "first" prize, there are 5 runner-up prizes which pay $1000
CASH in your pocket!

So what do you have to do to win?

62 | P a g e
 The contest is simple.
You've read my latest report. It's all about how ATTENTION can make you money.

Now, I want to prove it.

The person (or team) who can create the MOST attention about my latest,
groundbreaking report (and my upcoming seminar) will win first prize.

You can write press releases...

You can write blog posts...
You can write forum posts...
You can call a radio station...
You can mail your list...
You can upload a video to YouTube...
You can do almost anything...
BUT the goal is to show how you can create ATTENTION.
If you can demonstrate that you understand the concepts in my report, and you
create a palpable BUZZ on the Internet, you could win first prize, or one of the runner up
prizes.

So there it is. A change to win PERSONAL advice with several marketing masters. A
chance to show off your marketing chops. A chance to win cash. A chance to impress me
with your marketing skill.

Read the report again and then spread the word about the report (and the seminar if
you wish).

Then, document what you did and complete the form at:
http://www.strategicprofits.com/getattention

You have until July 8th. After that, winners will be chosen.

To Higher Profits,

Rich Schefren
Strategic Profits

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