Publishing just got dangerous.

As we’ll talk about in this video, Derek and I have been working relentlessly on our product publishing company, Dangerous Publishing. In our constant conversations with authors and experts, we’re getting endless insight into the author mindset and pre-conceived notions towards publishers. It’s a nuanced negotiation around each side’s value and contribution to the potential product, and inevitably, the currency is control.

No, you should not self-publish. You’re expertise is bigger than that.

The entire notion of self-publishing is doing a massive disservice to people that won’t realize it until it’s too late. In the same way that open-source tools like Wordpress have turned plenty of damn good content-creators into mediocre code-tinkerers (”Oh, I’ll write more later… I need to go tweak my theme again first…”), self-publishing is convincing otherwise smart people that they should take on every aspect of the publishing workflow.

If you think, inside your mind and on the tips of your fingers, you have brilliance that will make you rich, you may be right. You may have the sort of expertise that will set you up for years of strong, product-based income. We meet people constantly that have that.

Your brilliance means nothing if you can’t let go of control, and you’ll be forever beneath your potential if you can’t get out of your own way, and refuse to stop doing things that don’t matter.

If you want to be small and disrespect your core contribution to the world, go ahead: self-publish your heart out. Spend your time fighting with Microsoft Word page margins, hacking together a shopping cart, learning Photoshop to make mediocre ads, and figuring out how to get your book on the iBookstore. All of these things have nothing to do with your being ridiculously knowledgeable about what you know, and you’ll realize the one thing you don’t have energy left to do is the thing that matters most: create pure content.

As a publisher, we’re concerned with your doing one thing: flowing forth raw, uncut brilliance. We want to see you step into the recording booth, stand in front of the cameras, or sit in a simple text document – and be absolutely world-class. Everything else is production, and if you are truly world-class, you shouldn’t be bothered with the minutiae. The willingness and ability to let yourself be produced is what separates the big players from the little tinkerers that never took themselves seriously.

Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

Muselife is back in action, baby. C’mon, somebody pop a bottle and pour it on the floor.

It’s been ages. I know it, you know it – there’s just no denying it. I guess I’ve just been too busy “lifestyle designing”, huh? No, that can’t be it. If it were, I’d be blogging every 3 hours. So, why the disappearing act? What have I been doing? In short: hustling. Creating, learning, writing, studying, failing, building. I’ve been in Bangkok for 7 months, living and scheming with dangerous minds. We have a lot of catching up to do, and we’ll be doing it with fresh videos. Let’s get started.

In this video, joined by Derek Johanson (@djohanson) of Live Uncomfortably, we talk about a phrase I consciously avoid using: internet marketing and its proper place in building a business. We hit on the importance of the product, and make an insultingly obvious distinction between the getting of money vs. the keeping of money.

Next up…

In the next day or two, we’ll be rolling out another conversation focused on digital publishing, product creation & the neurotic obsession with control that will keep you broke and insignificant if you don’t change your attitude.

Until then, coming to you from the island of Koh Tao … it’s good to be back.

The quick version…

We’re releasing a product called M6 Method on May 28th, 2010. There’s a detailed explanation at the new blog we just launched, and you’ll see a complete overview of the Method rolled out there over the next 6 days. Read this post, then go there, get on the notification list, and see what Method is all about this week. Follow@muselife for updates.

Go to the M6 Blog ›

Now, the longer version…

It’s no secret that muse is a loanword from Tim Ferriss. Predictably enough, it’s gotten tainted over time by aspiring “lifestyle designers” lacking followthrough and shifting blame away from themselves. The hard truth is that creating a business is not something everyone is cut out to do, and if you think publishing & marketing products is any exception – you’re delusional. I’ll say this now and I’ll say it later: It’s not easy, but it’s simple.

Let’s start with some clarification…

muse (bastardized):

A half-hearted, disorganized, bullshit business targeting an unvalidated market, which never actually goes live or generates revenue due to it’s originator quitting the moment it becomes difficult or requires more than two weeks of sustained effort.

Synonym(s): side-project, dream, buzzword

muse (proper):

A well-architected, low-input, process-driven business which produces stable income without demanding constant attention or intervention.

Synonym(s): business

That said, I need to answer a question I hear constantly (and with good reason): “Why don’t you post more often?” It’s true. Sometimes there’s over a month between, and sometimes we drop off the grid entirely. It’s time to explain why, and talk about something that’s going to help you immensely.

