Back in June I read the first chapter of Dave Navarro’s What’s Holding You Back? Beat The Seven Success Killers That Everyone Struggles With. (You get this chapter for free when you subscribe to his blog, Rock Your Day.)

I really liked it, so I bought the full version. And then I forgot about it for five months. One day I realized that what’s holding me back could be that I hadn’t read What’s Holding You Back, so I set aside some time to read it.

First of all, Dave is nuts to sell this for only $12.95. Maybe he lost a bet or something, I don’t know. But this is a good deal.

This is the kind of ebook where you have to be willing to do the exercises to get the most out of it. And there are LOTS of exercises. It’s sort of like having your own productivity coach, only in book form.

I’m not so good at giving compassionate advice. If someone says they’re trying to save money but they keep spending their whole paycheck by the end of the month, I’ll just say, “Well, stop doing that. What’s the problem?” But instead of just telling you what to do, Dave shows you how to figure out specifically where you’re having problems, and how to get through them in a way that makes sense for you.

It’s 172 pages, but it’s not as long as it sounds. He put in wide margins for taking notes, and there’s an appendix with another copy of all the worksheets in one place for handy reference. One thing I should say is that I found the sample chapter to be the best one, but we all have different opinions.

Anyway, since the first chapter is available for free, you might as well subscribe to Rock Your Day to get it. And then if you like it, you can buy the full version of What’s Holding You Back? Beat The Seven Success Killers That Everyone Struggles With for just $12.95. Seriously Dave, raise the price!

I just read the simple productivity ebook Todoodlist by Nick Cernis, and it’s a rare pleasure to be able to recommend an ebook so unequivocally. 97 pages but an easy read, it’s worth the $14 price just for the entertainment value alone. In particular, the “7 fun essays exploring our complex lives, including Zen Kitten in a Box and Parrots in Space” had me cracking up. Nick does a great job poking fun at how needlessly complex our lives have become.

I’m not into all the complicated productivity systems like GTD (which I haven’t read yet, but I probably will someday). I’m also not into high-tech stuff, except at work (where I don’t mind spending hours on overly complicated things). I like keeping things simple, and Nick is totally on board with that, having abandoned his PDA three years ago in favor of simpler methods. He offers 5 terrific productivity solutions using good old pencil and paper. (Actually, I’ve always greatly preferred pens to pencils, but he says pens are OK if they work for you.)

I can’t really get into any specifics, because these solutions are so simple that even a summary would give away too much. But although they’re simple, it’s a pretty safe bet that you’re not using all 5 of them. In fact, I was only using one of them already. 2 of them aren’t for me, but the other 2 I’ll start using today.

Nick also describes a simple 5-step system for reducing complexity in your life. I found this part good but less original than his 5 productivity solutions, since we saw similar things in “The Four-Hour Workweek.”

There is an affiliate program paying 50%, and a 30 day no-quibble money-back guarantee. If you’re looking for good entertainment and simple productivity, look no further than Todoodlist. In fact, it’s going on the Resources page.

Would you like to get more bang for the buck? Sure, we all would. Sometimes getting more bang for the buck is more important than just getting the most bang.

When we talk about bang for the buck, “buck” can refer literally to dollars, but in general it means whatever resources or effort you put into something. “Bang” refers to whatever you get out of it: money, blog subscribers, friends, satisfaction, etc. And return on investment, or ROI, is just a fancy term for “bang for the buck.”

At the heart of The 4-Hour Workweek is the ability to do more with less. Making a full time income in 4 hours a week is better than making double the income in 40 hours a week. While very few people will be able to actually generate a decent income in only 4 hours a week, everyone will have their moments where they get a lot of bang for the buck.

Here are some of the actions I took with this blog that yielded a high return on investment:

- The Automatic Blog Post Rehasher took me a couple of days to create. The concept was pretty easy to come up with, and writing the code wasn’t bad. The main cost was the time it took to mindlessly copy and reformat all the text from the blogs to rehash.

