How many times have you come to a point in life where you face a difficult choice and wish you could make recourse to your inner psychic abilities to ‘listen to your heart’ or your ‘inner voice’ for guidance on the best course of action? Perhaps there were even moments where you had some intuition or warning from your inner voice but you discarded it and followed your logic or accepted social views.

Similarly you can be in a particularly stagnant moment in your life where everything seems to be coming against you despite your  hard efforts. You wish you could ‘tune in’ to yourself and find out how to align with your purpose in life and be a creative vessel for effortless success.

Listening to your Heart – Inner Sensing & Focusing

The first step in aligning with your life purpose and creating the life you want is by listening to your heart. By listening to your heart, I broadly mean turning your attention inwards and ‘sensing’ what your inner body and mind are ‘telling’ you.  This is often called ‘focusing’ – the art of ‘tuning in’ and listening to cues or ‘felt senses’ in your body.

This isn’t always easy as so much about our daily lives is about relying on what’s external rather than internal. The Western culture doesn’t always support the need for “going within” for the answers. Logic, intellect and fact is much more respected than psychic and intuitive abilities, but it doesn’t mean it’s right.

Visualization

The power of visual programming can have lasting effects on our lives. Have you ever heard the expression, “what you see is what you get?” Our visual sensory is one of the most powerful aspects of psychic power that we have at our disposal and with the power of the mind can be used for our personal gain. Much scientific evidence suggests that we create our reality, instead of our reality creating us. It is no longer an absolute opinion that we are victim to everything that happens to us. Instead, our mind is so powerful that we are constantly creating our situation that lies before us. This is why what we see in life has the powerful effect of manifesting into a much bigger picture. For example, if you are always coming up short when it’s time to pay the bills each month, you may  be sending messages to your conscious brain such as, “here we go again! I never have enough money!” The more we tell ourselves a certain thing such as having a lack of money and security, the more the Universe will respond to that and cause a repetitive habit of a lack of money. On the flip side, if what we truly want out of life is security and prosperity, we can begin to send our brain messages of abundance with messages such as, “I can afford everything I want or need in life.”

Whatever you visualize for your life can and will have a profound effect on your life, and works well if you want to improve your intuition as well. Mental programming is about going inside yourself and focusing on what you, your spirit, mind and body truly wants. If you are committed to a life of adventure, romance and excitement rather than the current state of your repetitive daily outcome, you can manifest your ideal life with focus and a clear mind.

Giving before receiving

Improving your psychic abilities means that you may have to become more sensitive to the world and yourself than ever before. Compassionate people tend to have an easier time becoming in tune with their psychic power, although anyone has the capacity for it. Relearning the world through new eyes is also important when it comes to improving your clairvoyance. No one with a muddled up mind of noise, judgments and self-doubt can accomplish their dreams of improved psychic power. This is because the root of being psychic has to do with being in touch with who you are. The more you get to know yourself, the better you will become at knowing the world and adjusting your frequency which will allow you to connect with the Universe in a way you won’t believe!

Positivity

The more positive you can be about your life, about others and you progress with your psychic powers, the better you will be able to receive goodness, love and positive progress. A negative person will have a very hard time receiving psychic power and harnessing their abilities to be clairvoyant because a negative mind will always block the opportunity for change. When you think positively, your entire world changes including how you feel inside, how receptive you are to the energy in and around you and most of all, what you can accomplish with your new found psychic power. A person with the power and gift of being psychic has a tremendous responsibility to the world. Not only will they vastly improve their attitude and confidence as they constantly rely on themselves for life’s biggest questions and challenges, but they may process the power to predict what happens to others before it actually happens. No matter how advanced your psychic power becomes, know that you remain in control of it and all times and by trusting yourself, you can have the confidence and wisdom to change or adjust to anything that life presents.

This article has been written by the Silva Method Team.

For over 5 decades the Silva Method has helped millions of people around the world achieve their highest potential by working with the mind. By expanding the mind’s capabilities through meditation, creative visualization, mental exercises, and self-improvement, graduates of the Silva Method have gained profound achievements and lasting transformation in their lives.

