He has some interesting models of human behavior that I am trying to learn.

The first is the concept of the five basic needs of people: Survival, Love and Belonging, Power, Freedom, and Fun (also equated with Learning).  Every person has a "genetic" makeup of how deeply they feel these needs.  For example, a person may have a high need for security (survival) and a low need for power.

These genetic need maps are basically unchangable.  If a person has, say, a high need for power, they can certainly compromise or adjust their needs for others, but that doesn’t change the fact that they have the need.

One of the key principles in Choice Theory is that we can control ourselves, not others.  We can negotiate with others but the idea of controlling via threats, manipulation, or any other "external control" system is doomed to failure.  He sees this as a primary reason for the failure of upper grades of school: most learning is taught via a system of pressure and guilt.  In other words, by trying to control the students rather than participating in the students’ needs systems.

He believes most problems that we have come from relationship problems.  Interesting patterns come into play as we enter relationships.  If two high-power people come together, they will have a conflict in a different way than, say, a high-power and a high-freedom couple.  Before you can negotiate effectively with somebody, it helps to know what kinds of needs system they have in place.  There’s no point trying to convince somebody of the safety of a potential venture if the person you are trying to convince has a low need for survival (that is, he/she is very comfortable with taking risks) and a high need for freedom or creativity.

In any relationship we need to be clear about our needs, not to suppress them.  We need to decide how much we are willing to compromise and where our boundaries are.  Then the choice is up to the other as to whether they will participate.  Trying to force somebody to meet your needs is fruitless.

There are so many good Wordpress web templates out there but so many of them have some clever part about them or an image that is so unique to a niche that I would have to redo a lot of it just to get it to work.

On the other end of the spectrum is paying for a template according to my own design, and somewhere in the middle is building my own, something I can do from the technical perspective but which never looks good from the graphic design perspective.

I think the solution is to find a generic template that works and to split it out and standardize it so that it’s easy to change the fonts, graphics, and color scheme of it.  Then I can reuse it for different sites.

The templates I want should be clear and clean, with widgets that encourage browsing the site.  I’ve seen templates where the widgets all start out "collapsed," so that the viewer has to click a button to expand it and see the contents.  That is not going to do me much good for a part of the site that I want to lead the user around.  Others are designed with bland fonts, or lists that make it difficult to see the individual items.

All of this, however, is not the gray area I’m talking about.

I’ve got the site almost completed from the "framework" point of view.  The original three-month plan is to get a few articles and let the site go, hoping that I get enough search engine traffic that ultimately converts into people adding the widget to their Google homepage.  Can that really work though?

I guess it comes down to this: this particular plan is based on wanting to spend the minimum resources on the project.  So if that is still my goal, I guess it comes down to mostly monitoring this site.  But the more I work on it, the more I enjoy it.  So who knows?  Maybe I’ll decide to spend some more resources on this one.

On the other hand, my music site is starting to get some hits……

A friend is working on a tutorial that will help non-techie users add Bluebarb gadgets to their iGoogle pages.  I’ll add that as a WordPress page.

The original reassessment didn’t have any budget for advertising.  The idea was (for now, since I don’t want to put a LOT of resources into it) to just let it be discovered.  Of course, that’s been the idea with the Google gadget approach, too, but there are so many Google gadgets out there now that it’s almost impossible to get noticed in the directory.

I’ve recently discovered Project Wonderful and have had some luck getting some ads placed at 10 cents a day (you pay by the day, not by the click).  Ten cents a day is around three dollars a month.  I think I could afford that…maybe I’ll use that over the next three months and see if I can get some traffic going.

What else?  Add a comment and give me your ideas on how to get these gadgets onto some Google homepages.

For example, somebody may say to me "I am scared to give my speech tomorrow."

"Why?"

"I’m afraid the audience will laugh at me."

"And then?"

"And then I will be embarrassed."

"And then?"

Being embarrassed–as emotionally painful as that can be–does not need to be an "end state" in your self-exploration.  It usually goes deeper than that.

"What does it mean if people laugh at you?"

"That I have nothing of value to say."

Now there is a fear of something that you have control over.  It is also a statement of power, when you turn it around: "I am a person who feels it is important to say something of value."

This is a clear declaration of a powerful part of your nature.