To know me is to realize that I’m obsessive. I deconstruct everything until I grasp the underlying frameworks and systems that aren’t clear on the surface. I see through the content to the structure and sequence that enabled it to produce an impact, or understand why it failed to. Years ago, I began studying NLP – and never stopped. The concepts of modeling, strategies & unpacking impact everything I do, and will explain what I’m about to introduce. Before that, a few loose definitions…

• Strategies represent a specific order and sequence of internal and external processes or experiences that consistently produce a specific outcome.
• Unpacking is a process to logically deconstruct a strategy into distinct actions, sequences, or elements.
• Modeling is a means of unpacking a strategy in order to achieve the same outcome for yourself.

You should be wondering why I’m giving a pseudo-psych lecture. It’s simple: nearly everyone is screwing up or getting stuck, and I don’t want you to be one of them. When it comes to creating, distributing and monetizing products, you must be methodical and model a solid strategy. As I move through different projects and work with entrepreneurs, I’ve seen countless parallels and recurrences. Creating businesses and products is about as formulaic as creating boy bands. The bulk of it all is generic and unremarkable, and too many smart people ar getting caught up on things that don’t account for the value of their idea – things that have already been figured out.

Method to the madness

When you crave an optimal way of doing something – and you know you’re not doing it that way – it’s time to stop, step back, and zoom out. When I can’t find something that meets my criteria, and all I can find are mediocre, half-assed efforts by questionable marketers – it’s a cue to create it myself. I needed to deconstruct and systematize it all. Now it’s time to share that. The result is M6 Method.

I’m going to point you to a new blog about this, but here’s an excerpt:

M6 Method is a 6-phase, systematic, process-driven framework for developing and launching product-based businesses, with a focus on low-input operation and distributed marketing effort. It is a logically assembled, reusable, scalable collection of processes and resources supporting the rapid creation of digital products.

From here, keep an eye on the M6 blog for the details over the course of the week and beyond. We’re excited for this, and for what you’ll be able to do with it.

Drop a comment if there’s anything you want to know, or questions about all of this.

Go to the M6 Blog ›

Benny Lewis is one of those guys you’ll eventually meet – in some absolutely random spot on the globe – and immediately take a liking to. For me, that particular meeting spot was near Khao San Road here in Thailand – appropriately enough, in an Irish pub named Shamrock. Here’s what’s remarkable about this chap: at any given moment, you can hear him shift between any of 7 languages in casual conversation. Benny Lewis has the type of linguistic skills that make me feel like a low-functioning autistic by comparison. Fortunately he has that disarming Irish charm to spare the fragile, unilingual ego of the average American.

After hearing him speaking Esperanto (seriously), I was fascinated. After hearing more than a wee’ bit o’Gaelic, I felt an Irish camaraderie with him. Having heard no mention of Elvish or Klingon, I knew he wasn’t just some lonely language nerd (though he did deconstruct Na’vi). After listening to him charm a Parisian model to the point of melting – in fluent French – I was straight-up jealous of him. I recall Sean Ogle and myself were about ready to bow at his feet after we witnessed that moment.

So, how is this relevant? Aside from being fascinating, what does this have to do with turning passion into passive income, product creation, and mobility? Everything.

Mobility

First off, Benny is entirely location independent. He’s lived all over this fine globe, supporting his travels as a language consultant and translator. He has the workflow and toolkit to a science, and this work also develops and maintains his core language skills. He is not crunching spreadsheets in a cube, hating his life, dreaming of a someday that will never come. He’s found a way to fuel his lifestyle doing what he loves.

Check out this post on Fluent In 3 Months for more on going freelance: How To Become A Location-Independent Freelance Translator

Product Creation: Content is king. You are nothing without content.

I don’t speak 7 languages, and I never will. That’s not my passion. However, I could make Benny relatively rich by helping him beautifully package everything he knows into something marketable. Nothing is possible without the content.

At present, you can’t buy anything from Benny. When you go to his sites, you aren’t hammered with promotions for an e-book or a course he’s selling. Everything he’s doing is 100% pure content emerging from his own learning process. This is the foundation for what will become a seriously profitable product/course. Content is all you need. If you are cranking out content around the thing you know best, you can create income. Packaging knowledge is formulaic – possessing the knowledge and sharing it liberally is what counts. Go buy yourself a $500 package from Rosetta Stone or Berlitz. By the time you’re thoroughly frustrated and regretting your decision, Benny will have something out there worth buying. He’s setup a mailing list to keep everyone updated on the status of his Language Hacking course, so I highly recommend you jump on that here.

