Why is it that visionaries such as Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, and Walt Disney seem to have extraordinary powers of ESP? Are they just born that way, or can vision be learned?

In Ten Steps Ahead: What Separates Successful Business Visionaries from the Rest of Us, Erik Calonius argues that vision is anything but an inborn talent. Instead, it’s the result of carefully training one’s brain to work with inspiration and perspective. This book is a very fun read, filled with all kinds of good stuff from neuroscience, psychology, and interviews with entrepreneurs.

One of my favorite examples is Richard Wiseman’s luck experiment. Using questionnaires and interviews, he determined whether his subjects considered themselves lucky or unlucky. He then gave them all a newspaper, and asked them to count the photographs. The “unlucky” people took two minutes to count them, while the “lucky” people took only a few seconds. Why?

Because the “unlucky” people missed the huge message on page 2 that said, “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” They didn’t see the half-page message in 2-inch high type because they were too busy counting.

His explanation: “Unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner, and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.”

Anyway, if you want to learn why visionaries have an uncanny ability to see and shape where the world is heading, read this book.

Hot off the press, it’s Jonathan Mead’s free ebook The Zero Hour Workweek. Boy, the workweek keeps getting shorter and shorter, doesn’t it?

Actually, the zero hour thing means that when you love what you do, work doesn’t feel like work. Jonathan says that he can no longer tell whether he’s working or playing. How cool is that?

What’s inside: how he gained over 10,000 blog subscribers, became a regular writer for a top 50 blog, and created a full time income online. And then, of course, how you can do the same with what you love to do.

He also includes case studies of Danielle LaPorte, Chris Guillebeau, Glen Allsopp, Nathalie Lussier, Cody McKibben, and Charlie Gilkey. It’s hard to imagine someone not liking this ebook.

Jonathan Mead, one of the faculty members of Project Mojave, has just released a manifesto called The Liberation Revolution.

It’s about creating a “freedom business” in order to “cut the cubicle umbilical cord.” While most of the information on how to do this is reserved for the paying members of Project Mojave, the manifesto is free and a pleasure to read.

Here’s what’s inside (I hope he doesn’t mind me ripping off his bullet points!):

• Why we’re tired of choking back vomit because we’re going another day doing a job we hate, with people we don’t connect with, working for someone we don�t respect.
• How we’re transforming our relationship with work, through breaking down social conventions and overly politicized nonsense.
• Why we think entrepreneurship is one of the highest forms of self-actualization.
• How we’re in this together.
• How to cultivate the “Free-man” (or free-woman) mindset and seven things you can do right now.
• The importance of getting to Game Over.

Being free, it’s not as earth-shattering as his paid ebook Reclaim Your Dreams. But it’s good, and well worth taking a few minutes to read. I’m a sucker for freedom manifestos.

Photo by azrainman

Tim Ferriss wrote The 4-Hour Workweek. Then I wrote Why We’re Failing the 4-Hour Workweek. Now Jonathan Mead has written The Lie of The Four Hour Work Week. And I in turn will respond with The Lie of the Lie of the 4-Hour Workweek.

Just like Jonathan isn’t really accusing Tim of lying, I’m not really accusing Jonathan of lying. It just makes for a nice title. Plus, it sets up my critics to call their rebuttal post The Lie of the Lie of the Lie of the 4-Hour Workweek.

Tim says that we should find a way to not have to work so much, so we can do what we want. Jonathan says we shouldn’t think of work as something to avoid, but something that’s sacred, that lets us provide value and make a difference.

I agree with much of what Jonathan said. In fact, the only thing I really disagree with is his contention that what he and Tim are saying is really all that different.

We have a semantics problem here, in that people don’t really agree on what constitutes “work.” How can Tim not consider writing and marketing a best-selling book as work? What about doing his own TV show, being a champion tango dancer, building schools in Vietnam, etc? Don’t these things take a lot of effort? Yeah, but none of it is “work” to him.

I’m guilty of using the word “work” to mean two completely different things:
1. slavery, drudgery, tedium, burden, toiling, punishment, monotony
2. freedom, purpose, contribution, self-expression, making a difference, fulfilling your dreams

People are sometimes confused when I say something like “I want to retire so I can get my work done.” It’s because we have two definitions of work that are as different as night and day.

While I don’t feel like starting a movement to get the dictionary updated, let’s see if we can paraphrase Jonathan and Tim in terms of the definitions above.

Jonathan says: “Don’t think of what you do as work¹, think of it as work².”

Tim says: “Get your work¹ done in just four hours a week, so you have more time for work².”

These sound very similar to me!

While I agreed with much of what Jonathan said, some of his commenters really got to me. I’m going to quote them anonymously not because I’m stingy with link love, but because I’m going to be mean to them. Not just for the sake of being mean, but because they’re spewing nonsense like this:

“I actually had the four hour work week for about 18 months… I got so bored that I went and found a real job that paid me much less than I was earning from my four-hour work week business just because I wanted something to do.”

and this:

“I don’t believe he works 4 hours a week. I don’t believe anyone on their death bed will be satisfied with a life like that. That isn’t authentic happiness.”

and this:

“Most people would freak out with all the ‘psychic entropy’ if they had a 4-hour workweek. I know several rich entrepreneurs who did exactly that.”

and this:

“Tim Ferriss has some interesting ideas, but the key is NOT working LESS, but instead working MORE on things you LOVE.”

and this:

“I was a stay at home mom for while and could not take it after about 6 months. The lack of people interaction was mind numbing and I missed going to the office and taking trains. Nothing like a cup of joe from a cart on the corner. For those who like to go out, meet people and feel passionately about everything they do, that lifestyle would not be ideal.”

