The Lazy Way to Success

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In Praise of Laziness

I just finished making a video entitled In Praise of Laziness. It is a glorious, uproarious five-minute animation starring humanity's greatest thinkers stingingly rebuking the concept of hard work and embracing the power of laziness.

In Praise of Laziness is quirky, funny, delightfully shocking, and playfully profound. I hope you enjoy viewing it as much as we enjoyed creating it.

To view, please click here www.lazyway.net/movie.

For the maximum experience:

1. Watch until after the credits for a surprise ending.
2. Turn up the sound. The music specially composed for this video is superb.
3. If you have a fast computer, the icon in the lower right-hand corner (next to the speaker icon) expands the video to full screen.

Let me know how you like it.

Fred

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Definition of Success

An editor for a success magazine wanted to know my views on success. Here is what I wrote back:

Most people think success is a goal. I do not. I see success as a process. Most people define success only in terms of money. I do not. I think success is a combination of things -- health, happiness, material prosperity, love of family and friends, wisdom, influence, and fulfillment.

Here is how I know someone is successful -- If you are able to give from your abundance then you are successful. If you are able to donate money, spread happiness, inspire health, propagate love, share knowledge, motivate people, etc. then you are successful.

Most people think you need to work hard to achieve success. I do not think that is true. I believe the opposite is true. I believe you have to learn how to avoid work to be successful. I define work this way -- if you'd rather be doing something else, then you are working.

You avoid work by loving what you do. Loving what you do is infinitely more powerful in achieving success than all the hard work in the world. If you love what you do, Nature will show you her secrets. When Nature reveals her secrets to you, you have the golden key to being successful. Those secrets are the formulas for working less yet accomplishing more. For example, you can strain your muscles working hard to move a big rock or you can use one of Nature's secrets and use a lever. When you use a lever you work much less but you accomplish much more.

People who say they work hard are really saying they are not smart enough or creative enough or lucky enough to have found an easier, more effective way to accomplish what they want. Hard work is not the answer. Finding an easier, more effective solution is the answer. To find the easier solution, you need to be alert for a lazier way. People who work hard don't have the time or the energy or inclination to find that easier way.


www.lazyway.net

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Holiday Wishes

Here's wishing you a blissfully lazy holiday season, gloriously filled with robust health, uproarious laughter, fabulous culinary treats, and loving family and friends.

May the New Year bring you more of the above plus even greater prosperity and glowing accomplishments.

And finally may we all see this New Year result in a world where everyone finally learns to play together in joy, harmony, and enlightened laziness.

All the very best to you,
Fred and all the members of Team Lazy

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A Star of Stage, Screen, and You Tube

I've made it to the big time, folks. There is a 51 second clip of me talking about Transcendental Meditation on You Tube. Here's the link.

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News from the Hammock

I have not been posting these last several months for a couple of compelling reasons:

1. I've been participating in a special Transcendental Meditation program that I have been enjoying immensely. Unfortunately it absorbs a lot of time, leaving little left for things like blogging.

2. In the time I do have, I've been writing my next book which is currently in the hands of an editor who I revere. Once I incorporate her ruthless edits - always a shocking, yet ultimately rewarding process, I'll be ready to lay out the book and publish it.  I will release it as an e-book first even before it goes to the printer. I think it is going to be a humdinger so stay tuned. If you want to be alerted when it is ready, send me an email to [email protected] and I'll put you on my mailing list. For those of you who were just horrified by that complete lack of on-line savvy, rest assured that I am in the process of upgrading my entire Internet presence so that things like building an email list will be automated.

For more news, the translation rights to my first book, The Lazy Way to Success, have been sold to 8 foreign publishers. Now folks interested in my brand of laziness can read my deathless prose in German, Portuguese, Czech, Hungarian, Korean, Chinese (simple character), and Chinese (complex character). The Japanese publisher who purchased the rights, failed to do anything in a timely manner so those rights revert back to me. I hope to sell them again soon. The German edition, by the way, is in its third printing.

For those who prefer pixels, The Lazy Way to Success is also available as an e-book. The e-book comes with a pile of bonus interviews of yours truly. If you are interested in it, please go to www.lazysuccess.com.

I am extremely stoked about my new book, Perfect Mind Perfect Motion. I think it is the most important book on sports ever written. It shifts the paradigm dramatically and I think it will change the way sports are taught, practiced, and played throughout the world. Hang onto your hats, folks. It should be available as an e-book in about one month.

That's it for now.

Wishing you all effortless success,
Fred


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The Laziest Man in North America on YouTube

I will be coming out of retirement for a couple of hours to speak at the THINK! 2007 Seminar along with a slew of world class presenters. The dates are September 25-27, 2007 and the place is Amsterdam, Netherlands. Here's a glimpse of yours truly in the middle of the seminar's promotional trailer.