When Naomi Dunford of IttyBiz discovered it, she wrote a post about it, and the traffic started coming in. It got 28 diggs, which isn’t a lot in absolute terms, but relative to the size of my blog it would be equivalent to Zen Habits getting 62,000 diggs. It instantly took me from about 20 subscribers to 44.

- One day the idea for The Zen of Blogging just came to me suddenly, and I wrote it in my head in about an hour. It took me a day to write the first draft. I don’t remember exactly how many hours it took, but it was less time than it’s taken me to write some of my posts. Three more days for editing, and it was done. This ebook later became the biggest factor in taking me from 44 to 205 subscribers.

- Revolution Money Exchange was the best financial return on investment I’ve had so far with this blog. By signing up for this PayPal competitor, I received a $25 signup bonus, received a $10 referral bonus for signing up one person, made $10 for the person who referred me, and made $25 for the person I referred. $35 for me and $35 for other people, for a few minutes of effort.

You might say that $35 isn’t much money, and you’re right…it’s not. But the point is that it’s $35 for such a small effort. As an hourly rate, it’s extremely high. Plus, the money for something like this is scalable with the number of subscribers I have. I think I had 84 subscribers at the time, so let’s assume a 1 in 84 conversion ratio. With 840 subscribers, I would have made $100 in referral bonuses. With 8,400 subscribers, I would have made $1,000 in referral bonuses. Just for a few minutes of effort.

(I just found out that the previous 4/15/08 deadline for receiving the $25 signup bonus has been extended to 5/15/08, so there’s still time if you want to get in on Revolution Money Exchange.)

How can we identify which actions will yield a high return on investment? I wish I knew for sure. We’d be a lot more effective if we could consistently pursue the high-ROI opportunities while ignoring the low-ROI opportunities.

Anything that says what we’re all thinking (e.g., the Automatic Blog Post Rehasher), anything that’s very different from its competitors (e.g., The Zen of Blogging), and anything that offers guaranteed money for little effort (Revolution Money Exchange) has a chance of paying off big. Anything that’s bold, risky, or efficient has a chance. Of course, ideas often don’t work out as we’d hoped. But when a fresh idea comes to you, or something interesting presents itself, if it seems like it could work, it’s usually a good idea to run with it.

Most likely, you’ll have to take a lot of low-ROI actions in order to find a few high-ROI actions. But if you keep your eyes open, you’ll see chances to make it big.

I’d like to hear your thoughts. How can you tell what actions have a good chance of providing you with a high return on investment? Or what are some things you’ve done that resulted in big rewards for little effort?

The most brilliant definition of persistence ever:

“Persistence isn’t using the same tactics over and over. That’s just annoying. Persistence is having the same goal over and over.” - Seth Godin

(I hate to quote someone’s entire post, but I guess it’s OK if the post is only 21 words.)

Many things require persistence. We’re usually not good at something the first time we try it, and as we all know, practice makes perfect (or if you prefer, practice makes for improvement).

Persistence gets tricky when other people are involved. Someone often won’t do something the first time we ask. That’s why commercials have to run more than once. It’s hard to get someone’s attention, get them interested in doing what we want them to do, have them make time to do it, etc. So we often have to ask more than once.

But how do you ask more than once? Do you just say the same thing over and over again? After all, it eventually worked for Bart and Lisa Simpson with their “Will you take us to Mount Splashmore? Will you take us to Mount Splashmore? Will you take us to Mount Splashmore? Will you take us to Mount Splashmore? Will you take us to Mount Splashmore? Will you take us to Mount Splashmore? Will you take us to Mount Splashmore? Will you take us to Mount Splashmore?”

But using the same tactics over and over can get very annoying. Even if it somehow works the first time, you’re likely to burn bridges in the process, and then it won’t work a second time. Is there a better way of being persistent when asking others for help?

When I wrote The Zen of Blogging, it was well received by those who read it, but with only 20 subscribers, I knew I wasn’t going to get it in front of many people by just posting it to my blog.