You can’t really control whether people laugh at you.  But now that you are in touch with your inner desire, you can focus on saying something of value, rather than having the weaker focus of "avoiding the laughter of others."

When you do say something of value, you can celebrate that and feel the reward of meeting a deep internal desire–whether of not the value was received well by the audience.

People tend to criticize you based on your strengths.  If you really were not a nice person, then there would be no impact of somebody accusing you of that.  It’s because you’re nice that it does sting.

But your "niceness" should be evaluated by you, not others.

Many people use self-talk when they criticize.  They use criticisms they’ve heard, either from others or from their own internal voices.  Learn to listen to whether their criticism applies to them, especially in the current situation.

A woman I used to work with was in tears one day.  When I asked her what was wrong, she showed me an email she had received from her adult son.  It was filled with mean accusations that she was disorganized, couldn’t hold a job, didn’t care about others, and similar attacks.

I asked her to do me a favor and read the email one more time, but this time imagine it was a letter that her son had written to himself.  I asked her if the email made any sense that way.

She read it again and looked slowly to me.  "I’m sure he does see himself this way," she said.

By seeing it through his "lens," she was able to reply in a way that addressed the real problem–which was not any of the shortcomings he accused her of in his email.

Now imagine that same board stretched between the 38th-floor windows of two adjacent buildings.  The odds of failing are the same.  However, I would certainly be afraid to make that walk.  But is that a fear of failure?  Or a fear of falling?  A fear of falling or a fear of hitting the ground?  Or a fear of pain or death?

By bundling up fears like that in the term "fear of failure," we tend to avoid facing what it is that we are really afraid of.

Now look at that fear.  What’s a worst-case scenario if you were to try and fail?

You could have a fear of rejection, abandonment, loss of security, or embarrassment.  There are many more.

Obviously, those fears are much more specific than a general "fear of failure" and each would be dealt with in a different way.

The good news is, the closer you get to identifying the real fear, the easier it is to deal with it.

What are you scared to do?  Leave me a comment of a task you’ve been putting off, and what the fear is behind it.

Get to the 100th floor of a building in only one second!!  Imagine all the time you will save.  Many people never even make it to the 100th floor.  With my proven system, you can be there in as fast as one second. 

This eBook normally sells for $94.99.  But if you act today, you can have it for the special sale price of $34.99!  But you have to act TODAY!

You can’t resist the opportunity to make $60 just by purchasing it on sale.  So you buy it, download it, and open it quickly.

You know how it begins, right?

"Here is my method for getting to the 100th floor in one second.  Starting from the 99th floor of a building, go to the stairwell and walk up until you are one step away from the top.  Are you ready?  OK, start your stopwatch now and take that step!"

Does this example sound silly?

Yet how many squeeze pages have you seen that advertise "$1,285 in one hour!" or "$32,136 in one day!"?

Those who have really done it have started by spending years building a base.  They didn’t start from the ground floor and jump to the hundredth floor in one second (or if they did, it was by something similar to winning the lottery, not a repeatable process).

Although it may seem desirable to make a ton of money fast with no work, I want to encourage you to learn the pleasures of constructing a solid foundation and building steadily upon it.  At the time I recently re-launched this site, I had a handful of websites I’d run with various levels of success and a collection of marketable programs that I’ve built over the years, not to mention the years of experience I’ve had running projects and seeing just about everything that can go wrong and right with them.

Through these experiences I’ve built up my skillset and–most importantly–discovered myself.

I certainly look forward to financial reward.  But I am also so thankful for the journey.

Keep moving steadily from floor to floor.  Sure, that last step will take one second, and people may then call you an overnight success.  But you’ll have a whole set of rewards, and you’ll know what it took to get them.

There’s something you’ve been putting off.  Something that is very important to you and that will benefit your life tremendously. 

Instead, you’ve been catching little bits of pleasure here and there, but nothing with lasting value.

It’s time to climb that mountain!

What’s the worst that can happen?  If something goes wrong, learn from it and move on.  The worst that can happen when you take the jump is better than the long-term loss of not doing this important thing.

You don’t have time?  Make the time.  Move something around.  Pretend that you set a deadline.  We did it in high school–pulled an allnighter to finish a report or project.

