Monday July 16th, 2007: Issue #823
I spent an hour this morning watching a YouTube video of an American Presidential hopeful talking to an audience at Google HQ.
Dr. Ron Paul is a US Congressman who is running on a radically different set of policies. Unlike pretty much every other politician I’ve ever heard of, his argument is for less government, less federal intervention, less control and more freedom. Ultimately he seems to want to dismantle the machine of government in favor of getting back to the letter of the American Constitution.
American politics is not directly any of my business, and I’m sure that there are a lot of holes in his rather optimistic ideals, but the principle of what he is suggesting is worth listening to.
Here in Britain, government is increasingly hands-on. Perhaps not as much as in America quite yet, but we are going that way. Congressman Paul’s ideas may or may not be politically naive, but they are worth listening to.
I’m not particularly political, and the generally self-serving utterances of politicians (especially foreign ones) usually leave me cold. But for a hour this morning I was amazed to find myself watching Ron Paul and thinking that maybe some of what he said made sense.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCM_wQy4YVg
I realize that some people may have strong views on either side of the argument, so why not express them on the Kickstart forum? I’ll post this as a thread there so we can have our own debate if anyone is interested. All I ask is that we try to keep the tone respectful.
http://kickstarttodayforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=589
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True to my word I made one Kickstart reader $225 better off.
By a wonderful stroke of coincidence, 7 Kickstarters sent me their affiliate link for Mike Filsaime’s 777 product. I put all the names into a hat and picked one at random.
Paul Chilvers-Grierson got the commission - well done Paul (don’t spend it all at once)!
And now I’m looking forward to the parcel arriving so I can start to view the DVDs.
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Today’s power thought looks like a cooking lesson, but there is a sound business point. It’s one I hope that all Kickstarters will take to heart.
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I think that pretty much everyone who has read it agrees that the fifth Harry Potter book was the worst one. The story is very dark and Harry is very angry (not the innocent youth of the earlier books), but the real problem was the writing.
It read as if JK Rowling had become too powerful and wasn’t prepared to accept any editing by her publishers. So the book was unnecessarily long and rambling. Not at all the tight, exciting style we had become used to. (Thankfully her old style came back in book six).
Against that backdrop I was nervous that the new movie would be disappointing too.
There was no need for concern. It is a great movie. The story was pruned and streamlined into what it should have been in the first place. It is still dark, and Harry is still an angry young man, but you can now get to the reasons.
Each Harry Potter film is eagerly anticipated, but this one really lives up to its hype.
Excellent!
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An Inspirational Thought
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Everyone must know by now about Kyle MacDonald, the Canadian man who hit the Internet by storm last year.
Perhaps his name will mean more if I mention that it all began with one red paperclip.
I’ve just finished reading the paperback book he wrote that documents how he traded one red paperclip for a three bedroom house.
What a wonderful story it is! It shows, above all, that no matter how cynical we have all become in this often unpleasant world, there is room for wild ideas that sweep all before them.
Kyle MacDonald’s success isn’t something that can be directly repeated. That’s not the point at all. But it does show that crazy, positive, fun ideas can still pop up when you least expect them.
What will your one red paperclip idea be?
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Who do you know who would love Kickstart Today?
Don’t keep it to yourself - send them to
http://www.kickstartdaily.com today!
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The Quote of the Day
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Carl Shapiro said,
“Positive feedback makes the strong grow stronger and the weak grow weaker.”
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Today’s Power Thought
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I was talking to Delia over the weekend (yes, after 30 years we still do that!) about something that happened recently at the school she used to teach at.
Apparently one of the teachers asked for volunteers from the parents to come into school to show the children (7 year olds) how to bake fairy cakes. Brits will know what fairy cakes are, but I don’t know if the term translates - briefly they are like small muffins, baked in individual paper cases.
The idea was to get parents involved and to show the children how individual foodstuffs (flour, sugar, eggs etc) are combined and cooked to make something very different.
Only after a lot of prodding did one parent come forward - on condition that the school paid for all the ingredients. Fair enough, it is a poor area. And the cost would be less than £5 ($10) anyway.
The parent turned up with boxes of ‘just add an egg’ cake mix costing almost £20 ($40). She missed the point entirely and cost the school far more than necessary. The kids got some cakes to eat, but learned nothing about how the different ingredients work together.
What has this cooking story got to do with anything? Especially business?
Quite a lot.
Everywhere we look lately, and especially online, people want instant, no-work solutions. They don’t want to find out all the individual things that are needed to make a business successful, they just want to be given a ‘just-add-an-egg’ packet mix that will give them a perfect result every time.
No matter that the instant result usually costs more in the long run.
No matter that the instant result doesn’t teach them anything.
No matter that they become so reliant on the packet mix that they don’t even realize that there is another way.
And, no matter that despite the hype and the breathless prose on the packet, hand made cakes with the best ingredients and no artificial additives always end up tasting far better than the ready-mix alternatives.
Making cakes from a packet, or building a business from a box is enticing. It appeals to the lazy in all of us.
But can you still be called a cake maker when the packet is not available anymore?
Or a business person when your instant solution stops working?
My point, even if the metaphor has been stretched, is that instant solutions are great in their place, but don’t imagine that they are a long term answer. The only long term route to real, lasting success, whether as a business person, and Internet entrepreneur or as a cake maker, is to learn the fundamentals. Understand what works together to produce what result, and why.
That way you’ll adapt and thrive while your instant solution peers are wondering what changed.
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Fascinating Facts
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The Romany people were originally believed to have come from Egypt - hence their nickname, Gypsies.
However, analysis of the Romani language suggest that their real geographic origin was probably the Punjab region of India.