The Silva Intuition System is a powerful program designed to heighten your intuition in order to make the right decisions, follow your destiny and passions, and bring out your inner compass. While conventional science will have us believe that we are limited to the 5 senses, there is one sense that has been left hidden for many people and that is your intuition. It is your most powerful and precious sense.

For more information please visit: http://www.silvaintuitionsystem.com

Hello again folks. Its been a while since I’ve bent your electronic ears with some of my hyper positive cheer leading, so I figured I’d come back and discuss a subject we all need help with at various points in our life – Confidence.

When you get down to it, nothing in life is more important to your individual success than confidence in yourself, your goals and your abilities. If you seek success in a group project, you must have confidence in your team and your coaches which in turn must also have confidence in you. We all like talking about that moment when we are truly confident in ourselves and (almost) our actions, so FIRST let’s talk about that least desirable part of our own quest for confidence. I mean that part in the beginning when you don’t have much confidence at all.

Most of us have heard one person over time mention that sometimes you gotta fake it till you make it. I’m not breaking news by mentioning it here. That said, in your quest for bullet proof, unflappable, no doubt,  REAL confidence (part 3 of this series) the truth is that you have to start out fake. Completely FAKE.

Before you get all high and mighty on me, let me tell you this: if the alternative to faking it is to have zero confidence, I would gladly choose to have “fake confidence” for a few months while I build some real confidence. OK So how do you fake confidence?

Exaggerate! Exaggerate your abilities, your skills, your everything. This is different than boasting or bragging about yourself although from the outside it might look the same to a third person. It’s about doing some positive self-talk to yourself in a bid to put up high your morale and reinforce your self-image which is crucial to confidence. Look in the mirror and tell yourself – “sure you can do that!”.

Let’s be honest here, when you are building confidence, a mirror is the first place to start because that person is the only one who will listen to you. Choose a thing that you want to increase your confidence in and start telling people you are better at it than you are. When other people know that you have (said you have) skills in a certain area, they will start expecting you to demonstrate those skills. Here comes the important part. That pressure will cause you to study and work on that skill so that when you are eventually called on to demonstrate it, you will have something to show.

Something? Oh yeah, at first when you do something new, you are not going to be a champ at it but you are better off than you were before you did it and you have a new baseline to build confidence upon. To put it in another way, the next time you do it, if you do it a little better you will be more confident in your ability.

Those lessons are painful up front guys but all the rejection or falling on my face all seem funny when I look back on them with a confident mind so the trip was definitely worth the pain.

Is it really possible to live life without cable TV?  Yes, yes it is.  I’ve been doing it for the past 9 years.  You might think the reason was economics, and sure that played a part, but the real reason was the feeling I had after a night of television.  I felt unproductive and lazy.

I found myself mostly watching home improvement shows or nature shows.  While these shows aren’t necessarily bad, I felt like the time I spent watching them was wasted.  I really didn’t learn enough about home improvement to turn my house into a mansion, and in all actuality, I can’t remember any tips that were worth all the time I spent watching.  And all that nature knowledge has yet to be proven useful.  Maybe next time I see a tiger staring me down at the grocery store, I’ll wish I had watched more Discovery channel.  But until then, I’ve found all that television to be a waste of time.

So, we took the plunge.  When we moved into our house 9 years ago, we decided to go without cable TV.  For the sake of full disclosure, we did get the very basic cable, which comes with mostly local broadcast channels, about 10 total.  It only costs $10 per month, and since we are a cable subscriber we get a $15 dollar discount on our cable Internet.  Looks like we stumbled upon a small loop hole, plus we don’t have to deal with a TV antenna.

The choice to ditch the cable started some time before moving into our house.  We decided to conduct a little experiment to turn off the TV for an entire week.  No TV at all for one week.  Going into it, I wasn’t sure how the week would unfold.  Like most households, I would come home from work and spend most of the evening lounging on the couch watching TV.  I wondered how I would occupy my time.

We decided to just jump right into it, and here’s how it went.  I spent a lot of time reading.  It was nice to have additional time to read, but the real bonus was I could read in quiet.  There were no noisy distractions.  I spent more time talking with my wife.  We could chat about the day or ponder the mysteries of the universe.  Once again, no distractions.  We were able to spend more time cooking.  No rush to get through cooking or eating dinner just so we could catch some “must see” TV.  The thing I remember the most from our “No TV Week” was the quiet.  All week I came home to a silent peaceful environment.