Other people will misunderstand you? Or see you differently?  That may be true.  It’s time for honesty, not popularity.  This is important to you and you can’t let others make the decision of whether you do it or not.  Do it.  That will put a new decision in front of them: how they perceive you and how they will interact with you as time goes on.  But it will be the real you that they choose to interact with.

You don’t know how to do it?  Find somebody who did it and model after them.

I don’t know what your personal mountain is.  But I do know this: it’s time to climb it, go around it, or tear it down.

You can see an example widget here, and the complete list here.  Try them out!

We developed these and let it alone to see what would happen.  Let’s assess this business and make a business plan for the future.

My first question for any business is: what are your goals?

The goals for bluebarb are to simplify online shopping and keep users up to date on the latest projects, and to make some money doing this.  We make money via the Amazon Affiliate program.  Anytime somebody purchases something via our widget, we get a small percentage of the purchase price.

How well are you meeting the goals?

The income is extremely low (less than a dollar per month).  We have very few users of the widgets (less than a hundred for each).

What resources do you have?

We have created almost 10 widgets and they have been deployed to Google.  We have a domain name and a website but it is very plain and not very motivating for anybody who may show up.

The widgets are branded.

How much resources do you have for ongoing operations?

This is not our main source of income and we hope to spend very little time working on it once we’ve upgraded it.  The goal is to set something up and let it run, spending less than an hour per month monitoring it.  In addition, we would be open to the idea of selling bluebarb itself to an investor.

We would like to spend less than $100 upgrading this business.  In addition, we have web development skills, but we’d like to spend less than 20 hours of our own time improving this business.

Let’s take a look at traffic.  What’s your monthly hit count (the number of times somebody looks at a page on your website)?

Virtually zero.

My next question would normally be: what’s your conversion rate (the percentage of people who use your product)?  In this case, you don’t have enough hits to have a meaningful number.  For those widgets that are in place, how many hits to Amazon are they producing every day?

About two.
 

Assessment:

Money is produced in this business whenever a widget user goes to Amazon via the widget and purchases something.

The more widgets in use, the more trips to Amazon.  The widgets have been in the iGoogle directory for several months now and it doesn’t appear that many more users are adding the widget to their iGoogle Personalized Page.

Therefore, our goal is to get more people to add the widgets.  In order to do that, we’ll need to find people and let them know the value of the widgets.

Since the budget is low in terms of time and money, I think the simplest approach would be to set up some meaningful content on the bluebarb website.  A good start would be content that explained useful web tools and included a description of how valuable bluebarb widgets are and how to set them up.

The content will get indexed by Google and hopefully that will bring in some traffic.

Use your twenty hours of web development time to set up a WordPress blog for the website instead of the Dreamweaver site that is set up now.  Set up an author login and use the investment cash to pay for articles and instructions.  Because it’s in WordPress, the author can type the articles directly into the website.

With the one hour each month, gather and review the following statistics:

• website hit count for the month
• number of widgets in use
• number of times users went to Amazon
• number of times users purchased something at Amazon
• income

Track these numbers over three months and let’s do another assessment at that time!

You think "By the time I spec it out, I’ll have put in almost the same work as writing it myself."  Or: "They may not even do a good enough job, and I’ll have to send it back and ask for a rewrite.  That’s more trouble than doing it myself."

You know what?

You’re probably right.

You know what else?

Learning to outsource part of your work is not an inherent skill, it’s one that needs to be developed.  The first time you do it, it could be a disaster.  It likely will be difficult.  But in order to move up the value chain, to become a provider of greater value, this skill is a must.

You can read about it, but in the end you will develop it through practice.  This practice will give you greater skills in managing people, it will force you to think about your project at a higher level, and it will build your network.

Once you get past the point where outsourcing is more trouble than doing it yourself, you have increased your reach.  You are now investing resources other than time to produce something that is bigger than what you could do yourself.  This leaves you time to work on the most critical parts of your business.

Before I learned this, I would be making big charts of what needs to be done in the project.  As I wrote down steps that I don’t like doing (at that time, just about anything other than programming), I could see my evenings and weekends slipping away.  It was a mental drain just to put it on the todo list.

Now that I have learned to pay others to do a lot of this work, I no longer need to put it on my todo list.  In terms of my stress over it, it’s "done" as soon as I think of it.  I have somebody I trust who will take care of it.