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18.2 Three Archetypes that Lead to Success

January 15, 2008 by Liz

Getting to Success

Barry J. Moltz

Yesterday, Barry Moltz, the author of —Bounce!: Failure, Resiliency, and Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success, and I talked about what it means to Bounce! Barry explained that by letting go of successes and failures, we can Bounce! We Bounce! from success and failure, failure and success. Being able to Bounce! leads us to develop resiliency and true business confidence, passion, and enthusiasm.

Today, we’re talking about success.

Barry, in the book, you talk about three archetypes that we all follow to achieve success. Would you talk about them and why they’re true?

Most of us look to follow one of three paths to get to business success:

    You can create something from nothing. You have few financial resources but you do have an idea and you are willing to work very hard. Your many years of hard work and bit of luck, finally result in a million dollar payday This is the American Dream, right. No matter where you start from, there is the infinite possibility that you can get there!

    —–

    You fail miserably, you may even go bankrupt, but you are able to learn something important from this failure. As a result, this new information propels you to even greater financial success this time around.

    —–

    Finally, once you get there after you made that first million, success leads to even greater success since we all know, it takes money to make money. I love the business adage that says how do you make $100M ? Start with $10M!

And there are places where this is true.

Bill Gates after he dropped out of Harvard, he did create something from nothing in building Microsoft and became as a result one of the richest men in the world.

Simon Cowell, my favorite American idol judge, did have a miserably failure. He went bankrupt, lost a million dollars and had to move back in with his parents. With the success of the show, American Idol, he now makes over $8M a year and in 2003 he sold half of his S Records to BMG for $43M. Pretty good comeback

And finally, Donald Trump was able to take over his father’s real estate business and become even richer. I laugh because in a recent issue of a pop-culture magazine, Stuff, one of the headline read, How to Get Rich, by Ivanka Trump. I did not even have to read the article to know the answer—have “The Donald” as your father!

These stories are great to read about and sometimes they even inspire us. But are they always true? For most of us they are not. No matter how hard we look for the ten steps to success, we each have to make our own way.

Thanks, Barry!

Tomorrow we’ll talk about how honoring our failures is also important. Find more great information about Bounce! and advice on success and failure at BarryMoltz.com

–ME “Liz” Strauss

If you’d like Barry to do a guest post or an interview at your blog during his virtual book tour, email me at lizsun2 at gmail.com

Filed Under: Business Book, Interviews, Successful Blog Tagged With: Barry-J.-Moltz, bc, Bounce, interview

18.1 What Does It Mean to Bounce?

January 14, 2008 by Liz

Bounce! Not Bounce Back

Bounce! The Path to True Business Confidence

Barry and I met the first time in a local coffee shop. We shared a bit about ourselves and quickly got to the many facets of Barry’s business career, his books, and his experiences. We talked about his first book, You Need to Be a Little Crazy: The Truth about Starting and Growing Your Business. He told me a few stories about his own successes and failures and how they contributed to his new book —Bounce!: Failure, Resiliency, and Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success. Bounce! is about how to gain true confidence by learning from and letting go of past success and failure.

Barry, I love the cover of Bounce! So let’s start there. What is Bounce! anyway? Is it about bouncing back? Why a rubber band ball on the cover? What does the rubber band ball mean and how can I get one?

I don’t believe that we bounce back. That is too simple. The business world is not structured in a linear way,

Bounce! is about letting go of what you were taught was the secret path to succeed in business. Letting go of the idea that something to learn comes from failure or that you can always duplicate your success. Let go of the shame of losing and the enlarged ego that comes with a big win.

If we let go of whatever the last result was — we can actually Bounce! We can learn what — if any thing — from the last success or failure and get ready by bouncing to the next decision that we have to make.

Any success or failure is just a part of the entire business lifecycle. Individually, a particular result or outcome actually means nothing. No event will guarantee the same result in the future. By learning to bounce through this repetitive process of “success and failure, failure and success”, you will develop a resiliency that will lead to the true business confidence that ultimately determines which ones of us succeed.

