gobuysoft.com

Hey guys!

I just felt like making a quick video for you all. So I whipped up a video about my LiveScribe Pen—the new way I write.

The pen is designed so that it knows exactly what you’re writing, saves it to the computer, and even records the audio happening around you (if you are taking notes on a meeting, for example).

The coolest thing is that the software even converts your written text into ASCII text, so you can copy and paste it into MS Word or anything else. This photo shows the difference between what I wrote and what it’s converted into.

Anyway, I put together a quick video for you to check it out. You can get it at Amazon: Livescribe 8 GB Echo Smartpen Pro Pack

Video – The LiveScribe Pen, a revolutionary way to write is a post from: Hack The System

Hack The System

A new jobs board has been launched as part of the new web site for the UK Game Developers trade association, TIGA. Built on the engine of DS Interactive Ltd’s very own Games Job Board the site boasts 248 senior level and 182 mid level games industry jobs in the UK (175), China (45), Germany (31), Sweden (23), Irealnd (22), and Canada (19) and many other countries. Vist the new site at http://www.tiga.org/jobs

Game Careers .BIZ – Video Games School, Jobs in Gaming.

In the summer of 2011, DJ Maneesh and DJ Rachman moved to Berlin to attempt to become DJs in Berlin. They had no experience.

We filmed this in our attempt to become well known DJs in just 90 days. In our first episode, Building the Mobile Disco, we built a system that allowed us to throw parties anywhere in the city.

In the second episode, Destination: Subway Station Rave, we showed the sort of parties we threw in Metro stations and on the street.

Today, you’ll see our failed Bicycle Cart, where we attempted to improve our outdoor party center—miserably. Check it out. PLEASE: Share this video with your friends!

Ep. 3 – Building the Failed Bicycle Cart. 90 Days to Becoming a Berlin DJ is a post from: Hack The System

Hack The System

Welcome to the inaugural episode of the Hack The System show!

You should subscribe to this show on iTunes.

Starting today, you’re going to get access to interviews with the worlds’ foremost experts on blogging, lifestyle design, traveling, and life/system hacking. In short–you’re going to learn how to kick ass.

In this episode, I sit down with Jonathan Mead of Illuminated Mind, where he blows my mind with his ideas about joint webinars and building a brand. This interview literally changed the way I do business.

Jonathan teaches people how to change their lives through his Trailblazer course, where he helps students discover, and implement, their passions. Check out his awesome Trailblazer video.

Listen to the podcast here:

Watch it here:

This podcast can be seen on iTunes. Click here to follow it via iTunes (and automatically sync it to your iPod)

00:25 – Welcome Jonathan Mead!
1:05 – Importance of branding in business and in life
2:10 – The feeling of getting success stories from people you’ve inspired
3:10 – Feeling trapped in your job
3:45 – How to escape feeling trapped
6:00 – What was the first step for Jonathan towards finding his passion
7:00 – What did Jonathan do before blogging?
8:50 – Mentors that help you design your life
9:55 – How Jonathan helped one woman achieve her passion
10:55 – How to reach out and network with people who are more powerful than you
12:00 – more tips on networking
12:50 – How Jonathan built his readership by leveraging others’ communities
13:30 – Offering your skills for free to network

From 15:50 – 25:00 == Some of the best tactics for networking an generating revenue that I’ve ever heard

15:50 – How to reverse engineer situations to meet important people
16:30 – Specific tactics for making important people notice you
18:40 – How Jonathan built such a large email list
21:05 – Jonathan’s current tactics for success: building partnerships
21:20 – Doing co-webinars (This advice BLEW MY MIND)
22:00 – Exactly how to leverage other peoples’ audiences to make money and build your subscriber list
25:00 – Getting excellent design for ebooks and web sites
25:20 – For people who are just getting started, what’s the next step to become successful?
26:00 – The importance and how to of running your blog like a business
27:40 – What about building an online business/passion without blogging?
28:50 – Jonathan talks about his product, Trailblazer

Hack The System Podcast: Episode 1 with Jonathan Mead is a post from: Hack The System

Hack The System

Journal entry – January 15. 99.5% of people.