It might make a good story if I told you we decided to give up TV completely, but we didn’t.  We allowed the TV back into our lives.  When it came back though, it was no longer allowed to consume our evenings.  We were more mindful about what we watched.  The evening news was no longer allowed, as we saw the constant stream of negativity as detrimental to our peaceful evenings.  We applied a loose rule to TV programs that they had to be better than watching a movie.  If we would pay the cost of a movie rental, then it may be worth watching.

The “No TV Week” allowed us to look more objectively about what we wanted to watch on TV.  From this, we determined that we weren’t watching near as much Cable TV as we had thought.  Most of the shows we watched were on regular network TV.   Looking at the cost of $60 a month for standard cable, we figured we had to have at least 10 movie quality shows per month.  That just didn’t pan out.  We didn’t watch that many movie quality TV shows on cable in any given month.  So, when it came time to move into our house, we didn’t sign up for Cable.  I haven’t missed it in the least.

Have you ever tried a No TV experiment?  Have you considered giving up cable TV?  I’d love to hear from you.

One of the biggest human shortfalls is the easiness to lose perspective in moments of crisis or adversity. Most problems whether global or local, large or small,collective or individual are linked with this issue of perspective. The way we look at any given situation or problem determines whether we fail and succumb to its pressure or succeed in creatively find a solution to it.

Perspective is the way we see things and filter our reality. Reality is not seen as it is although this is naively and implicitly assumed in our conceptual model of the world.

The Gap we fill in our Heads

There is always a gap between objective reality and the way it is represented in our heads through concepts and mental models. That gap is filled by the many assumptions, presuppositions and categorizations we use to speedily make sense of the noisy and incomplete picture of the reality around us.

For example you are doing your usual jog in the park when you arrive at a part where you see flashing red and blue lights round a bend behind some trees and bushes. You quickly make a mental picture of it. You conclude that it is probably an unfortunate case of an ambulance with paramedics assisting a jogger who had a heart failure. You come to this conclusion partly informed by the fact that you have seen quite a number of 65+ joggers using the park before and you have also heard of a similar case happening lately. This is your interpretation based on partial information and past cases.

You could also conclude that it is a police car on a crime scene owing to the fact that you have witnessed a similar case in the same park two years a go. You also know that the area around the park is dodgy, the hour is late and such accidents are not infrequent.

So our perspective sometimes depends on things that although can lead us to a correct judgment in a probabilistic kind of way, they are not always based on truthful premises but rather on partial fragments on information and past experiences. It is also influenced by our motivation of the moment. Our emotional predisposition will lead us to interpret one scenario as against another possibly skewing our perspective as we do so.

Distorted Realities

There are a million examples of how perspective influences and determines our perception of the world in everyday life but I wish to focus on one particular situation which I think we all fall victims to: Our perception of the scale and durability of a problem when we face temporary setbacks.

We all have experienced this on many occasions in our life: Everything is going fine until something happens that totally disrupts our momentum. We then fall prey to worrisome thoughts and finally end up feeling stuck and helpless.

The biggest problem we face in these situations is not one of resources, fortune or fate. The problem is one of perspective.

The general tendency is to believe or think that the predicament or downturn we are experiencing is not a temporal one but a permanent one. This is of course false but it shows how our perspective on things get skewed when we are stressed or anxious about some problems. We momentarily lose touch with reality and with it we lose our ability to think straight and see the full facts as they are.

Our mental model of reality becomes jumbled up and our focus debilitated. We become immobilized with fear and our creative resources blocked. The inability to see past the present circumstances is a very natural human fallibility.

So the question is: How do we train ourselves to become expansive in moments in which we are naturally inclined to feel stuck & limited? How do we shake ourselves awake from the illusion that we are stuck with a problem forever?