On the other hand, if I could get it in front of Darren Rowse of ProBlogger, I thought there was a good chance he’d write a post about it (after all, it’s relevant to his audience). And then I’d get a flood of highly targeted traffic, people interested in blogging, referred by someone who has a reputation as a blogging expert. It was the best promotional opportunity I could hope for.

But how could I grab Darren’s attention? How do you get noticed by someone who gets a thousand emails per second when they don’t know who you are?

First, I left some comments on his blog. While busy bloggers don’t respond to many comments, they probably read most if not all of them. I wanted Darren to see my name and know me as someone who leaves decent comments. This would hopefully make it more likely that he would read the email I was going to send him.

And then I ran into a serious obstacle. Darren wrote a post saying he was going out of town. He wasn’t going to be reachable when my ebook was released.

But another opportunity presented itself. Darren gave an open invitation for guest bloggers to help him keep up the posting while he was gone. If I could have a guest post published, I could put a link to my ebook at the bottom of the post. But the competition was fierce, and my post wasn’t chosen (at least not at the time; it could possibly be chosen down the road).

When I released my ebook, I emailed Darren even though I knew he wasn’t around. I quickly introduced myself, said I knew he was gone but I wanted to tell him about my ebook, and then, most importantly, I told him why he should care. Just a couple of sentences explaining why I thought my ebook would interest him personally, and why it would interest his readers.

When I didn’t get a response, that’s where many people would either (1) give up, or (2) keep emailing him to ask “Did you read my ebook yet? What about now? What about now?” I didn’t want to give up, but I knew that emailing him over and over would just be annoying. So I decided that now just wasn’t the time, and I’d come back to him later. (Some people would have emailed him again after a few days, which I think would have been OK, but I chose not to.)

I saw an opportunity when Darren posted that he had just gotten some help with cleaning up his email inbox from Leo Babauta of Zen Habits. Leo helped him develop a system for dealing with the massive pile of emails he already had (most likely deleting them), and for managing his future emails more efficiently. Darren said he was sorry if he hadn’t gotten back to anyone, but he invited people to resend any emails he might have missed before “the great email culling of 2008.”

So I just emailed him again, saying I was taking him up on his offer to resend emails he might have missed. I told him about my ebook, and now I had some good testimonials to include to get him interested. He wrote back to confirm he got my email, and had added my ebook to his longish list of things to check out. A couple of days later, he posted about it, the traffic starting pouring in, and I had one of my biggest breakthroughs as a blogger.

This happened not because I used the same tactics over and over, but because I had the same goal over and over.

I just finished reading “Mastering the Most Powerful Force in the Universe,” a great free ebook by Paul Piotrowski at Inspired Money Maker. I won’t give away what the “most powerful force in the universe” is, but I think I agree with Paul.

The ebook shows us how this force applies to money, diet, exercise, sales, blogging, the Law of Attraction, and even The Matrix, among other things. You’ll probably like the ebook if you liked my posts How To Create A Seven Figure Residual Income and Want To Dodge Bullets? Maybe You Don’t Have To!

While I found the beginning a bit slow because the math major in me was already well aware of what he was talking about, it got very interesting later on (and of course, not everyone was a math major, so the beginning will be useful to most people). It doesn’t take very long to read it, so why not check it out right now?

The ebook is free for anyone who subscribes to Inspired Money Maker’s RSS feed. You’ll see a link to the ebook at the bottom of each post in your feed reader. I’m not sure if you get the ebook if you subscribe via email, but subscribing via RSS is really much better, once you get used to using an RSS reader.

There’s no risk in subscribing to a blog, because you can simply unsubscribe if you don’t like it. But after checking out Inspired Money Maker, you very well might become a loyal reader. I just discovered it recently, and I’ve already read some amazing posts. This blog deserves a much larger audience than it currently has.

“My goal is to help others develop a more healthy relationship with money as something that liberates their souls to do what they love in life and make money doing it.” - Paul Piotrowski, Inspired Money Maker

Check out this video of Tim Nolan, a world record holding professional juggler and basketball entertainer. He does insane tricks like chucking a basketball, letting it bounce a few times off the walls, then off the backboard, into a trampoline, off the backboard again, and then through the hoop.