“I’ve failed my New Year’s Resolution . I wish I could do better. I just don’t have enough willpower.”

Have you ever set a goal you didn’t achieve? Ever tried a New Year’s Resolution that didn’t stick?

What separates the 0.5% from the 99.5%? What makes some people succeed in building new, sustainable habits—-but almost everyone else fail?

I’m going to reveal to you surprising research about habit change–what influences success, what causes failure, and specifically, what you should do to build a successful new habit.

But first, I’m going to share with you a personal story, where I discovered the power of context on habit change

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then is not an act but a habit” – Aristotle

How living in a cave turned me into a blogger

October, 2011. I decided to hike for 28 days into the wilderness with no backpack, no tent, no sleeping bag.

Actually, let’s go back further. Sophomore year, college. I never could get an assignment done on time. I had to request late days often. I would procrastinate on every assignment, leaving me with a required all-night study session on the day before the assignment was due.

I took my advisor’s advice and visited a psychiatry clinic. I was diagnosed with ADHD. Now I had a name for my problem. I had pills. I thought that they would magically make me focus on getting my work done.

Boy was I mistaken.

Instead of focusing on finishing my work, the pills did the opposite: they made me hard-core focus on distractions. Now, I would Skype chat with 8 windows open, wasting my focus on unnecessary tasks.

The pills were making me focus on whatever I was doing. In this case, I was simply focusing on the wrong thing.

Back now to the wilderness. I’d been trying to start my blog for over two years, but I could never get words written on the page. My empty blog sat online, since 2008, just waiting for me to feed it content.

I blamed it on ADHD. I blamed it on being busy. 

But in October, 2011, I was in a cave with just a little bit of food, a pen, and a moleskine. No distractions, no facebook, no notifications—just a pen, paper, and a grove of prickly pear cactii.

I woke up on the first day at sunrise when a mouse startled me by walking by my face. I got out of bed, walked outside, drank some water, and sat down by the river with my Moleskine and pen.

The words just flowed. I didn’t have a clock so I can only measure the amount of time I wrote with the sun: I wrote from sunrise till sunset. For 4 days. Almost 3000 words a day, over 1.5 months of blog content in four days.

And now that I’m back in society, with a computer (that allows me to type 10x faster) I barely manage to write 500 words a day.

Why? It’s a function of context.

How heroin addicts in Vietnam and your productivity habits are the same

Everyone knows the horrible effects of heroin addiction. Once someone starts taking heroin, it’s almost impossible to quit—and those who form a recurring habit will likely never quit.

So why didn’t heroin-using Vietnam vets relapse when they returned to the USA?

A study from the Washington School of Medicine concluded that very few heroin-using veteran relapsed when they returned to the USA—and those who did were most likely to have been illicit drug users before ever arriving in Vietnam. These vets weren’t addicted to the chemicals in heroin—they were addicted to the experience of heroin in a specific, situational context.

In the same vein, you think that you are in control of what you do. You think that when you fail, it’s a failure of your willpower.

But the fact is, you don’t even realize the influence your environment has on you. Did you know that obesity spreads through a network of friends? Happiness also spreads throughout a social network. Your situation determines your choices as much, or more, than your own personal choices and willpower.

“So how can I use this to improve my habits?”

You now know that your context influences who you are. So you need to make a choice—are you willing to create systems that will help you achieve your goals, or will you mindlessly try to make things happen that just don’t work?

Here are a few of the best methods for improving your context.