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Destination Imagination and a Proud Papa

My son Jake has participated in Destination Imagination (DI) for the last eight years. DI is a team-oriented creative problem-solving competition. Each year in October, teams (comprised of five to seven kids) must choose one out of five long-term challenges -- each with a different focus (Technical/Mechanical, Theater Arts/Science, Theater Arts/Fine Arts, Theater Arts/Improvisation, Structural & Architectural Design). Each Team Challenge is designed to be open-ended and solvable in many ways and on many levels. In competition the long-term challenge counts for 75% of the score.

The Instant Challenge portion of a DI Tournament accounts for 25% of the score. During Instant Challenge, teams
are given a challenge on the spot and asked to solve it in about five to eight minutes. No one knows ahead of time what the Challenge will be. Kids really have to be good at thinking on their feet.

The coolest part about DI is that adult intervention is strictly prohibited. Kids must create, build, and present their solutions without any adult direction and assistance (other than chauffeuring and paying the bills). In the early days, it was difficult to bite my parental tongue but I have come to really enjoy this aspect. First off, it is quite liberating. Secondly, I realized that if adults were involved, the solutions would not have been anywhere near as imaginative.

I am convinced these DI kids will make ideal business partners because they are extraordinarily creative and they understand the power of teamwork. They definitely have learned how to
think innovatively to solve problems cheaply, efficiently, and elegantly.

Here's how the competition works. First place winners on the state level qualify to compete at the Global Finals. And let me tell you, Global Finals is a spectacle to behold when a cross-section of the most creative kids in the world come together. Competition is extremely stiff.

My son has won first place in Iowa and gone to the Global Finals four times. In seventh grade, his team came in 6th globally and, in eighth grade, 5th. (4th, 5th and 6th place are like honorable mention; 1st, 2nd, and 3rd bring home flashy hardware -- medals and trophies.)

When in tenth grade, Jake's team won 2nd place and I thought I had reached Parent Nirvana but this year, Jake's 12th grade team finished first in the world and they also won the prestigious Renaissance Award for outstanding design, engineering, execution, and performance. The centerpiece of their solution was a homemade computer with its electromagnetic switches constructed out of nails and copper wire. The damn thing could add. The judges were absolutely blown away.

As you can imagine, I am still kvelling. Here's a picture of the world champs.
Jake is front row, second from left. As proud as he is of his accomplishment, I am more so.

Di_global_finals_2007_071_2
Even though I am a little sad to see the end of this exciting chapter in our lives, I am relieved our home will no longer be the "mess house" where solutions are designed and built.
That means I won't have to peel scrapes of duct tape off my socks any more.

www.lazyway.net
 

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Free Advertising

Let me start by splitting hairs.

Frequently, publicity gets referred to as free advertising. This is a common misunderstanding. There is an important distinction between advertising and publicity. You pay for advertising and you control the content. With publicity, you don't have to pay (it's articles and shows about your product) and you have no control over the content. It is the journalist who writes what he wants -- good or bad.

However, this just happens to be a story about free advertising.

It takes place during my ice cream days. We were trying to get into supermarkets and compete head to head with Haagen-Dazs and Ben & Jerry's. In taste competitions, we always beat them. Journalists would ask why and I would explain that both Haagen-Dazs and Ben & Jerry's were French-style ice creams that used egg yolks in their recipes.  Since I objected to the sulphury taste of egg yolks and felt it overshadowed the subtlety of delicate flavors like vanilla and fruit, I didn't use eggs. While my ice cream was as rich and as dense as my two major competitors, my ice cream had a clean, pure dairy taste that enhanced subtle flavors. I would tell journalists that I believed ice cream came from cows, not chickens.

In our efforts to get placed in supermarkets we signed up to exhibit at the FMI convention held in Chicago. FMI stands for Food marketing Institute and they would hold these humongous conventions for supermarket executives who would come from all over the world. This particular year, McCormick Place was the venue. If you have never been there, suffice to say that the exhibition space is large enough to have all National Football League games played simultaneously and there would still be room for several college games as well.

Nearly every manufacturer who sells wares through supermarkets puts on a display. And no one skimps. Floor space is exorbitantly expensive and some large food concerns don't hold back. Companies like Coke and Pepsi construct breathtaking architectural and technological wonders. Some companies (Budweiser, for example) put on stage shows in their exhibits featuring the characters from their popular television commercials. Other companies featured sports figures or movie/television personalities. Wheaties, for instance, had some well-known Olympic gold medalists in its booth. Playboy magazine had its Bunnies and Playmates. And not to be outdone, Penthouse had its "whatevers."