He can do the juggling stuff on demand because he’s put a lot of years into it (and you can clearly see that some of what he does is at the limit of his ability). And he can do some of the basketball tricks on demand, like the over the head shot (he wouldn’t do it in front of an audience if he couldn’t get it within a few attempts).

But I think many of his basketball tricks depend a lot on luck. Just a guess, but I don’t think he’s that much better at some of these tricks than you or I would be. The difference is that he was willing to make jillions of attempts before it worked. Have you ever given up on something because it didn’t work the first time, or the tenth time, or the hundredth time, or the thousandth time?

Photo by Sir Mildred Pierce

When buying plane tickets, you want to find cheap tickets on a convenient flight, without spending a lot of time searching for them. If you’re in a hurry, you can learn how to do this by skipping ahead to the Cliffs Notes at the end. Otherwise, you can read all the gory details.

The more complicated a trip is, the more it pays to check out your options. Flying from Washington, D.C. to New York is pretty straightforward. Just check out some travel sites, play around with different dates (and possibly different airports), and it’s not hard to choose the flight that gives you the best combination of price and convenience.

But flying from Washington, D.C. to Osaka, Japan is much more complicated. That’s why I enlisted some experts.

Back in January, I planned a trip to Japan that I’m taking next week. While I had found some reasonably priced one-stop flights on CheapTickets, Orbitz, and Expedia, I was curious to see if veteran travelers could do better. Since my mom works with someone who lived in Japan for five years, I asked her to see if he had any advice on finding a good flight. He had some specific airlines in mind, but he didn’t find anything cheaper than what I had already found, nor did he find a nonstop flight.

It turns out that my mom also works with someone who derives great enjoyment from looking for good deals on travel. He would never just look at a few options and consider his search done. He would consider every possibility under the sun, and he was actually willing to spend a lot of time helping me find a flight.

He considered that I could fly into Tokyo and take a train. Or fly to Los Angeles, then switch airlines. Or fly into Toronto, then get on a Canadian airline. But after spending several hours looking, he didn’t find anything better than what I already had. However, he did suggest that I try Priceline.

When all was said and done, the best deal came from Priceline, which had a flight with a layover in San Francisco, for $188 less than the cheapest flight on CheapTickets, Orbitz, and Expedia. In fact, it was $350 cheaper than the same flight on those sites! Another nice feature I discovered is that Priceline lets you know if alternate dates or airports will result in a cheaper flight.

The Priceline flight was on United, and I found the same price when I went to the airline directly. I always buy tickets directly from the airline to save the $5 or so charged by some sites. Priceline doesn’t charge a fee for any published flights, but I figure you might as well avoid the middleman and possibly have better service or fewer complications.

Priceline still has their “Name Your Own Price” system that lets you bid on flights, and claims you can save up to 40% that way. The major disadvantage of doing this is the risk and uncertainty. You submit a bid blindly, not knowing the airline, times, or routing in advance. And if they accept your bid, you can’t cancel or make any changes. Also, if your bid is rejected, you can’t submit another bid until after the waiting period has passed. Furthermore, you don’t get any frequent flyer miles. I don’t know what kind of success people have had doing this, and Priceline has been moving away from the “Name Your Own Price” model in recent years.

Incidentally, Travelocity found a flight on Asiana Airlines for $54 less than the Priceline/United flight, but it had stops in L.A. and Seoul, and I really wanted to avoid two stops.

Ultravagabond Tim Ferriss has said that instead of booking flights far in advance, he gets better deals by booking at the last minute, when the airline is afraid the seat will go unsold. I tested this back in January, searching for a last-minute Japan flight on United. There was only one flight available, for $3,000 more than the far-in-advance flights, and with a 5 hour layover in Doha, Qatar (which means flying around the world in the wrong direction).