1. Make better friends- You MUST associate yourself with people who help you achieve your goals. Everyone has had a depressed friend or family member, who makes you more depressed the more time you spend with them.You are the average of your five closest friends. So make sure that the people you associate with are helping you get closer to your goals, rather than pushing you away from them.
2. Automate systems to increase productive time – It’s easy to say you ‘should save more money.’ But it’s much, much harder to force yourself to send money to your savings account every month. Why not automate it, so that your bank account automatically deposits money in your savings account/IRA every month?Some other systems that I’ve created – Hiring a virtual assistant to call me and remind me to do my tasks. Hiring others to do my work for me, so I can focus on specializing on important tasks. Hiring a personal trainer to force me to go to the gym.
3. Work on projects/goal with a partner – Life isn’t a solitary thing. The best businesses have cofounders, and if you are working alone, you are fighting a losing battle. In anything, it’s better to have a partner.
4. Use 30 day habits, and Tiny Habit mechanisms, to make new habits stick – My old professor from Stanford, B.J. Fogg, runs the Captology Lab, which researches behavior change using digital tech. He now runs a program called TinyHabits—a method to develop any new habit. Any new habit takes three steps:
   1) Make it tiny – Any habit must be incredibly small. Floss one tooth. Walk for 3 minutes. nothing more. Once you get started, it’s easy to continue—so just make yourself start
   2) Find a spot – Your new habit must go somewhere in your existing routine. Trigger it by forcing yourself to do something right after finishing something else. After brushing, floss one tooth. After lunch, walk for three minutes. Etc. This is called ‘anchoring’
   3) Train the cycle – If it’s a very small habit (i.e. you followed step 1), then you simply need to start executing to make it automatic. If you are finding this too difficult, go back to step one and make the habit simpler.

You are basically training your body to associate the existing habit (the anchor) with a new habit. Thus, continuously do the small habit, until it becomes natural. Then you can try running more, or flossing your whole mouth.

Read this article by BJ Fogg for a more in-depth explanation.

To hack a better life, you need to build good habits. Follow the steps above, and build an awesome life.

How Heroin Addiction In Vietnam And Your Productivity Habits Are Identical is a post from: Hack The System

Hack The System

If I spent as much time working as I do trying to find ways to beat the system, I’d be a millionaire by now.

Fortunately for you, I’ve done all the hard work. I know how to fly around the world for free, without spending a dime on tickets. I know how to find offices in every country of the world. I know how to become a famous DJ in just 90 days.

And for some reason, others seem to want to know the same.

So I’ve created an ebook for you called “Taking Advantage Of The System.” It’s only 10 pages long, but it’s action packed with specific steps to

1) Get a free roundtrip plane ticket, anywhere in the world.
2) Get free office space in almost every single country you could imagine.

All you have to do is sign up below, and I’ll send it to you instantly.

And hey! If you could share this page on facebook, I’ll love you forever.

Check out some emails I’ve already gotten related to it:

awesome guide, I’m really digging it. Clear, well written, and actionable.

Hey man, the ebook was awesome, thank you so much. I’ll pass it on!

Take Advantage Of The System-A Free Travel Hacking Report is a post from: ManeeshSethi.com – Lifestyle Design, SEO, and Living the Digital Nomad Life

ManeeshSethi.com – Lifestyle Design, SEO, and Living the Digital Nomad Life

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Protected: Hack The System Podcast: Welcome to Episode 1 with Jonathan Mead is a post from: ManeeshSethi.com – Lifestyle Design, SEO, and Living the Digital Nomad Life

ManeeshSethi.com – Lifestyle Design, SEO, and Living the Digital Nomad Life

When I talk to girls at bars and clubs, I love to A/B test.

When I’m asked “What do you do,” I give different responses. And I measure which one impresses the girl the most.

Blogger? No one cares. DJ? Ooh, that’s interesting. Traveler? Tell me more.

Internationally best selling author? “Here’s my number. Call me ”

I wrote my first book when I was 13 years old. I’m 24 now, so I’ve been in the industry for 11 years.

And I know how hard it is to get started.

I get emails every day from aspiring authors who see my old tv-spots, asking about how to get published, how to write a bestselling book. And I’m tired of not having a perfect response for them.

So, I am supremely excited that Chris Guillebeau and David Fugate wrote this ebook for me. Just announced today: The Unconventional Guide To Publishing, a MASSIVE 45,000 word ebook about the publishing industry. How to break in, how to read a contract, how to deal with promotion, and much more.

It’s 88 pages of fucking AWESOME material.

Chris and David were nice enough to send me a review copy, which I spent all day reading, and here is my review:

Holy. F’ing. Shit. This is amazing.

This is the guide I wish I had when I wrote my first book. It would have saved me months.

