The Need To Lead

A few years ago now on a summer weekend afternoon, I had a conversation with my girlfriend at the time, Charlene, that has stuck in my head quite a bit over recent years. We had made plans to spend the day together, and she had just arrived outside my condo for the two of us to go off on our adventure.

She asked me “So, where do you want to go ?”

Having only lived in my current city for about a year I replied “I don’t know this area very well, why don’t you take me somewhere ?”

She was stunned a bit for a second then said “You know, I don’t think I have ever been asked that before, everyone always takes me everywhere.”

Batman Must Always Lead

After a bit of thinking, Charlene took me on an amazing tour of the area, including two wonderful lakes, one of which had a huge sand building competition on it that day, which Charlene had already been aware of, and the other had a great cliff side view of the surrounding forest and lake which we first ate lunch at, and then hiked down for a private swim. After we hiked back up to the car she then took me to a great restaurant for dinner where we stayed for several hours afterwords to drink beer and listen to the live blues band.

I found it quite amazing that no one had ever asked Charlene in all her thirty years of living in the same area, where she wanted to go. This though of course was of great benefit to me, because by her sitting in the passenger seat all these years, she had collected a huge knowledge of good things to do, and the best of it all this knowledge had been delivered to me on this day. Needless to say I wanted to see more the next time she came over, and she had more than a few days of things for us to do that were of great interest, all of which I added to my own list of things to do in the area when people visited me from out of town.

I wondered a bit more to myself why no one had ever asked her before what she wanted to do, she was often quiet, but quite obviously bright. I am guessing it was mostly because in groups there is usually that one person that really feels the need to lead everyone all the time, and that was just not the way she was. Usually those that force themselves on us as the leader are a type “A” personality, and Charlene was defiantly not one of these.

Funny Leadership

Now don’t get me wrong, leadership is a wonderful thing, and necessary if you want to get things done efficiently, you need a leader. I lead my household around most of the time, but not always, and I also lead my employees, but feeling the need to be leading everyone around all of the time, is a massive weakness of personality in my books.

In my opinion, constant leaders usually have the least knowledge of anyone in the group, as all of their less than vast knowledge is quickly shared to the masses who usually, due to their ability to sometimes follow, both individually and collectively know more. So if you yourself feel the need to lead constantly, you might want to consider taking a back seat sometimes to let a more knowledgeable person show you around, that way when you do take control, people won’t always be quietly wishing they were somewhere else.

Please Keep Your Freedumb Away From My Freedom

I am just days away from a two week holiday to my hometown of Vancouver Canada, it is always nice to see the west coast of Canada in the spring, often during this time of year the trees will blossom, adding some incredible colors to the already beautiful scenery, and a sweet scent to the cool fresh air. I am also of course very much looking forward to seeing my family and friends, who are the reason for the trip.

After making some plans to visit friends, a discussion about me started amongst my various acquaintances back home, and eventually, some of this discussion came back to me though hearsay. Apparently not all of my friends think I am doing very well in life, and by their measurement, which is salary, I guess I am not, but I do not measure my life in salary, if I did I would have kept some of the high paying jobs I had in the past, or taken some that were offered to me along the way, but I did not, because instead of salary, I measure my life in how much free time I get to experience, free time I often spend with my son, or traveling, reading, and writing.

Consumer PrisionerInevitably during my trip back to Canada as I visit with the few friends that can find enough time off work to see me, they may give me advice, as they often have before, about how I should change my life to be more like theirs, forgetting that I had lived that way for too many years already, with the waking up to an alarm, rushing to work, wearing a shirt, tie and black socks, eating when I’m told to, and then rushing back home at the end of the day. Many just can’t seem to understand that even though I hardly make any money at all by writing, programming, and selling shirts on the internet for a living, it is exactly the type of life I hope to live forever. To me what I have is something closer to true freedom, than the common illusion of it, which is humorously defined on the web today as freedumb.

As they suggest I dust off my work clothing, which I assume still exists somewhere in my closet, to get a “real job”, and make some real money, I will likely just nod politely, and think to myself, “Please keep your freedumb away from my freedom.”

Below are three videos, with a combined total of only seven minutes, they are all great clips, that I feel relate perfectly to normal corporate life and real freedom.

Enjoy!