More importantly, it allows each of us to have passion and enthusiasm regardless of where we are in the cycle. It allows us to get ready our next great success!

I love the rubber band ball for a lot of reasons. I grew up making rubber band balls. They became somewhat of an obsession for me. I loved how you take a simple rubber band and make it into a cool toy ball that could bounce. The biggest one I ever made was about 6 inches in diameter. Recently I went on YouTube and there are so many videos with rubber band balls doing a lot of things.

I concept of the rubber band ball is that while there are not 10 steps to success, there are building blocks. In order to build true business confidence, you layer on these bands or foundations for yourself. Rubber bands are also very flexible and that is what you have to be in the business world to succeed.

Thanks, Barry!

Tomorrow we’ll talk about the Archetypes that lead to success. Find more great information about Bounce! and advice on success and failure at BarryMoltz.com

–ME “Liz” Strauss

If you’d like to invite Barry to do a guest post or an interview at your blog, email me at lizsun2 at gmail.com

Filed Under: Business Book, Interviews, Successful Blog Tagged With: Barry-J.-Moltz, bc, Bounce, interview

A 5-part Series: An Interview with Barry J. Moltz

January 13, 2008 by Liz

Meet Barry!

Barry J. Moltz

A wonderful thing about the blogosphere is how it connects us. Shortly after I met Brett Farmiloe of Pursue the Passion, I met the guy who inspired Brett to get crazy about his passion.

When Barry called me, his energy bounced through the phone. We met for coffee and parted with a working relationship. I’ve been working with Barry Moltz since October.

You might know Barry from his first book, You Need to Be a Little Crazy: The Truth about Starting and Growing Your Business. Many of you have told me you are. It describes the ups and downs and emotional trials of running a business. It is in its fourth reprint and has been translated into four languages. (Here’s an Amazon excerpt if the book is new to you.)

The Bounce Virtual Book Tour

Bounce! The Path to True Business Confidence

With this post, we’re happy to announce that Barry about to release his new book, Bounce!: Failure, Resiliency, and Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success. Bounce is about how you gain true business confidence by letting go of both your failures and successes. I’ve read it and I think that your readers will find the insights that Barry shares to be invaluable.

We’re launching a virtual book tour with a series of interview this week on Successful-Blog.

Monday, January 14 — 18.1 What Does It Mean to Bounce?

Tuesday, January 15 — 18.2 Three Archetypes that Lead to Success
Wednesday, January 16 — 18.3 Honoring Our Failures

Thursday, January 17 — 18.4 Good Things about One-Hit Wonders

Friday, January 18 — 18.5 Getting Free of Success Mythology

Because Barry’s in Chicago. I get to work with him in person. It’s a treat I hope you’ll get to experience one day. In the meantime, check out what he has to say this week. You’ll see what I mean as you read along. Then keep the great information and counself flowing by subscribing to Barry’s Blog.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

If you’d like to arrange for an interview with Barry, email me at lizsun2 at gmail.com

Filed Under: Interviews, Successful Blog Tagged With: Barry-J.-Moltz, bc, Bounce, interview

The Ageless Project: David Wilkinson

November 14, 2007 by Liz

the ageless project

A Problogger in His Teens

by Keith Dsouza

Did you think that age could deter you from blogging? Did you think that a 13 year old only can accomplish things in school?

Well lets break the myth today. Blogging is ageless.

David Wilkinson has shattered any idea that blogging is restricted by age. . . .

David Wilkinson, a 13-year-old blogger from Manchester, England, was born on February 15th, 1994. He has been actively blogging since the age of 12. In that short time, David has become a full-time Problogger and Internet Professional without affecting his studies. He is also the CEO and founder of Zi Media.

David also likes to play golf in his spare time or hooks on with his Xbox 360 or his gaming PC. He also has an interest in Photography but meekly says that he is not a expert at that yet.

Vital Stats

Name: David Wilkinson
URL: http://www.tech-zi.net
Birthdate: 15th February 1994
Birthplace: Manchester, England – UK
Current Location: Manchester, England – UK

What David Blogs About

David writes at Techzi.net and also owns Affiliate Defined. David writes about technology and has quite an engaging way of doing it. He mixes humor with his writings that many of regular readers have come to appreciate.