The Unconventional Guide To Publishing distills everything down to exactly what you need to break into the publishing industry. Here are some of the highlights I found.

• How do advances work? (Page 10)
• What EXACTLY are publishers looking for? The Compelling Idea, The Audience, and The Author (20-25)
• How to write a book proposal (Page 27)
• The steps to finding an agent (and are they really necessary?) (Page 37)
• Specific, scripted emails to send to an agent (Page 43)
• The process of pitching (Page 54)
• The art of writing an excellent book (Page 73)

As you can see, this book is FULL of awesome information. But, get this.

There’s even more.

Chris told me that, just for the first week (until Friday), he’s offering these special bonuses.

I would feel incredibly bad not writing this post today, because I don’t want you to miss out on these bonuses. In fact, I’m considering purchasing the package myself—even though I received a free copy of the book—just for the bonuses.

If you grab the Unconventional Guide to Publishing by Friday, you will get some ridiculous bonuses. This comes directly from the big man, Chris Guillebeau, himself.

Guys—there is also a 100% guarantee. If you ever wanted to start publishing a book, get this guide. It’s the book I wish I had written.

Get The Unconventional Guide Here. Click the Buy It button on the following page to get your hands on his crazy good resource.

Get Published, Write Your First Book (with Chris Guillebeau) is a post from: ManeeshSethi.com – Lifestyle Design, SEO, and Living the Digital Nomad Life

ManeeshSethi.com – Lifestyle Design, SEO, and Living the Digital Nomad Life

…so have an awesome New Years.

Be ready for some awesome stuff in the upcoming year

It’s been a great 2011… is a post from: ManeeshSethi.com – Lifestyle Design, SEO, and Living the Digital Nomad Life

ManeeshSethi.com – Lifestyle Design, SEO, and Living the Digital Nomad Life

My favorite thing about the end of the year? Reading the end-of-the-year blog posts from my favorite bloggers. Today, I’m pleased to show you my favorite summaries of what went right and what went wrong in 2011, along with some goals for 2012.

1) MarsDorian.com – Read my blogging lessons of 2011 and avoid sucking as much as I did

Mars is one of those guys you have to meet to really know. I met him in Berlin, during our 4 Hour Workweek Meetups in Berlin, and I realized how amazingly driven he is—he really wants to be the best artist in the (internet) world. It’s quite inspiring.

From the second you land on his page, you’ll see what I mean. Beautiful designs, cartoons, and art everywhere. He’s interviewed some amazing people, and produced some awesome projects.

What’s awesome about his 2011-summary list?  It’s the sincerity you hear in his writing. For example, here is the biggest lesson he took away from this year:

Lesson: Don’t like your customers, luv them so much it makes your partner jealous like hell. Gary Vaynerchuk said the most important thing you can for your biz is giving a fuck – CARING about your customers as much as you can. I agree. Don’t blow your work, BLOW their minds.

Oh hey, I just noticed he mentioned me in this article! I didn’t even realize that before doing this post. Well hot damn, thanks Mars! I wish my name was as cool as yours!

Check out Mars’s End-Of-The-Year post here: MarsDorian.com – Read my blogging lessons of 2011 and avoid sucking as much as I did

2) The Art Of Non Conformity – 2011 Annual Review - Business Lessons

Chris, Chris, Chris, seriously, when are you going to learn? You can’t keep writing content this awesome—you’re messing it up for the rest of us!

Literally 100% of the conversations I have these days about lifestyle design ends up with Chris G entering the conversation. I love this guy—from his first manifesto about world domination, till his ridiculously awesome Frequent Flyer Challenge, till his perennially awesome Annual Review posts, I can’t get enough of this guy. I was lucky enough to meet him in Portland this year, and it killed me that he is even more honest and softspoken than the friendliest baby ocelot you could imagine.

Chris’s yearly Annual Reviews (redundant much?) influenced me to do the same, since 2009. I even keep an Excel Spreadsheet of my Annual Reviews, courtesy of his .xls template. His stuff is awesome, and his annual reviews are awe-inspiring.