Funny Shirts Changed My World

I don’t know if you have visited the retail part of this website yet, but I happen to have what I feel is several hundred of the funniest shirts ever created. I know that not everyone shares my sense of humor, some will likely be offended, and some people will just not get it, but to me I have the greatest collection of funny shirts in all the world. Believe it or not though, when I first started selling funny shirts, I was not the type of person who would actually wear them, in fact my original idea with this website was not to sell any funny t-shirts at all, but to sell a line of great tribal shirts I used to buy and wear. However by the time I was ready to sell the tribal shirts, the manufacturer of the shirts did a ridiculously stupid thing, he fired his artist, and stopped printing his great designs. I had already built the website and had to sell something, and so began my quest for really funny shirts.

As time went on, the website grew, and with it my collection of funny shirts, at the same time my own tribal t-shirts were becoming old, and my girlfriend used to laugh at how I was this great internet t-shirt retailer that wore old shirts with holes in them. I did see the humor in it, and having such a large collection of shirts on hand at any one minute, it was very easy just to toss the shirt in the trash and grab a new one. So one summer day, I tossed out my old shirt, grabbed one of my fresh beautiful funny shirts from my collection, a shirt I like to call Hypno Monkey featuring a chimpanzee wearing headphones in the middle of a yellow swirl, and stepped out the door to the public.

Hypno Monkey Shirt

I live in a very large and busy city that has a great public transportation system, so have not owned a car in years, it is not a matter of money, it is just to me cars were supposed to be a convenience, and the transit is so good here, to me they are actually an inconvenience. So after thirty seconds or so waiting for the bus, it arrived and I stepped on. Unfortunately no seat was available so two or three of us were forced to stand.

The bus left the stop and I was looking out the window enjoying the view, and looking around a bit at the other passengers, there was a young kid smiling at me, that was nice, and a very pretty brunet smiling at me, that was nice also, I of course smiled back at both of them, and the bus continued down the road. I looked around the bus again at a few people and noticed most of them were very friendly towards me. This seemed to continue with me all day long as I went to the mall and ate some lunch. I was feeling particularly handsome this day, since I must have had smiles and eye contact from about ten or so women by this time, and also a couple of men smiled at me, that was uncommon, and a bit mysterious. I didn’t really put two and two together until I went to wash my hands and looked in the mirror, which of course reflected back to me not only my face, but also that of the silly chimp on my shirt.

Wow I thought, if you smile the world smiles back at you, but if you wear a good funny shirt, the world smiles at you first, and then you smile back. Now that is something cool. I can’t believe I never knew this before. Also I found that I was actually walking around with a smile on my face more, not just because of the motion of smiling back, but because I was actually happier.

I wear funny shirts now most of the time, and my son does also, because of this we live in a happier world than we did before, people around us are all very nice to us, occasionally laughing can be heard around us, and sometimes people that normally would not talk to us strike up friendly conversations.

I understand the world was not changed by me wearing  funny shirts, but without a doubt, wearing funny shirts changed my world.

What Should I Sell On The Internet?

As most of you know, I sell products on the internet to make a living these days, recently a friend of mine also expressed an interest in starting a similar type of business, so he asked me what I though he should sell to make some money. I gave him a few suggestions and explanations for my reasoning which I have put for you below.

I sell t-shirts, but I would not recommend this to others, had I understood the amount of stock I would need on hand and the work I would have to do to sell a few shirts for such low profit, I probably would not have quit my day job.

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91% Failure!
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What I recommend is that if you are going to sell stuff on the internet, and going to build up a new website from scratch as I did, due to a lack of visitors, you will find yourself lucky to make a single sale each day for the first year or so, therefore it is best to sell items that will not become quickly outdated. If you sell products you need to move quickly through, such as electronics, which become outdated, devalue quickly and have a low profit margin even at the best of times, you will soon find yourself stuck with a lot of stock that nobody will buy from you at a profit, also you will need to be updating the website faster than you can probably work alone and will need to hire a team of expensive professionals just to keep up.

Apache Helicopter

Sell Used Helicopters

I believe you should sell the most expensive items you can afford to, the reason for this is you have the opportunity to make the most profit per item purchased, or package sent. For example, I remember one time last year where I needed to get someone a particular color and size of shirt that we had run out of stock on, due to a high number of unexpected complications, it must have taken me about nine hours of my time to fill the order, this is not normal, but it does happen, and for my nine hours of hard work, I only received about seven dollars profit, if you compare this to people who sell helicopters online, yes you can buy helicopters online, who make a few hundred thousand for the same amount of time, you can see that my shirt business is not necessarily the worlds best idea, but it was all I could afford to start with.