Reading through his blog, I was surprised at how easily a reader could digest the information he provides and laugh while doing it.

David’s categories include Internet, Gaming, Gadgets, Web2.0 and many more.

Getting Candid With David

Here are a few questions we asked David and what he had to say. .

Successful Blog (SB): How old were you when you came across blogging?
David Wilkinson (DW): I started blogging in July 2006 which would have made me 12. Admittedly, it was complete fluke that I ran across blogging at all and I have a spammy AdSense arbitrage website to thank, ironically enough.

SB: How did the interest generate within you, knowing that you are of such a tender age?
DW: I’ve always been an entrepreneur – trying to sell things to my friends and try out new methods of work. I’ve also always showed a natural interest and a burning curiositry for anything out-of-the-ordinary, or even slightly different. Blogging presented itself to me in a strange way (see above), but I don’t regret it for a second.

SB: Did something influence you to take up blogging?
DW: I’d always had a passion for writing and like to have my views known. I knew XHTML and a bit of CSS and with the help of Blogger managed to get a site running pretty quickly. I soon picked up on sites like Engadget and Gizmodo, along with the other “usual” technology blogs you’ll run across who dictated the direction my writing took. My style, being arguably different from the masses – aimed to please and not just inform and reading my blogs for the first time, alot of people won’t pick up on the underlying humor and jokes that long-term reads will. I guess my biggest influence however was the relationship I had with my readers, and for that – I thank them.

SB: What are your most memorable experiences when you started blogging?
DW: Ha! One stands out particularly strongly, as it happens and it was perhaps one of my first ever backlinks I was to receive. I’d reviewed NABAZTAG, a French Wi-Fi Rabbit-turn-evil-villain-turn-RSS-reader-turn-alarm-clock and the makers had picked up on the article and linked to it. Being new to the whole concept of blogging, I went off and wrote three or four posts ranting on my blog about how “famous the blog was”. Oh boy – I had a long way to go… 😉

SB: Do you think blogging is ageless? If not a ProBlogger, would you have still chosen to blog regularly at your age?DW: Ageless? Certainly. If not a ProBlogger would I have chosen to blog? Bear in mind, when I started to blog, I *wasn’t* a ProBlogger. I was just your average geeky kid (which I’m proud to say I still am). Today, I’m not sure I *would* class myself as a ProBlogger. Six months ago, maybe, but my focuses and earnings have shifted from one place to another and today my main focus is affiliate marketing. Despite this, I have to admit that the blogosphere is one of the safest and most fun environments online with such a community element to it that it’s hard not to grin broadly at the random adventures of Timmy the cat and Darren Rowse’s next big thing.

SB: Could you give us some quotes on how blogging can be an ageless experience.
DW: It’s nothing like a 9-5 job. There’s nothing stopping you from doing your schoolwork AND blogging. I guess it’s flexible “working” hours, to be honest. There’s nobody to tell me off (besides my blog readers) or whine at me for not writing (besides my blog readers) or dock my pay if I turn up for “work” late (besides my advertisers). 😉 Hehe… At the end of the day though, it’s one of them things that ANYBODY can do with a keyboard and a mouse. You don’t need to be 18. You don’t have to be younger than 60. You don’t have to have an IQ of ten-thousand and one. You don’t even have to write well so long as you have an interesting story to tell. A breath of fresh air in a controlled world.

Thanks, David. We couldn’t agree more.

Be ageless and let the world know. Great thoughts come from every age and all over the planet.
–ME “Liz” Strauss and Keith Dsouza
Work with Liz!!

Filed Under: Interviews, Successful Blog Tagged With: ageless-project, bc, blogging-basics, David-Wilkinson, interview, Tech-zi

The Relationsheep Factor: A Successful Blog Birthday Bash Interview with the Phil Gerbyshak and Lisa Gates!