I checked again a few days later and found several last-minute United flights for $3,000 more, with a stop in San Francisco. However, when I checked on Priceline, I actually found some last-minute flights for $118 less than my far-in-advance ticket ($3,118 less than the flights offered at the same time on United). Remember when I said that my mom’s coworker thought of flying into Toronto? That’s what these flights did. But they also stopped in Vancouver, and I wanted to avoid two layovers.

Cliffs Notes:

1. You’re perfectly capable of quickly finding as good a deal as a veteran traveler could find.

2. Check Priceline first, because it tells you whether changing dates or airports will give you a better deal, and you can use this information on later searches. Naming your own price might not be a good idea because of the risk of unchangeable tickets, inflexibility of having to accept whatever times and routes they give you, and time required to resubmit bids that aren’t accepted.

3. Check some of the travel sites such as CheapTickets, Orbitz, Expedia, and Travelocity. They’re likely to be very similar, so don’t feel like you have to check more than a few. Also check Kayak and SideStep, which offer the advantage of searching multiple sites, though I would still search directly on some of those sites (tip from Barbara Swafford and John).

4. If you have a particular airline in mind, search for flights on their website. The price could be different from what’s listed on the travel sites, or the airline might not be included in those sites.

5. Buy your ticket directly from the airline to save money and eliminate the middleman. If you have an ethical problem with this, then by all means pay the extra $5 if that lets you sleep better.

6. Although Tim Ferriss has traveled all over the world and says booking tickets at the last minute will save you money, I didn’t find that to be true in this case. It might depend on where and when you’re traveling.

See also:

How to Fly Without ID and Skip Lines (Tim Ferriss)

How to Score Free Airline Vouchers by Reserving Overbooked Flights (Clay Collins)

To be highly productive, you need a fancy system like David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD), right?

Actually, I’ve never seen the point of making productivity complicated. While I haven’t read GTD, the summaries I’ve seen don’t impress me. I think most people are overdoing it. Spending countless hours learning and implementing elaborate productivity systems and reading so-called productivity blogs seems a lot less effective than just doing stuff.

Steve Pavlina is well known for being productive. He finished college in just 3 semesters, taking triple the normal course load while also working a full time job in his last semester. In the latest issue of his newsletter (sign up on his home page, a few issues a year, free), he described the productivity system that allowed him to do this.

He just used a notebook. When a new assignment came in, he added it to the end of the list, along with its deadline. He decided which one to do by scanning the list and quickly picking one that seemed like a good choice. Then he’d work on only that task until it was done, and cross it off.

If anything stayed on the list too long, it would eventually be the only thing left on its page, with everything else crossed out. When this happened, he’d either do it immediately, decide it wasn’t worth doing, or possibly move it to the end of the list and try again later.

I was glad to see Steve agreeing with me that productivity can be simple. My system is very similar to his, but I use Windows Notepad instead of a physical notebook. I like Notepad because I can easily reorder items, as well as copy and paste URLs. And unlike Steve, I don’t automatically add new tasks to the end. I sometimes add them near the front if I think I’ll want to do them soon.

I’ve tried reading some productivity blogs, but I haven’t been able to get into any of them. I couldn’t understand how reading a productivity blog that posts ten times a day was going to do anything other than destroy my effectiveness. Clay Collins had a good take on this, when he discussed the difference between the productivity habit and the productivity hobby.

Never forget that sometimes the simplest solution is the best one.

Scott Young was kind enough to give me a press copy of his ebook How To Change A Habit. Personally I don’t struggle with changing habits, but I was very interested in reading this ebook because I know that many people do. Some of the obvious habits that give people a hard time are quitting smoking and starting an exercise program. Scott says that people can change their habits far more easily when they adopt effective strategies for doing so.

You may remember that not long ago I reviewed Scott’s latest ebook Learn More, Study Less. He wrote How To Change A Habit last year, but obviously the principles still hold true. While I found Learn More, Study Less to be more original and more helpful to me personally, How To Change A Habit is good, and in fact better than I was expecting. How To Change A Habit is much cheaper at only $14.99, though it doesn’t have an affiliate program.