Ask, Allow and Imagine:

I would like to present 3 tips one can follow when we are feeling stuck or anxious about a problem:

1. Ask yourself a few questions: Can this problem be solved? Did I solve similar or bigger problems before? Am I all alone in this or are there people I can turn to for help and advice? Is this problem caused by circumstances which are related to a particular moment in time? Is this problem as serious as it seems?

2. Do not try to solve the problem. This may sound paradoxical but the thing is that as we ceaselessly try to control and act on the problem we create more stress and hence limit our creative powers. Instead of trying just allow it to be for a while. Just ask yourself to find a creative solution to it and let it flow without straining yourself to apprehend or find answers to it. You will notice that by allowing it to settle you will relax and finally the solution will come intuitively and spontaneously. Your subconscious mind would have had the time to work on it without the constant interruption of your conscious mind trying to gain control.

3. And finally visualize the problem as being just a minor patch in a long stretch of timeline. Visualize yourself in a week or month’s time being completely past the problem and surmising to the fact how you managed to creatively get past the dip.

In my late twenties (I’m 35 now) my wife and I made the decision to crawl out from our pile of debt.  To summarize our situation, we had a bit of credit card debt and a couple of car loans.  The plan of attack was similar to Dave Ramsey’s baby steps, but we started before we heard of his plan.  We kept about $1000 in the bank as an emergency fund.  Then we made a budget.  This was eye opening, as we could really see what we were spending, and how much money we were wasting each month in interest.

This was our initial inspiration, to stop wasting money on interest payments. We were wasting hundreds of dollars each and every month, just because we bought “stuff” on credit cards and cars through bank financing.  We started off strong, attacking debt.  We cut back on all unnecessary expenses; we stopped eating out, we cancelled our cable TV, we stopped buying stuff.

It felt great for a while.  But cutting back is hard, and eventually the novelty wore off.  We found our desire for “stuff” beginning to grow.  I needed inspiration.  I’d like to share with you, the ways we found inspiration to keep going.

The first big boost to our inspiration was hearing about Dave Ramsey.  I bought his book, “The Total Money Makeover.” Actually, what I thought was a paperback version turned out to be the workbook (note to Dave Ramsey: The giant word “Workbook” written across the cover wasn’t enough for me to notice the difference.)  In any case, it contained much of the same information as the real book, and it got us supercharged.  We officially began working the baby steps.  We worked on the smallest debt first, and paid minimums on everything else.  We were making good progress.

Months went by, and living within our means was still tough.  We had our goal, but it seemed like it would take forever to reach it.  The inspiration was slowly waning.  The one thing that kept me going through the ups and downs of our new “living below our means” lifestyle was listening to Dave Ramsey’s radio program. Hearing about other people that were in our situation or worse even, and seeing how they managed to overcome debt.  I especially liked his Friday shows where he encouraged folks to call in and scream “I’m debt free.”

As we entered our thirties, my wife and I started thinking about having a child.  We knew that if we were going to have a child, we wanted her to be able to stay home and raise this child.  This was inspiration number four.  To be able to live on one income in order to support a stay at home mom and a new baby. This is where we got fanatical about paying off debt.  To find out if we could get by on one income, we practiced it.  We lived on my income, and all hers (minus working expenses) went to pay down debt.  We also took every bit of bonus, tax return, and gifts, and added it to our debt snowball.

It took us about three years to get out of debt.  During that time, we needed to constantly reach for inspiration to keep going.  It was tough to realize that we weren’t as rich as we thought we were, and to start living within our means.  We did it though, by the time our daughter was born, we were debt free, and my wife was able to stay home to raise our daughter.  I can think of no better reward for our hard work and dedication.

Here’s the quick list of the inspirations that kept us going.

1. Establishing a reason to get out of debt
2. Reading about strategies and success stories
3. Listening to strategies and success stories
4. Setting a goal (of life changing proportions)

Those are the sources of inspiration that worked for me.  Your situation may be different or you may have different inspiration, and that’s ok.  What’s important is that you find your own inspiration, and use it to keep you going on your path to success.

We’ve been out of debt for nearly four years.  One of the benefits I didn’t realize at the time is the reduction of money related stress.  All those bills are stressful.  We now have less stress and less worry.  Another benefit which I certainly didn’t foresee was being able to weather a 3 month layoff due to being debt free and having an emergency fund.  Actually, it was more than just “weathering;” I was able to relish it.  I was able to enjoy every second of unemployment spending quality time with my family.