If you are really low on cash, and have even less then what I started out with, which was approximately fifty thousand American Dollars, you can try some drop shipping companies. If you put “drop shipping companies” into a search engine, you will find all sorts of companies that hold all the stock for you to sell, and you can simply buy one item at a time from them, after your customers have already paid you, and then get them to send directly to your customers. This is a great alternative to holding stock, but I gave up on drop shipping in the first year myself, due to my lack of traffic, by the time I actually sold stuff, they were already out of stock on the items.

The biggest problem for any web based business will always be getting enough traffic to stay afloat, too many people subscribe to the “If I build it they will come” philosophy, which is probably a good reason why nearly one hundred percent of all web start ups fail. You really would not believe the competition out there that you have to deal with, you really have to be the best of the best to survive these days.

After four years of sixty hour weeks, and being fortunate enough to have most of the best shirts in the world available for me to sell, I am now almost making the same as what I used to make at one of the crappier day jobs I quit a decade ago, so you have to be seriously committed to do what I am doing. I heard someone say recently that to create a successful commercial website in today’s market you needed to have blind ignorant faith equaling that of many religions.

The Author Made Some Money

There is a constant push on the internet and in the news about how starting a web based business is a good idea, but statistics prove otherwise, it is a bad idea, in fact the only people that seem to really be making any money online are those that create websites for hopeful “entrepreneurs” or offer paid services to market their businesses for them. This reminds me of how a long time ago in the Klondike gold rush, the people who sold the miners supplies made much more money than the miners themselves. These are the people telling you it is a good idea, don’t listen to them too much, I would suggest never listening to anyone that is trying to get money from you.

If you still want to start an online business, you may as well get started, it doesn’t matter if it succeeds or not as long as you don’t invest too much into it. I started three websites before the one I have now, never made a penny off them, but this one does pay the bills. You should not think of the internet as a great place to get rich quick, these days the best you can hope for a chance to get rich eventually.

Beware of Gríma Wormtongue

A couple of decades ago, I slowly but surely made my way through the trilogy of The Lord Of The Rings while I was away for a vacation with the family. I found it a difficult to read, but it was still a worthy investment of my time as the story, as most of you should know by now, is a great one.

There are plenty of nasty creatures and characters in the trilogy, from Trolls, and Ring Wraiths, to the wizard Sauramon the White, and the main antagonist Sauron, but for me, the most vile of all the evil characters, was a man by the name of Grima Wormtongue.

Wormtongue

Gríma Wormtongue Waits To Advise King Theoden In “The Two Towers” 2002

If I remember correctly, Grima did not have any true magic in the books, but was still an enchanter of sorts, if you do not recall his character, or his name Grima (Meaning Grim, or Helmet) Wormtongue, does not give it away, he, like his name implies, was particularly skilled, and practiced, at worming his insidious ideas into others minds. Wormtongue often liked to stand next to King Theodin, and whisper things into his ears, to influence his decisions, therefore leaching on the King’s power, and being the true controller of the Kingdom.

I think the reason the character Wormtongue stuck with me so much throughout my life, is because he was the most common type of real world villain, and most perverse of them all. I find him worse than Sauron, who at least was honest enough to openly declare war on people, or Sauramon, though he did hide his evil from others, at least did not pollute peoples’ minds with lies.

Wormtongue’s are so unfortunately common in real life, you can see them going into the bosses office after some difficulties with others, or going to lunch with them, they may have even wormed their way into the bosses chairs themselves. Sometimes you find them actually whispering right in your plain sight in real life, just as Wormtongue does. You don’t know exactly what they are whispering, but you can be sure by the way that they will not say it in the open, that it is not good. Most likely they are trying to align others against their antagonists, to make a team, and grab some power.

At times of course, they may come to whisper in your ears, this may make you feel like you are part of the inside crew, but there is no inside crew, you are only another tool needed to achieve the goals of the Wormtongue.

Don’t be fooled. Heed Tolkien’s warning, and beware of Grima Wormtongue.

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