And everyone serves food and/or drink. Even if you are extremely particular about what you eat, you'd more than satisfy your hunger even if you ate just one bite-sized free sample per booth. I am a fussy vegetarian and I was so full at the end of the afternoon I didn't want to think about dinner.

Now, into this arena of excess, marched the "juggernaut" from The Great Midwestern Ice Cream Company. We could not afford even the smallest booth space for ourselves but fortunately we had been invited by the state of Iowa to be in its "Taste of Iowa" booth . This booth wasn't on the main exhibition floor but on a subterranean floor of an auxiliary building. It definitely was far removed from the main action. We ended up sharing this space with two popcorn companies, one barbeque sauce company, and a fruit cake baker from Nebraska.

We had five feet of frontage.

Even given its poor (and tiny) location vis a vis the big manufacturers, we still had plenty of traffic since most executives toured the entire show. Unfortunately, when they finally got around to us, they were so totally over-stimulated, over-titillated, overwhelmed, jaded, satiated, and carrying their overloaded stomachs around in wheelbarrows so the idea of eating another bite, even if this was the premiere taste sensation of the entire show, was abhorrent to these guys.

So, how did we compete in this high dollar and high glitz environment?

It turns out that concurrent with the expo were presentations on various aspects of the supermarket industry to large audiences. The speakers for those presentations were the same executives we wanted to contact. So instead of standing in our booth and trying to entice passers-by to taste our ice cream, we wrote letters of invitation to each speaker to come and visit us and guaranteeing them that just a taste of our ice cream was worth the trip. 

Now here is the best part. We then went to a Federal Express box, commandeered a stack of cardboard envelops, addressed them to each speaker, and just before any presentation was to about to begin, we hand delivered the FedEx letter. It created quite an impact. Most presenters were tickled by the chutzpah and cleverness of our approach and actually visited us.

Whatever bad karma I incurred for taking those envelops, I'm sure I've repaid many times over in the high prices I've paid FedEx for subsequent deliveries.

www.lazyway.net

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Ice Cream and the Presidential Election

As I mentioned in my last post, the Iowa caucuses are the first test for aspiring presidential candidates. A good showing in Iowa and then a success in the New Hampshire primary a week later gives a candidate a major boost in terms of media coverage and fund raising. Candidates are well aware of Iowa’s early impact. They start arriving more than a year before the caucuses and return frequently to grovel for our votes.

Besides the candidates, an army of journalists from all over the world record every step and misstep during this quadrennial courting dance.

Back in 1987, no incumbent was running so both parties had eight or nine candidates each declaring his or her intention to run. At the time, I was in the ice cream business and looked upon this overwhelming media presence and wondered how I could tap into it and use it to my commercial advantage.

It was then that I thought of The Great Midwestern Ice Cream Presidential Poll. Here is how it worked:

I assigned flavors to each candidate, giving that flavor a name that reflected a distinguishing characteristic of the candidate. For example, there was Bush’s Preppymint, Simon’s Bow Tie Brickle, Gephardt’s St. Louis Bluesberry, Biden’s Loquacious Peach, Gore’s Mint Julep Chip, etc. I then declared that we’d determine a candidate’s popularity by how much ice cream was sold in his (or her) name.

It was a cute idea and I thought I’d get some little mention in TIME magazine or something like that. What actually happened blew my mind.

The press went wild. The evolution of this story over the next six months made the international wire services four times. I was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, New York Times Magazine, NBC Evening News, and scores upon scores of others. I appeared on Japanese TV. A friend said he saw my interview when he was vacationing in Italy. A Dutch film crew visited my ice cream factory.  I got a call from a radio station in Germany and found it particularly difficult explaining to a German audience why Kemp’s Quarterback Crunch was funny.

The punch line of my ice cream poll was the flavor for a candidate who was forced out of the race because of an extra-marital affair – Hart’s Donna Rice Cream

With all the media attention this poll was receiving, the candidates and their staffs started taking the poll seriously. Staffers would “stuff the ballot box” by buying lots of their candidate’s flavor. One staffer actually complained to a major newspaper that just because someone may not like their candidate’s flavor didn’t mean he didn’t like the candidate. Another campaign’s highly placed staff member called me and expressed her extreme disapproval with the name we gave to her candidate’s flavor – Robertson’s Born Again Chocolate. (It was Double Dutch chocolate). She said she wanted us to change it to Peppermint Patty. I said that that name simply wasn’t funny. Congresswoman Pat Schroeder loved her flavor – Run Pat Run Raisin. (When she was trying to decide whether to run or not, her supporters would chant Run Pat Run.) Dupont cringed when he heard the name of his flavor – Dupont’s Super Rich Fudge – but he said he would endorse my ice cream if I would endorse his candidacy. Both Governor Dukakis (Massachewy Chocolate) and Senator Dole (Top Banana) made personal campaign promises to me. Neither kept them even though I tried to collect from Dole on a number of occasions. When I shook hands with General Alexander Haig (I’m In Charge Chocolate), all humor was sucked from my body and I thought I would never laugh again. He was one serious dude.