Are you working towards a debt free lifestyle?  What are your inspirations?  I’d love to hear from you.

Image by TomJByrne

A lot of people want to be popular and well known. They try everything on earth to be someone. I think this is natural in us humans.

Over the past few years I’ve succeeded at NOT having friends. Why? I ask myself all the time. I feel that I am a good guy and a likable person.

So I’ve decided to tell people that if you don’t want to win friends you have to do as I have done. If you want to succeed at not having friends, then listen to what I have learned from myself about my relationship with friends.

What I’ve learned was that all this time I have been criticizing every person I know without looking at myself first. I also have a habit of complaining too much. Confucius said “Don’t complain about the snow on your neighbor’s roof, when your own doorstep is unclean”.

Have you noticed that I have been using the word “I” too much? If you read “I” you are correct.

You see guys I have been selfish all along, I have been interested on the wrong person all this time and that person is me. I should have been interested in them, all of them, my friends. I have not showed interest in those I met. So please don’t do the same mistakes I made.

If you show interest in them, I mean genuine interest, they will show it back to you like no other.

So another point is here:  Don’t bother showing interest in people if you DON’T want to win friends.

The last secret to success at not winning a friend is to NOT show them how much you appreciate them.

I’ll be honest to you and say that actually I have made a lot of friends but that’s only because all my friends have done the opposite of what I have. They know how to win friends. I took for granted their friendship and lost them, because of my lack of appreciation.

I just want to say one last thing if I may: I want to thank all the readers of this blog on behalf of all the writers. If it wasn’t for you I know I wouldn’t have the urge to write. I greatly appreciate and enjoy everyone that reads and comments on this blog.

So listen and learn from my mistakes. Don’t criticize, Don’t be all about yourself, and Don’t take your friends for granted.

Lifescapeartists.com was basically the creation of multiple bloggers who decided to collaborate on a project and what you see today is the result.  Starting today, I’m going to walk you through a series on effective collaboration and how we achieved this.

If you look at the top blogs like Dumb Little Man, Lifehack and many others, you’ll notice that the blog is comprised of a team of regular writers, all of who have their own blogs. But, what’s amazing is that these blogs are also inundated with request from people wanting to write guest posts for them. As a result the founders are fortunate enough that they can write once a week, but still keep the blog continually filled with fresh content.  So, essentially you gain economies of scale in blogging and get to treat blogging as a team sport.  With 4 of you working together, even writing 3-5 posts a week, you will nearly double the content volume that you can produce. The beauty of this extends even further. If you have 4 somewhat established bloggers working together, then you have a certain ability to take things viral and push content out far beyond the level you could if you did everything on your own.

I’m going to assume your multi-author blog is staffed by people who have their own blogs and are getting 50-100 visitors a day. They are getting some respectable traffic. We’ll talk about how to recruit the team in another section.  But if you notice, each blogger has a network of contacts, connections, and online resources. While there is probably some overlap, there is probably also a ton that is not overlap.  So essentially your power to take your content viral goes up exponentially.  You get the point. Working as a team could allow you to grow much faster. I’m willing to bet that team based blogging, with groups of 3-4 writers is going to be the next big trend you see.

“I believe that as soon as people want
peace in the world they can have it.
The only trouble is they are not aware
they can get it.” John Lennon, 1969

The Creative Block:

This is not the popular type of creative block I am referring to – the one in which an artist or writer is mentally and creatively blocked. This is the systematic and cultural creative block imposed by social control structures.

We are brought up and educated to follow a reality which is socially constructed, shared and inter-subjective. We are grown in an environment in which the value of things is given to us through peer consensus or disapproval. You can say that this is an artificially built reality very much like in the blockbuster movie The Matrix.

Authenticity and individualization:

Individualization means, amongst other things, to break free from the social mold and discovering your true purpose. Very often this runs counter to the pressures imposed by our social environment and hence individualization is very often revolutionary and crisis-laden.