Check out all 5 parts of his annual review. Me being the business man that I am, I enjoyed his business lessons the most. The biggest takeaways I got from this year’s business annual review were the following:

Monthly Pricing: A Good Thing – … My first recommendation to anyone creating digital assets would be: offer your products or services in a (limited) range of prices. Your customers will like this, and you’ll like it too—because people will spend more. But now I have a strong second recommendation: find a way to ensure that at least some part of your income arrives every month, regardless of how popular everything else is.

Additionally, I enjoyed this:

Webinars: Quick, Easy, Profitable – …That’s when I had the thought: instead of building a huge program, why not find a way to launch something quickly? Every day, people ask me the same questions over and over. Two very common ones are “How can I get started with traveling?” and “How can I work from the road?” Of course, we answer those questions in considerable detail with the Unconventional Guides products, but not everyone wants a whole product.

Check out Chris’s End-Of-The-Year post here: The Art Of Non Conformity – 2011 Annual Review - Business Lessons

3) TheMinimalists.com - A Year End Review: How Everything Can Change in a Year

I got to meet Ryan and Joshua just a few weeks ago, and despite making myself look like an ass by jumping to monetization-speak before even getting to know them, these guys were simply smooth. They went out of their way to come to San Francisco and be interviewed, even though they were heading on a long road trip the day after. The nicest guys you’ll ever meet.

Joshua’s a fiction writer as well, and his new short story collection is a page-turner—the type of book that made me take a bath, pull out the iPad Kindle app, and try not to drop it in the water during a 4 hour reading session. Check out and buy Joshua’s collection, Falling While Sitting Down.

These guys went from ‘not being able to spell HTML’ (they’ve said that to me every single time we’ve met) to having a blog with 100,000 monthly unique visitors. In just 8 months. Color me jealous. (Black and white?)

Anyway, here are some of the takeaways I winnowed from their amazing story.

A year ago we were really inspired by Leo Babauta, Colin Wright, Joshua Becker, Julien Smith, and others like them. And we still are inspired by them. A year later we’ve met these guys, been featured on their amazing websites, and established great relationships with them and dozens of similar people who have helped shaped our lives in meaningful ways.

A year ago we had spreadsheets full of goals, and we would beat ourselves up when we didn’t achieve those goals. Now Ryan lives with one goal at a time, and Joshua has no goals at all.

A year ago there was a considerable amount of discontent in our lives. Now we’re happy, and when we look in the rearview mirror, everything is different.

Brilliant. Check out The Minimalists’ End-Of-The-Year post here: TheMinimalists.com - A Year End Review: How Everything Can Change in a Year

4) Location 180 – 10 Things I Rocked in 2011 (And How You Can Rock Them Too)

Sean and I simply click.

It’s rare to meet someone who is absolutely on the same page as you about everything. It’s happened only a few times before with me—with Tynan, and Rachman, and maybe just a few other people. But Sean and I just understood each other.

His blog always restates exactly what I’m feeling. His posts come from the same place as my posts—everything makes sense. It also helps that he bought me a delicious happy hour burger in Portland after getting me drunk at an ale festival.

So when I read his End-Of-The-Year Summary, it felt like the exact summary I was about to write. So instead of writing it, I let him do it for me.

3) I established my position as a relative expert. After talking with my buddy Nick about this concept a lot this year, I’ve worked to establish myself as a relative expert when it comes to location independence and running a real business from anywhere. You don’t have to know everything, you just have to know more than the dude hiring you. Once you make this mental shift, a legitimate business suddenly becomes much more attainable.

How you can rock it: Chances are you already are. What do you know more about than 95% of the population? It can be anything. Use that as a jumping off point for any new business ideas. Don’t discount your experience, as you’d be amazed what viable business opportunities you can find in very small niches.

Check out Sean’s End-Of-The-Year post here:  Location 180 – 10 Things I Rocked in 2011 (And How You Can Rock Them Too) . Check out his other summary posts as well: 10 Things I’ve Sucked At With My Business in 2011 and My 10 Coolest Offices Of 2011.