Scott uses 30-day trials as the foundation for changing habits, saying that simply following a trial is enough to solve 50-75% of the problems people face in changing their habits. The rest of his ebook is about refining that core process. By using certain strategies, Scott was able to change many habits that most people would have a very hard time with, such as becoming a vegetarian, waking up at 5:30 every morning, exercising every day, and giving up TV (though he later decided that a moderate amount of TV was the best option for him).

He gives us basic techniques to quickly begin changing habits, and then moves on to advanced techniques that are needed when the basic methods fail. While he acknowledges that some discipline is necessary, his focus is on developing a good strategy so that habits can be changed without extraordinary levels of discipline. His ideas are based on his own personal experiments, but also backed up by psychological research.

The ebook is visually pleasing, having a good number of illustrations and a nice layout optimized for on-screen reading. He takes a very detailed look at 30-day trials, and gives a lot of good information about advanced techniques.

I said at the beginning of this post that I don’t struggle with changing my habits. However, I’m currently going through a trial that’s proving to be a major exception to this (see my next post). Because it’s a trial of changing my thoughts, it’s much tougher than any other habit I’ve tried to change. If I slip up just once with my thoughts, I have to start all over, and that’s what keeps happening. So I was pleased to see that Scott has a section specifically about “Changing Habits of Thought,” which has given me some ideas.

If you’ve tried to change some habits but found it too difficult, I recommend How To Change A Habit. I’m adding it to the Resources page.

Does good content matter in the blogosphere? Recently there has been quite a bit of discussion suggesting that perhaps it doesn’t.

James at Men with Pens wrote about Getting Creative With Your Content, or rather, how people are not getting creative with their content:

“I scroll through my feed reader, my attention dulled by the similar headlines. They’re carbon-copy titles that make a desperate attempt to grasp my attention. Some – very few – do. But I’m often quickly disappointed. The headline may be mildly intriguing, but the content of the first paragraph is just the same old stuff. Nothing new, nothing entertaining, nothing interesting.”

Skellie wrote about Why Great Writing Doesn’t Matter Online. Considering how many people admire her writing, it surprised me a bit to see her say this:

“Good writing, clever writing, beautiful writing — all of these things are unnecessary in the creation of great web content…clever turns of phrase, immaculate grammar, flawless spelling and crisp sentences are relatively insignificant.”

(Her point was that “all great web writing must do is communicate great ideas without getting in their way,” but I’d contend that even great ideas don’t necessarily matter, as evidenced by the success of certain blogs).

These posts received a flood of comments from people on both sides of the issue. I felt that a lot of people were doing their best to resist admitting what deep down they know is true: maybe great content really doesn’t matter that much.

It occurred to me that perhaps we’re looking at this the wrong way. Instead of lamenting the sad state of the blogosphere, maybe we should just give the people what they want: rehashed content. And I have a tool that will save you a lot of time in creating it: the Automatic Blog Post Rehasher.

Now you can easily rehash content from these blogs:

• 4-Hour Workweek
• IttyBiz
• Hunter Nuttall . com
• Men with Pens
• ProBlogger
• Seth Godin’s Blog
• Skelliewag.org
• Steve Pavlina . com
• Zen Habits

(I chose these blogs because they’re some of the well-known blogs I read. I’m not saying that they consist of rehashed content.)

Just fire up the Automatic Blog Post Rehasher and pick a blog. Adjust some parameters to fit your writing style, click “Rehash it,” and it spits out a brand new post for you, using word choice similar to the selected blog. It even gives you an image to use.

Some of you English majors may quibble with the grammar of what it spits out, but it really doesn’t matter. As you may know, people don’t read every word, they just scan. As long as your post contains a few buzzwords, it’s golden.

If you write (or read) content online or anywhere else good writing doesn’t matter, I’ve just saved you thousands of hours and given you a practically infinite number of free posts. I may have even improved the quality of your content.

Me Hunter. You read.