People go through all sorts of rebellious phases, capsize their lives or revolutionize their lifestyle in order to walk through the journey of inner discovery and authenticity.

Taking the red pill:

“You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.” Morpheus in the Matrix

Taking Morpheus’s red pill needs not be life shattering or full of drama. Soul searching is nothing but the shift of outer awareness into inner awareness. It all starts from being more aware of your inner calling.

Here are some points I always try to live by in my quest for freedom and authenticity:

1. Listen to your heart and bravely follow where it is pointing at.

2. Have more time for inner reflection.

3. Free yourself from useless clutter such as dreams which are not authentically yours.

4. Ask yourself which is the thing you love doing with enthusiasm, drives you, fires your imagination or make you feel complete and happy.

5. Forget practical and social constraints – the ‘you can’t make a living out of it’ or ‘you are daydreaming’. These are just thought barriers imposed by others. It need not apply to you.

6. There are no limits. There are only barriers of thought but not of practice. Many people have achieved the unimaginable because they believed so.

7. Be aware of the mental echoes that go around your head. Those repetitive self-defeating thoughts which hang around in our head. Very often these come from associations to past failures or rather perceptions of past failures. The past is past and is no guarantee of the future as certain disclaimers go.

8. Be aware that these mental limits are only mental or social constructions. They are tiny programs of the matrix to keep you under moderation and equalization.

9. Awareness of these ‘memes’ or ‘social programs’ means that they will eventually dissolve right before your eyes and you will start seeing outside the synthetic reality.

10. Once you starts seeing clearly beyond the socially built barriers you see that your dreams and goals are not only possible but concretely attainable.

11. Through awareness, your reality shifts – you escape the matrix and you start seeing a clearer reality in which you can achieve whatever you want if you set your heart and mind to it.

Procrastination is certainly a malaise that afflicts the vast majority of people from time to time in all areas of life.

Some people find procrastination more difficult to overcome at work, some others in dealing with home chores, financial and organizational matters or just about anything that entails a little effort to sort out.

A lot of stuff has been written about the subject tackling it from different angles such as:

1. Defusing counter-productive beliefs that sabotage your efforts

2. Being aware of those inner fears that immobilize you into action and

3. Practical approaches that help you overcome procrastination such as positive self-talk, visualization, affirmations, etc.

These are all valuable and effective methods to deal with procrastination as has been proven time and time again by people from all walks of life.

However the truth is that there is a mission key without which the above methods are rendered futile and ineffective. This is the element of readiness or the do it now factor.

It took me some time to appreciate this. What was frustrating me before that, was the fact that I had grasped the methods but was still not translating them in practice. Something was missing.

If you want to do something– Do it Now

It’s a small easy step really but a critical one. You can have the right knowledge, the best planning, the right goals and the right motivation but if you do not have the readiness to start now sometimes all those things turn to nothing.

I had learnt that the most effective way to beat procrastination is to start doing something even if you feel a lot of resistance towards it. This is because the biggest resistance and inertia stands between you not doing the action and you taking the action. Once that gap is closed, by taking the first step, the resistance drastically drops down and your willingness and motivation shoots up.

We all know what this means. How many times did we put off doing a particular task but then once we put our hands to it, we happily pushed through it like a breeze?

Sometimes we keep putting off things and bringing up excuses. Some other times we even understand our unwillingness to do something and know what are the problems causing our procrastination. But even more often we overlook the fact that it is our readiness to start off the deal that is the biggest hurdle.

Once we set things in motion, the rest flies

So next time you procrastinate about doing something and find yourself struggling hard to start off something, just bring to mind that it all gets easier once you start doing it.

The mind creates an illusion of how difficult, boring, distasteful and unrewarding the task is, but that bubble is burst once the task is initiated.

I grew up in Washington state, home of some of the best apples in the world.

When I was a kid, I thought this was a lie. Every apple that I ever remember eating seemed dry, mealy, and devoid of any sweetness or flavor. Were these the same apples that people would buy at ridiculous prices in Paris and New York? What were they smoking?

It wasn’t until taking Economics 101 that I found out why Washington Apples seemed so unspectacular. They shipped all the good apples out. The leftovers were for Washington state natives to consume.