The caucuses are held in the evening. On the actual day of the caucus, the candidates fill their schedules with as many appearances as possible where they try to squeeze out every last single vote and also to try to be the lead story in the evening news.

Governor Dukakis for the Democrats and Senator Dole for the Republicans won my poll. Each consented to receive their winning flavor on the day of the caucus. At the Dukakis presentation in the morning, there were 20 television cameras. The photo of me handing Dukakis his flavor made the front page of the Washington Post. Later that day, Dole’s presentation was recorded by 6 television cameras and a horde of print journalists.

That morning I was interviewed on the Today Show by Bryant Gumbel and Jane Pauley. On Good Morning America I was interviewed by Mark Russell, the political comedian.

The poll was such a success that we continued it after the Iowa caucus and took it on the road. Amana, the appliance manufacturer,  sponsored “The Rolling Polling Station.” The ice cream ended up being served at the Republican National Convention in New Orleans, a major Democratic fund raiser in Washington, DC, and at the White House at the President’s Annual Picnic for all the members of Congress. I was invited to attend. (At the time I was married for only three months and I really impressed my new wife with this invitation to the White House.)

If you would like to read the story of all my ice cream exploits, it begins at this permalink – http://lazyway.blogs.com/lazy_way/2005/04/by_popular_dema.html and runs for ten posts.

www.lazyway.net

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Iowa and Presidential Candidates

As you may know, Iowa is the earliest popularity test for candidates running for President of the United States. It involves a caucus instead of a primary. I am not going to go into detail about how a caucus works. Suffice to say it is a weird, convoluted system that only hardcore political junkies understand.

But that's not the issue of this post. The Iowa caucuses won't take place until sometime in January of 2008. This is February of 2007 yet candidates for President from both parties have been visiting Iowa in droves and they will relentlessly visit Iowa for the entire year. And each will be followed by a horde of journalists, photographers, and cameramen. The whole thing builds to a screaming crescendo the week or three before the actual caucuses. Press will outnumber Iowans at most events. And candidates will do anything to get the lead story.

In past years, it was easy to meet anyone you wanted. You could even invite a candidate to give a talk in your living room, especially if you invited them early enough in the process when they were building an organization.

In 2003 I wasn't particularly aggressive, but I met John Edwards, Howard Dean, and Dennis Kucinich. We even had Kucinich over to our house for one of those so-called cozy living room things. Little did we know that the Kucinich people advertised the event on their web site and 350 people showed up. Really. Even the New York Times sent a reporter.

This year I thought I'd invite every single candidate to my home. Since one of them was bound to become President, it seemed like a cool idea. But then I made a list of candidates. Frankly I wasn'€™t interested in meeting most of them. While it would be cool to chat up Rudy, Hillary, McCain, Obama, and Edwards, it suddenly struck me as an enormous amount of time to organize the whole thing and these days I am so deeply committed to doing the long meditations that I described in previous posts.

But that is not the whole story. It looks like the quaint Iowa caucus thing where candidates will sit with you over coffee or in your living room with a couple of your friends is a relic of the past. Today, some of these candidates are like rock stars giving huge rallies that attract thousands and command major press coverage. And those were the ones I wanted in my house. Since we barely fit Kucinich'€™s 350 in our home (it strained every seam), I thought it prudent not to attract a gathering the size of the Chinese army.

Of course, if I wanted to meet the second and third tier candidates I'd have plenty of takers, but, let's face it, zzzzzzzzzzzz.

www.lazyway.net

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Orange Herbert


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Interviews

  • Interview by Bob Doyle of Wealth Beyond Reason
  • Interview with the World's Laziest Man

Favorite Lazy Way Posts

  • The Ice Cream Story (10 parts) Starts
  • Finding Your Calling, Part 1
  • Finding Your Calling, Part 2
  • How to Start a Business without Money
  • Finding Your Calling: Collaboration
  • The Lazy Way to Become an Olympic Athlete
  • Taking My Company Public
  • The World's Greatest Banker
  • Top 10 Signs You're Made to be an Entrepreneur
  • The Secret to Making Lots of Money
  • Hard Work versus Smart (and Rich) Laziness
  • How to Light the Inner Fire

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