Proving it

Benny doesn’t flaunt his language chops. He won’t bust into a language for the “Oohs!” and “Ahhs!” it surely gets. Instead, Benny blogs, tweets & films in all 7 languages – every time. Want proof?

• Twitter: English, Irish, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Esperanto
• IrishPolyglot (Blog): English, Irish, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Esperanto
• Video: He re-dubs every video in each language too. Below is a compilation. Check out his YouTube Channel for more.

Wrapping it up

There’s a lot to digest here, but the simple point is this: share as much as you can about the thing you absolutely love, and do so with the realization that you can monetize it. You cannot monetize an intention. You need substance, you need remarkable content. It costs nothing and there are no excuses. Start consolidating, structuring and focusing what you know best, and leave it to guys like me to show you how to turn it into income – fuel for your lifestyle.

Want more on the actual language hacking process?

• Cody McKibben also sat down to talk with Benny, where he goes much further into his specific language hacking techniques and concepts – highly recommend that you check it out over at Thrilling Heroics.
• Check out FluentIn3Months.com

When passion comes up against a deadline,  you have to decide: what are you creating and what’s the cost of forcing it to completion?

An apology… M6 Creator isn’t launching just yet.

Details aren’t relevant, so I’ll simply say that M6 needs just a bit more love and testing before we’re ready to release it publicly. I want to apologize for the postponed launch and let you know that if you’ve signed up for the launch list prior to today, you’ll get something special for your patience. The demand and volume of emails/sign-ups I’ve gotten has been humbling & inspiring. When we’re about to release to thousands, you better believe it’s going to be done right. Rushing a product launch is like rushing a space shuttle launch – yes, it’s a bit frustrating to delay, but you’d rather be known for bulletproof performance than exploding. Lao Tzu says something that is invaluable for anyone that’s working on something that always feels just about finished…

Rushing into action, you fail. Trying to grasp things, you lose them. Forcing a project to completion, you ruin what was almost ripe. - Lao Tzu

Backing up to look at the situation, it started a long thought process on the concept of quality and where it comes from…

Passion & caring is the authentic quality assurance

I’ve always hated the word quality. It feels generic, hinting of assembly lines and middle-management performance reviews. Quality assurance is usually thought to be about keeping bugs out of software or fast-food burgers.

Quality itself is unexciting. When present, it allows you to forget the product itself and simply benefit from its utility. Quality jeans don’t have holes in the crotch; a quality axe doesn’t let its head fly off. More often, we only notice quality in its absence – when an baggage handler destroys your checked luggage; when a form is so poorly designed you can’t fill it out; when your steak is well, well beyond well-done. An absence of quality points to an absence of caring. It’s from someone lacking the time or passion to genuinely consider their work’s impact, or not taking time to design attentively.

A passionate programmer wants his creation to work, so he’ll hunt down bugs like a madman. A loving mother wants her baby to be healthy, so she’ll spend that extra minute comparing food ingredients. A drone programmer may hack together whatever he needs to “earn” his paycheck. A bad nanny may opt for the Happy Meal to stop a kid from crying. Passion and genuinely caring makes all the difference.

To explain why, you have to understand why

Setting a product launch date created accountability and expectation. Resetting that expectation calls for well-reasoned justification, out of fairness to everyone supporting the project. In breaking down the reason behind pushing the M6 launch, I wanted to analyze the underlying passion that won’t let me release anything less than top-notch. After considering a rushed release, I absolutely refused. Poor quality and not caring is what created most of the product website sites you see today, and M6 is built to annihilate that. So bear with me and stay tuned for an update – you’ll be glad you did.

To close, I’ll let men far wiser than myself talk about delay and quality.

At times it is folly to hasten – at other times, to delay. The wise do everything in its proper time.  - Ovid

I have offended God and mankind because my work didn’t reach the quality it should have. - Leonardo da Vinci

Delay is preferable to error. - Thomas Jefferson

Quality isn’t something that can be argued into an article or promised into it. It must be put there. If it isn’t put there, the finest sales talk in the world won’t act as a substitute. - C. G. Campbell

Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives. – William A. Foster

To get the thoughts going…

• Have you ever experienced poor quality and realized it was the result of someone’s lack of care or passion? (Try to think of somewhere other than the DMV.)
• Have you ever noticed the distinctly different feeling of doing something to just get it done vs. doing something passionately?
• What are you working on that deserves your highest quality effort, even if it takes a bit more time? Have you ever rushed something to completion and realized it wasn’t worth doing?

