Monday November 5th, 2007: Issue #855
Last week’s traveling editions of Kickstart came to a grinding halt when I got to Las Vegas. It seems that the better the hotel, the worse it’s Internet connection.
Small hotels and motels across America are able to offer free wireless Internet no matter how remote they may be. There may be no cell phone coverage and the carpets may have seem better days, but getting online is never a problem.
Find yourself in a so-called ‘top’ hotel, however, and the situation is much different.
Last year we found that the only hotel we stayed in that actually charged for Internet access was the Hilton in New York City.
Last week it was the turn of the third largest hotel in the world, the Luxor in Las Vegas, to disappoint.
Wireless Internet? Forget it. The rooms had an ethernet cable that cost $12.99 per day. Except that the one in our room didn’t work. An hour on hold to the ’service provider’ followed by an engineer’s visit did no good at all. Our cable was dead and the hotel was too full to put us into a different room.
Hence the lack of communication from me to you. Still, I expect you appreciated the rest! 
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The entire trip was very successful from both a business and pleasure point of view - and packed with high spots. I talked in the last traveling edition about the WOW moments we’d had up to then, but they just carried on! The Hoover Dam… WOW! Driving over the mountains and seeing Las Vegas laid out like a model below us … WOW! Seeing Elton John’s Red Piano Show at the Colosseum theater at Cesar’s Palace … WOW! (And more!)
It is hard to imagine now how we packed so much into a single week and it’s probably good to be home for a rest!
There is no ‘probably’ about one thing though - it is definitely good to back home with my family. Even the most fun week’s vacation has its tough moments and seems like a very long time when you are away from the important people.
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The Luxor was disappointing in many ways other than the lack of connectivity. I’ve been staying there for the past 10 years and have always enjoyed the experience, but this time the place seems to have got very tired. Everywhere you look there is building work going on - mostly constructing new bars. The delightful sense of space and openness that the place used to have is being eroded as walls are being built and new places to separate the punters from their money are being developed.
It’s a shame. I don’t think I’ll go back there again.
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Another thing that is peculiar about Las Vegas is that the ubiquitous slot machines have stopped taking coins.
I used to enjoy strolling around dropping a quarter in machines that took my fancy, but now you have to feed the machine with dollar bills (or larger denomination notes). And if you win, the machine prints out a ticket that you have to take to the cashier’s cage to redeem.
Naturally, the cashier’s cages are hidden in the furthest reach of the casino, miles from the slot machines.
Vegas has always been greedy, but now it seems to have become positively rapacious.
I wonder though whether this new ‘coinless slots’ policy is very effective? In the past I’ve seen people holding their cups of coins while they feed their favorite machines. I myself have automatically dug into my pocket for a quarter or two almost every times I’ve passed a bank of slots. And typically the machines were always full of people enjoying the thrill of hearing coins chug out when a winner hit lucky.
This time I didn’t play a single slot. There were no winning jackpot noises because tickets printing don’t have the same exciting appeal. And the number of people actually bothering to play the slots was way down.
Come on Las Vegas - sometimes you can get so greedy you just put people off playing.
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Jet lag is still doing odd things to my body. Hopefully it will pass soon, but my poor old brain is still feeling very blurry and I have a tendency to fall asleep at random times of the day.
But maybe that’s just me!
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I’ve come back to discover that Kickstart is having major problems with Yahoo. It seems that Yahoo is failing to deliver to about 43% of subscribers who have Yahoo email addresses.
Worse, about the same percentage of Yahoo addresses who try to sign up for Kickstart never receive their confirmation email from me and so never get their subscription activated.
Other ezine writers are reporting the same problem with Yahoo and many of us are considering banning Yahoo addresses from signing up in the first place.
That would be an extreme solution and a sad day. But other than telling people ’sorry, you can’t sign up with a Yahoo address, please use a different email account’, I don’t know how to solve the problem.
If you have any ideas, I’d be very willing to listen to alternatives.