October 23, 2007 by Chris Cree

Phil Gerbyshak, sheep, Liz Strauss, Lisa Gates = Relationship Geeks

In honor of Liz Strauss, the fabulously sticky writer and queen of relationship blogging, Lisa Gates of Design Your Writing Life and Phil Gerbyshak of Make it Great team up to offer this first-time-ever interview to talk about Liz’s impact on the Relationsheep factor and what it’s like to have Liz inside your computer.

Filed Under: Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, Evoca, interview, Lisa-Gates, Liz-Strauss, Phil-Gerbyshak, Successful-Blog

Interview 1.8: Brian Gardner — One Man Revolution

October 11, 2007 by Liz

They Say the Revolution Starts Oct. 24th

Revolution and Revolution News

Out in the northwestern suburbs of Chicago, a man is working has made a Revolution. Well, actually he’s made three. He’s designer, Brian Gardner. The Revolutions are his three newest WordPress Themes: Revolution Revolution News, and Revolution Sports. We’ve planned a two part interview. This Thursday and next to talk about what Brian’s been doing and how he found himself a blog designer.

Howdy, sir. Tell me, who is Brian Gardner?

My name is Brian Gardner. I was born on December 27th, 1974, at 10:06 in the morning in Bellflower, California. That makes me 32 years old, but please don’t tell anyone. I am starting to get a receding hairline, which is why I shave my head. I’m a hubby, a dad, a son, an in-law, a friend, a designer and sometimes a writer.

You might find this difficult to believe, but 12 months ago I didn’t own my domain name, had never touched a piece of WordPress code and knew nothing about blog design. In other words, everything I’ve done with WordPress and blog design in the past year has been self taught, using trial and error.

I find myself hopelessly addicted to blog design and taking nightly runs to Starbucks for a triple shot grande toffee nut latte. Other things I am addicted to are watching Grey’s Anatomy, fantasy football, and the repeat button on my Sarah McLachlan CD’s each night as I sit in bed with my laptop and work on my freelance projects.

Any signs when you were eight years old that you’d be doing this today?

Absolutely not – when I was eight years old, I was going to be a baseball player. And at some point I realized that I wasn’t “gifted” like today’s athletes are, and my dream of playing at Veteran’s Stadium in Philadelphia came to a screeching halt. Throughout my years in high school, my passion became writing. I have written over 300 poems, but never formally put myself through training. Then I went to college and studied geography, because of my love for nature and the mountains. After two years in college, I retreated home, where I currently am a project manager and IT for an architectural design company. In addition, I do freelance design work, and hope to go full time in the near future.

How did you come to discover blogs?

To be honest, I cannot pinpoint the discovery – what I can say is that I am a recovering Blogspot (Google’s free blog software) user, and was lucky enough to have a friend challenge me into trying out WordPress. The reason I love the concept of blogging is that I am able to combine the two things I am most passionate about – writing and design. Fortunately for me, I have been able to teach myself how to design WordPress themes, so I am able to write on a platform using a theme that I believe in!

Brian, what got you started in your career?

When I realized that I was finally making money doing something I love – I fully believe that you should be passionate about your careers, especially if you are self-employed. To be able to wake up and “want” to go to work is a huge thing, and even though I am not currently doing that, I look forward to the day I can!

What made you realize that you really were a blog designer worth paying attention to?

After releasing a few free themes, I started to receive feedback, and requests from people wanting me to do custom work for them. I realized that this was a sign that people liked what I did, and when I started to feel sought after, it really affirmed my gifts of design and motivated me to do more. Another thing that made a difference, more so in fun, was watching my Technorati rank increase – when I first started blogging, I made it a goal to break the top 100 blogs, and I am currently at #21.

I really want to thank Mark over at Splashpress Media for giving me the opportunity to do the current design over at the Blog Herald. I felt that was a turning point in my career, and that it gave credibility to my name. The exposure there has really been wonderful, and I have been able to do many other projects with them.

Thanks, Brian! See you next week . . . when we’ll talk more about more about the story behind the Revolution. Anyone else have questions for Brian?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Interview 17: Anita Bruzzese on 45 Things

Filed Under: Interviews, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, Brian-Gardner, interview

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