(Photo credit: Andy Warhol)

You’ve likely noticed Muselife has been suspiciously quiet as of late. As Twain said, rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated. I want to make it clear that the calm is not without good reason. I’ll do this first by giving an update on what’s been keeping me awake at night, and second by laying out what’s coming over the next month and beyond. Things are about to heat up and I’m amped to start sharing it with you.

M6 Creator: Launching live on Friday, August 28th 2009.

What is it & why it will help you kick serious ass

When I began creating information products over a year ago, alongside a core group of partners doing the same, I realized there is a tremendous barrier between sparking killer muse ideas and actually executing them. I’m relentlessly protective of my time and, though capability is not the issue, the process of developing sites for muse product testing was a huge point of friction. Doing it yourself is a waste of time. Getting someone else to do it is expensive. Either way, resources are required. Imagine if every person that wanted to start a blog had to develop a blogging engine and create a site from scratch. The only one’s talking would be developers and web geeks, who represent only a slice of the world’s conversation (albeit meaningful and one that I love). Creating a site for your info-product is no different. We’ve be reinventing something that should be highly replicable and adheres to a proven success model.

If we’re anything alike, there’s definitely more than one muse concept in your head at any given time and testing all of them requires a radically new breed of tools. M6 is a purpose-built tool that is going to make it almost insultingly simple to get your muse concept out of your head and into reality.

Between now and launch, I’ll be pushing exclusive previews & details to the launch mailing list, so if you haven’t already, get on the list and give me your thoughts as we push forward. I have never been more amped about a project, so I’ll be sharing details with the same gusto as a first-time dad with wallet full of newborn photos. Either get on the list using the form below or check out m6creator.com. I’ll be launching a partner M6 blog shortly to centralize all things related to the system.

Now, what’s next on Muselife

Leading up to and following the M6 launch, I’ll be pushing a number of muse case studies live to take you behind the process of creating a diverse set of information products. Over the past few months, I’ve brought together a core group of entrepreneurs/musemakers that are each taking these concepts into a different niche. What’s emerged will make for case studies and interviews that are perfectly aligned with where I’m driving Muselife.

Among the muses we’ll take a look at…

• A hardcore military-style fitness product created from 100% public domain materials and resources
• A wildly innovative approach to rapid language learning for short-term travelers
• A quintessential men’s e-book course to living a cinematically remarkable lifestyle
• A robust, interactive financial learning course for options traders
• A sales site overhaul to an ultra-niche woodworking workbook that had already been selling consistently for 10 years

… and that’s just the beginning. Taking you inside these products will spark or solidify ideas you’re working with and push them one step closer to fully passive income.

That’s where we’re headed and I’m looking forward to hearing what you’re up to and what muse you have in the works. Lastly, if you’ve emailed me/commented and I haven’t gotten back to you yet, I will absolutely do so. So much of lifestyle design is about balancing progress & creation with existing & new relationships. It’s arguably the most difficult aspect of creating an extraordinary lifestyle.

It’s time to crush it with your muse so we can always stay focused on being filthy rich in the only currency that matters – time.

The last thing I want to do is set a negative tone, but there’s been a topic I keep hearing come up in various communities that it’s time to weigh-in on…

To start things off, below is a quick video to let you know what Muselife is all about. Take a minute to watch and then check out the post below it for more…

Muselife is born of equal parts inspiration and frustration: inspiration to share experiences with outsourcing and niche product creation, and frustration with the torrent of conflicting advice and common questions I see absolutely everywhere. It’s time to centralize the conversation and share both the experiences and resources needed to make a killing turning your ideas into income and aggressively reclaming your time.

It’s important we start by defining our end-game: ultramobility & total personal autonomy enabled by highly automated sources of passive income. Tim Ferriss’ book The 4-Hour Work Week succinctly and powerfully codified a lifestyle and methodology many of us were already pursuing, and a thriving community has emerged to further the effort. Within these circles, we call one such source a muse to distinguish it from a traditional business – as the focus is an essentially hands-off, automated way of generating revenue that lets us focus on far more important facets of your life: time with family, friends, exploring passions, travel, philanthropy, and so on.

Consider Muselife your no-bullshit resource for all facets of achieving such a lifestyle, focused on rapid product development, niche market testing, fanatical outsourcing and complete process automation to give you more of what you can never get back once it’s gone – your time.

Click below to keep reading…

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