If you don’t have any products or services to sell, you can safely ignore this post. But if you do, you just might want to learn how you can sell more of them with almost no extra work, using Upsell 101 by Dave Navarro and Naomi Dunford.

Everyone says it’s easier to sell to an existing customer than to find a brand new one. Duh. But how exactly do you do that? This is the art of the upsell.

An upsell is when a customer has bought something from you (maybe just this second, or maybe a while ago), and then you sell them more stuff they want. It’s hard to think about upsells without thinking of the most famous upsell of all: “Do you want fries with that?”

Come to think of it, although that question is a huge cliche, I’m not sure if anyone has ever asked me it. Do you know why? Because fast food places found that customers wanted to be upsold so often, that they created combo meals to make it easier.

It’s just common sense that the kind of person who wants to buy a hamburger is very likely to want fries and a drink as well. However, that doesn’t mean they’ll just buy them on their own. They might forget to order a drink. They might not realize up front that they’ll be hungry later without the fries. They might be ordering for five hungry kids and lose track of who wants what. They might not even know fries are available.

So one day cashiers started asking “Do you want fries with that?” And customers appreciated that the cashier was nice enough to remind them of something else they’re likely to want. It worked so well that they added combo meals to the menu.

Not only was it easy for the customer to get everything they wanted, but they even got a discount over buying everything separately. The fast food companies made more money, and the customers were happier. (The customers also became obese, but that’s a completely different story.)

Of course, you probably don’t own a fast food franchise. But maybe you sell coaching, or copywriting, or ebooks, or art, or shoes, or something else. It doesn’t really matter what it is – upselling can work for you. They even show you how you can upsell if you only have one product.

The whole point of upselling is to make it easier for customers to upgrade if they want to. It’s not about being sleazy, hurting your credibility, or going down the path of what Dave calls “upsell hell.” Upsell 101 is about how to upsell your customers in a way that makes them want to buy more from you, instead of making them run for the hills.

The information comes in the form of a 78 minute coaching audio with Dave and Naomi. As with several of Dave’s products, you’ll definitely get the most out of this if you fill out the worksheets at the end. That’s what will let you apply your newfound knowledge to your own specific situation. I would have preferred if the 11 worksheets all came in one document instead of separately, but maybe separate worksheets make it easier to find the ones you want.

To master the art of the upsell and make more money from happier customers, you could hire Dave at $250 an hour and Naomi at $500 an hour. Or, if you’re willing to do a little work to save a ton of money, you could get Upsell 101. It’s up to you.

Is living longer always better, or would you rather accept a shorter life span in exchange for living and dying how you want to?

I started thinking about this in a discussion in Steve Pavlina’s forum about raw foods. Steve said “If you’re an American, you have an 80-90% chance of dying from heart disease or cancer.” I took it that people who eat only raw foods have a much lower risk of succumbing to those diseases.

But is that necessarily a good thing? Your total probability of dying from all causes combined is 100%. That doesn’t change. So if you reduce the probability of dying from heart disease or cancer, you must increase the probability of dying in some other way, because it all has to add up to 100%.

If you knew that you were going to die from a heart attack at 65, maybe you’d change your diet to prevent that. But maybe then you’d live long enough to be skeletonized by piranhas at 66. Is that so much better? Suddenly the heart attack is looking pretty good.

Once you take heart disease and cancer off the table, so many unlikely causes of death become more realistic. Will you fall into a giant vat of sulfuric acid? Get strung up by an angry mob and burned at the stake? Get chopped up by an axe murderer who takes a little too much pride in his work?

The point of all this is that everyone talks about wanting to live longer, and many people make big sacrifices to do so. But dying from heart disease or cancer at a normal age doesn’t seem so bad. Dying a bit older in a horrible accident is worse. And worst of all is living too far past your prime, watching your body and mind slowly deteriorate as you run out of money, friends, and dignity.

As Benjamin Franklin said, “Wish not so much to live long as to live well.”

I’ve never written much about food, but I came across an interesting post by Evita Ochel that I had to comment on. The post is called Going Behind the Scenes of the Food We Are Told to Eat By The News Media.

We hear about all kinds of foods that the media says we should eat. We’re told to eat salmon for the omega-3 fatty acids. We’re told to drink red wine for the resveratrol. We’re told to drink milk for the calcium. We’re even told to eat chocolate for the antioxidants.

We hear about a magical substance, and think that it’s the key to good health. So anything that contains it must be a miracle food. Red wine contains resveratrol, so it must give you immunity from cancer. Never mind all the alcohol. I suppose paint thinner or gasoline or rattlesnake venom would be nutritious too, if they added resveratrol.

Evita clears up some misconceptions about these foods. My favorite part: to get enough resveratrol from red wine, you’d need to drink 1,000 bottles a day. Bottoms up!

Why do we go nuts over every potential miracle food? I think it comes down to seeking an easy solution. If we can isolate the one chemical we really need, we can put good health in a pill.

So when one thing turns out not to be a magical substance, we go looking for the next one. Soy, beta-carotene, vitamin C…surely there must be one simple thing we can take for perfect health without restricting our diet in any way, or doing any of that damn exercise. What kind of a cruel world do we live in where effort is required?

But no, there’s no ambrosia that will make up for all the crap you eat and all the healthy food you don’t. It will take effort.

Evita points out that instead of eating junk because it contains trace elements of a good thing, we can just get that good thing from its source. Instead of eating salmon laced with mercury, pesticides, and antibiotics, we can simply eat the plants that the salmon get their omega-3 from. And instead of becoming winos in the name of good health, we can just eat red grapes.

Many years ago, I was at a wedding and deciding what to drink. I said “I like white wine much better, but everyone says red wine is good for you.” My friend replied, “Well, it’s not like people train for marathons by drinking red wine.”