Although I’m a little angry that I was forced to suffer a childhood without good apples, I realized that “shipping the good apples out” is actually an excellent business practice. Not only is it good for Washington state apple growers, but it’s good for bloggers as well.

These two factors make “shipping the best out” a good idea:
1. Transportation Cost
2. The Opportunity to Create a Premium Brand

Transportation Cost

Let’s say that a mediocre apple in Washington State is $0.50 and a premium apple is $1.50. Because the cost of a premium apple in Washington State is three times the price of a mediocre apple, people will most likely prefer three mediocre apples to one premium apple.

If you ship the apples to Paris, however, there’s a transportation cost involved. Let’s say that it costs an additional $2.50 to ship each one. Add the transportation cost and your mediocre apple becomes $3 and your premium apple becomes $4. Although the actual cost difference is still one dollar, the relative cost is greatly reduced. A premium apple no longer costs three mediocre apples, but only 1.25 mediocre apples.

The buyers in Paris, when faced with the choice of buying a mediocre apple at $3 and a premium apple at $4, will be much more likely to buy premium than the buyers in Washington State. This is why the premium apples are shipped as far as conceivably possible from where they’re grown. Although premium apples will always be more expensive than mediocre ones no matter where you go, the relative price between the two can vary wildly. Whenever the price difference between mediocre and premium is relatively low, premium will win.

Transportation cost on the internet can be interpreted as: “The trouble you have to go through to get the content you want.” Subscribers to your blog are like Washingtonians. In order to read your blog posts, they don’t have to expend much effort or energy. The article from your blog pops into their RSS feed and all your subscriber has to do is click on it and read it. Because the “transportation cost” is so low, they’ll be much more likely to appreciate your mediocre articles. If they had to surf the web for one hour to get to that mediocre article, their appreciation of the article would be severely reduced.

Non-subscribers to your blog have a lot more transportation cost to deal with. If they click from your guest post to your blog’s home page, they’ll have to navigate through an unfamiliar website, unsure if there’s good content or if they’re wasting their time. If you write a brilliant guest post, however, they’ll be more likely to expect premium content on your blog, and thus be more willing to brave an unfamiliar site. It’s a lot of work for them, but if they expect to find content of a similar quality to your premium guest post on your website, they’ll be more likely to take the plunge.

Whenever you write an article that you’re particularly proud of, the impulse is to post it on your own site right away to make your subscribers happy. If it’s really that good however, you should consider exporting. Don’t hide your best work in your blog’s archive. Do what you can to…

Create a Premium Brand

According to the Washington State Apple commission, the growers there produce about 100 million 42lb. bushel cartons of apples per year. 30 million of these are exported worldwide. You can bet that most of these exported apples are premium.

Examplevania is another place that produces a lot of apples. In fact, Examplevania produces nearly 150 million bushels. Of these 150 million, 70 million are premium. For this fact alone Examplevanian apples should be called the best in the world, but there’s a good reason they aren’t.

Examplevania exports a lot of apples overseas–nearly 100 million bushels. The problem is that Examplevania keeps a lot of the premium apples for domestic consumption, and only ships 15 million premium ones overseas. The result is that Washington Apples outnumber Examplevanian apples on the premium shelf by a ratio of 2 to 1. Meanwhile, there’s an overabundance of Examplevanian apples in the mediocre barrel.

The Examplevanian apple commission made a serious marketing blunder. Despite the fact that they produce more premium apples than Washington does, they decided to export a mix of mediocre and premium instead of premium only. Although Examplevanian apples really do deserve to be called the best in the world, they lost that title when their carelessness resulted in an overabundance of mediocre in the stores. Most American grocery shoppers have never been to Examplevania and don’t know how good the apples really are. The only way they could judge quality was by what they saw in the store.

Don’t make the same mistake that the Examplevanians did. If you write something that you consider your best work, showcase it elsewhere. Your subscribers already know how good you are. Now, let the rest of the world know.

Kenji Crosland is a former headhunter and English teacher who currently blogs about creating an ideal career at unreadyandwilling.com. He is also a novice web application developer and plans to launch his first community driven site early this year.