5) ZenHabits.com – The Essential Zen Habits of 2011

Leo is the king (monk? Shaolin master?) of the minimalist movement. His blog is hugely popular, and through his ability to find zen in the midst of a busy world (San Francisco) and a busy family (6 kids!!!), Leo has inspired tons of people to find peace and relax.

So, the style of Leo’s end of the year post should come as no surprise: simple, easy, and clear. There isn’t much analysis, but just a solid list of accomplishment’s, successes, and favorite posts.

Some of the accomplishments that impressed me the most:

Zen Habits grew from 200,000 to more than 230,000 subscribers, had more than 12 million unique visitors, and was named by TIME magazine as one of the Top 50 websites in the world.

I became fitter than ever in my life, with a simple vegan diet and the habit of daily exercise.

Leo mentions some of his favorite posts of the year, including:

1. How I Changed My Life, In Four Lines
2. Best Procrastination Tip Ever
3. 38 Life Lessons I’ve Learned in 38 Years

Great stuff from a great man. Check out Leo’s End-Of-The-Year post here: ZenHabits.com – The Essential Zen Habits of 2011

6) LeoDimilo.com - 2011 and Goals for 2012

I don’t know much about Leo Dimilo, but I do follow his blog through my RSS reader. He’s an Internet Marketer, so much of what he experienced this year resonated with me.

So when I read the summary of his year, I found that many of the Things He Did Well are things that I want to do well. For example:

I started networking with other SEO professionals- 3 years ago, I did SEO but didn’t really know anyone.  Fast forward to today and I have fostered some good relationships with online marketing professionals like myself.   This year has been a great year for networking with others in the marketing world for me.  Along the way, I have made friends with what I would consider some heavy hitters in the SEO world.   

What about the things he learned? Well, they are clearly things that I have been learning as well.

Helping People is way cooler than making a pile of cash

You will make far more money with brand than with SEO

If you’re running a blog, and trying to learn SEO or Marketing, check out Leo’s post: it’s chock full of great advice. Check it out here: LeoDimilo.com - 2011 and Goals for 2012

7) LisSowerbutts.com - 2012 Goals – Introduction

I’m not going to lie: I really respect Lis for dealing with such a difficult last name. I don’t think I could handle it.

Lis and I got into passive income strategies at the same time, when Hubpages were king and everything we learned, we learned from The Keyword Academy (still an awesome resource, btw). Lis has been continuing her passive income journey ever since, while I’ve moved into a different world.

I respect the work she’s put in, and her end of the year post is pure truth–you can see that she isn’t hiding anything. She really respects what she has done in the past year, but totally wants to improve. Some of the best parts of her post are as follows:

Well having just read The 10X Rule I had to cross out my 00/month income goal- and ended up with a ,000/month income goal!  OK let’s revise that a bit – what I am able to make (on a good month) is 00/month – so lets aim for ,000/month! 

My issue is that I’m a dilettante – I’m an amateur, I’m doing the right thing, but not enough, I still keep on chasing after shiny stuff. I’m over it. I feel great when I focus and actually achieve something. So that’s what I’m going to be doing! 

2012 is gonna rock! 

And its all gonna start here – because I have finally decided that if I’m getting serious about this business, this girl needs a business plan!  So keep an eye out – because if any of you are struggling with the same stuff as I am – you probably need one too (and you can steal mine for free!) . 

Lis, I wish you the best in achieving all of your goals: Personal, Business, or otherwise! Check out Lis’s End-Of-The-Year post here: LisSowerbutts.com - 2012 Goals – Introduction.

So—what about you, Maneesh?

Well, my End-Of-The-Year post is coming my friend. Just don’t expect it before, well, the end of the year Instead, I have a very special 90 Days Episode coming this Friday.

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You should Follow Me On Twitter Follow @maneeshsethi

IMPORTANT: The Online Marketing Master Class has a HUGE Holiday Sale right now, ending in just a few days (first week of January). Have you ever wanted to build an online business, travel the world, and make money, no matter where you’re located? Then check out the Online Marketing Master Class.

ManeeshSethi.com - Lifestyle Design, SEO, and Living the Digital Nomad Life