And if you are a Yahoo subscriber who happens to be lucky enough to still receive Kickstart, please consider sending me an alternative (non Yahoo) email address. Googlemail is free and seems to be as good as any right now. After all, if something as innocuous as Kickstart can be blocked without your permission or any warning, you have to wonder what else Yahoo is preventing you from receiving.
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An Inspirational Thought
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The creativity exercise a couple of weeks ago was a huge success. Loads of people posted to the forum and even more sent me their work by email. Most added a comment or two to the effect that they loved doing the exercise.
It isn’t meant to be a competition, so I won’t comment on or judge individual entries. The only prize is the awakening of your creative spark.I really hope that you’ll feed that tiny spark, fan the flame and create an inferno of creativity burning inside of you.
Today’s exercise will follow the same pattern as before: I’ll give you three words and your mission, should you choose to accept it, will be to write for five minutes (and five minutes only) without pausing for conscious thought. Just let you mind create a stream of consciousness that includes all three words.
Who knows, you may write the opening paragraph of the next bestselling novel!
Today’s spark-igniting words are: chocolate; dove; fur.
This time, please post your work to the forum at this address: http://kickstarttodayforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=1622#1622
I’m looking forward to reading what you come up with!
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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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James Lane Allen said,
“In all human affairs there are efforts, there are results, and the strength of the effort is the measure of the result.”
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Today’s Power Thought
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I’m going to make an assumption about you. If I’m wrong about you, ignore this section, but I bet I’m right.
There are things that you would dearly like to do or achieve in your life that you haven’t even started to take action on because you have a nagging doubt that you are capable or worthy.
Please read that again and if you can honestly say, no, that doesn’t apply to me, then skip to the quote of the day.
Still here? I thought you would be. You are a human being, after all.
Now let’s get real and look at three ways you can begin to overcome that doubt and start to release the achiever that is locked away inside of you.
1. Know thine enemy.
What is your doubt, specifically? Are you afraid of success? Paralyzed by fear of failure? Concerned about what other people think? Or something else.
We all hold back from taking the action to do something because of the negative voice in our head that provides us with the excuse we need for inaction. Unfortunately, most of us never look deep enough into our own feelings to know what that excuse really is.
Think about it. Dwell on it. Really peel away the layers of nonsense and try to get to the real heart of the matter.
Only when you know what’s stopping you can you really start to see the excuses for what they are: subconscious self-protection mechanisms that most often have no basis in reality.
2. Know yourself.
You can change, but do you really want to? When your excuses are laid bare and revealed to be illusionary roadblocks, the thing that remains in your path is your own desire.
Is your dream really in tune with who you are and will achieving it really make you the person you want to be?
In all likelihood the answer is yes, but if the things that you must do to succeed are too far out of line with who you are as a person, the result is likely to be unpredictable at best or unsuccessful at worst.
“People will only consistently do who they are” is a strange expression, but when you think it through it is right on the money.
3. Know your route.
You’ll never reach your destination if you are lost before you set out. If you don’t know the route to get you to where you want to be, you might as well be lost in a maze: reaching the center will be entirely a matter of luck.
Don’t leave your success to chance. Minutes spent planning your route will save you hours or days of travel time. Your route to success needs a clearly laid out progression path so that at any time you’ll know where you are on your journey, what you have achieved and what is still to be tackled.
Planning your success route will most likely be impossible for you to do alone. If you don’t know how to succeed already, you can hardly be expected to break new ground without a guide.
Education is important: books and ebooks, courses and worksheets - all can help you to follow a proven path that has been shown to work. A mentor or coach is even better because he or she should not only know the best route for you to follow but should know you well enough to tailor the journey to your specific personality and needs.
Whatever your dreams and aspirations may be, when you understand the doubts that have held you back, acknowledged the realities of your own personality makeup and really planned your most effective route, success is just a few short actions away.
Dream on … but work towards waking up and turning those dreams into reality.
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Fascinating Facts
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The oldest known living thing in the world is a humble creosote bush that is growing in California’s Mojave Desert. Scientists estimate that it is at least 10,000 years old.