In the 1991 Simpsons episode “Stark Raving Dad,” Homer wears a pink shirt to work, is mistaken for a “free thinking anarchist,” and gets sent to a mental institution. When it’s time to decide on his roommate, one of the asylum workers says “put him in with the big white guy who thinks he’s the little black guy.”

It turns out to be someone who thinks he’s Michael Jackson (and who was actually voiced by Michael Jackson, though credited as John Jay Smith and not revealed until later).

This guy may be delusional, but he sure is nice and helpful. When Bart doesn’t get his sister Lisa a birthday present, she gets very upset. “Michael” tells Bart that when he was a kid he didn’t have much money, so for his sisters’ birthdays he wrote them a song to show that he cared. And so he helps Bart find the words he can’t say in the song Happy Birthday Lisa (written by the real Michael Jackson though sung by Kipp Lennon). Lisa calls it the best present she ever got.

After “Michael” says his work is done and starts walking away, Bart asks why his voice suddenly changed. His answer is:

“This is my real voice. My name is Leon Kompowsky and I’m a brick layer from Patterson, New Jersey. All my life I was very angry until one day I just [switching to Michael Jackson voice] talked like this. All of a sudden everybody was smiling at me and I was only doing good on this Earth. So I kept doing it. To make a tired point, which one of us is truly crazy?”

This is just one of the many gifts Michael Jackson gave the world. Maybe not his biggest one, but just another thing he did to make people smile.

Everyone is talking about Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers: The Story of Success. Many people say it’s great, and it is.

It’s filled with amazing insights into success. It took me a long time to read it because I found that reading just a few pages sometimes gave me enough to hold me over all week.

You can read the prologue here and some excerpts here. (See “The 10,000 Hour Rule,” “Harlan Kentucky,” and “Rice Paddies and Math Tests” in the sidebar. The last one was enough to make me start learning to count in Cantonese.)

Just be aware that it’s not a how-to guide with a list of steps to take. In fact, his idea that successful people are merely a product of their environment might make you go all fatalistic like the Merovingian. It’s meant to be more intriguing than practical.

My only disappointment is that I was hoping for a lot more detail about the 10,000 hour rule that he’s so well known for. It says that pretty much anyone can become successful in pretty much anything if and only if they put in 10,000 hours of practice.

But what level of granularity does that apply to? Does 10,000 hours of being creative make you successful at being creative, or is that too broad? Does it really take 10,000 hours of practice to be successful at reciting the alphabet, or is that too narrow?

In Success Is For Suckers, I wrote about whether success is worth it, in response to Glen Allsopp’s post What Malcolm Gladwell Should Have Told You In ‘Outliers’. Now having finished the book, I can better see what Glen was talking about.

Compare these two examples from the book of people who sacrificed their childhood in the name of success. One was Bill Gates. He sacrificed his childhood to become the richest man in the world doing what he loved. That’s way more than a fair tradeoff.

Another was a poor girl named Marita. She sacrificed her childhood for an 84% chance of catching up to her grade level in mathematics. It’s not mentioned whether she got there, and if she did, we’re only talking about mediocre math ability by the standards of a country that’s notoriously bad at it. The link between that and success is far from clear.

Of course, Bill Gates didn’t know things were going to work out so well for him. But he would have gladly made the sacrifice regardless, just because it was more appealing to him than anything else he could be doing. Maybe Marita feels the same way. I hope she does.

But not knowing the outcome in advance can make the decision very difficult. In eighth grade, I had to decide what high school I wanted to go to. I could have gone to my local high school, which was a perfectly good one. Or I could have applied to the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, which has been ranked the #1 public high school in the country by U.S. News and World Report.

Although TJ would have been an incredible experience, there was a price to be paid. If I remember correctly, I would not only be leaving for school earlier in the morning, but I’d be getting home at 7 or 8 every night instead of 3 in the afternoon like a normal kid. And that’s to say nothing of homework, or how stressful it would be during the day.

My dad made it very clear to me what the tradeoff was. He said, “If you want to learn everything you possibly can about math and science, then this would be the best thing in the world for you. But if you don’t, you would absolutely hate it.”

I went to the regular school, and to this day I’m still pretty sure I made the right choice. I think I learned plenty, and I probably would have gone to the same college anyway (the University of Virginia). And remember that there are some advantages to, you know, not sacrificing your childhood.

On the other hand, say my future self had come to me in eighth grade and said, “If you go to TJ, you’ll become interested in robotics. Because of that, you’ll go to MIT. There, you’ll meet a professor who will steer you towards nanotechnology. You’ll go on to invent a race of nanobots that can be injected into the blood stream and safely kill cancer cells. You’ll be an outlier. But if you don’t go to TJ, then none of this will happen.”

In that case, then yes, of course I’ll make the sacrifice, knowing that the payoff is coming. But no one wants to make a sacrifice when your best prediction is that it’s not worth it. And not knowing the future is what makes it so hard to make the right decision.

For a quick and entertaining read about online world domination, check out 279 Days to Overnight Success. This is Chris Guillebeau’s free ebook for “bloggers, writers, online artists, and anyone otherwise interested in creating a new career or expanding their influence using social media.”

It’s about how he became a full time writer in 279 days, a very short period of time for overnight success, which generally takes years.

As his blog is called “The Art of Nonconformity,” you’ll find that his ebook has a different style from most ebooks about blogging. You might even enjoy reading it if you’re not interested in blogging.

I’ve just recently come across his site, but he seems like an interesting guy. One interesting thing about him: his personal quest to visit every country in the world before he turns 35 in 2012 (he’s been to 111 out of 197 so far).