Did anybody actually read the book? Where is everyone getting the idea that Tim prescribed a life of sitting around and doing nothing all day? Is there some law that jobless people are not allowed to ride trains, get a cup of joe from a cart on the corner, go out, meet people, and feel passionate about everything they do? Tim specifically suggests pursuing a life of excitement and service, and his life is far from boring.

What bothers me the most about these comments is the insinuation that life is inherently worthless unless you have a master giving you assignments. Newsflash: if you can’t figure out what to do with your time, THE PROBLEM IS YOU.

Say you suddenly had complete time freedom. In this world of countless wonders, unprecedented technological advances, and critical problems to be solved, could you really not figure out a way to keep yourself occupied? I can’t imagine ever being bored with life no matter how long I lived, as long as I had the freedom to do what I wanted.

If you ever run out of things to do, you’ve overstayed your welcome on this planet. If you’re bored, I’m happy to give you some sacred work to do. But really, if you have nothing to live for until your boss tells you what to live for, you’re done. You’re already emotionally dead, so as a formality, you just need to complete the process by becoming physically dead. It should be a seamless transition for you.

I agree that one’s work should be sacred. Freud said “Love and work…work and love, that’s all there is.” But Freud’s work was a lot more exciting than putting cover sheets on TPS reports. Most people aren’t so fortunate, and it’s much more of a challenge for them to make a living from work that’s meaningful to them.

The commenter who missed going to the office actually touched on a good point. What if the job you already have is meaningful to you? Great! You don’t need to avoid your work because you like it. Do your work and be happy.

I agree that a job can be great. I’ve even been there myself. But in my experience, things always change. If you like your job now, will you still like it when you have a new manager, or they transfer you to another department, or the company goes out of business? I’d rather be in control so that I know I’ll like my work every day.

And yeah, Tim and I are a little more job-averse than most. I came across a very interesting study through @phdbre and @thembti on Twitter, in which job dissatisfaction was compared among different Myers-Briggs types.

The study found that the types most likely to be very dissatisfied with their job are ISTP (like Tim), INTP (like me), and ENFJ. None of the INFJs, INTJs, ENTJs, or ESTPs were very dissatisfied with their job.

What ISTP and INTP have in common is that they’re the two types whose dominant function is introverted thinking. I’m not sure why the ENFJs are in that group. They’re called “the great communicators;” maybe there aren’t a lot of jobs for great communicators out there.

Anyway, people all want to do different kinds of work, including kinds that might not be readily available in a traditional job. And the point of the 4HWW is to put your income generation on auto pilot so your time is freed up to do what you want…which in many cases will be work, just work that doesn’t pay so much (or you’d already be able to do it).

Let’s take a look at one more comment:

“My dream job would actually require working probably 60 or more hours out the week since I would like to manage a hotel. Someone like myself would find the book and that lifestyle very unsatisfying.”

Well, if that’s her dream job, why isn’t she doing it? There must be something that’s stopping her, and I don’t know what that would be other than time or money. So if she had enough time and money to manage a hotel, then she could be doing the work she wanted to, right? THAT’S WHAT THE 4HWW IS ALL ABOUT! So why are we disagreeing?

If you chase two rabbits, both will escape. But there are so many rabbits out there!

I have a guest post on IttyBiz about this problem, called Chasing the Right Rabbits (rated I for IttyBiz-level profanity). While it might appeal to anyone with too much on their plate, it was mainly written for current or aspiring home based business owners.

I wrote it about a month ago, when I was feeling overwhelmed with all the rabbits in sight. Things are different now, and I’m more focused on a smaller number of rabbits. More on that later.

Oh, and Naomi started the #ElusiveFugitiveMicrobunnies hashtag for related conversations on Twitter. Not sure how much use that’s going to get, but it’s there.

It’s not that often that I buy books printed on that ancient material known as paper, but I made an exception for this new book on career planning by recovering lawyer/serial entrepreneur Jonathan Fields.

This is a guy who knows that the conventional way of career building just isn’t working anymore–he got his wake up call when job stress put him in the emergency room with a softball-sized abscess in his intestine. And the conventional way certainly isn’t working for people whose passion happens to be in something like art, music, cooking, or teaching.

What option is there, other than being a career renegade?

This book is called Career Renegade: How to Make a Great Living Doing What You Love. And what it’s all about can be summed up with a few lines from Jonathan’s own site:

“Do What You Love And The Money Will Follow” Is A Lie. More Often Than Not, You Need To Make The Money Follow. This Book Shows You How…

Doing what you love is pretty easy. I mean, just do it. You don’t need a book to tell you how to do that. But to actually make a living from it, that’s the hard part. And that’s exactly what Career Renegade is about.

The back cover caught my eye when it said that you can turn nearly any passion into a better payday, even video games. I was like, “Oh, come on Jonathan! Fine, I’ll read it, but you’d better be able to back up that claim!”

And yes, he did. But there’s a catch. Jonathan’s right, you can’t just “do what you love and the money will follow.” But, what most people don’t realize is that with creativity and hard work, you can figure out how to express your passion in a way that people will pay you for it. Like the guy who played video games.

Jonathan has run a lot of different businesses personally, as well as studied many other entrepreneurs. By doing this, he’s observed what successful businesses have in common, and learned the different ways of finding opportunities where most people wouldn’t see any. He has case studies of people who are making a living from things you wouldn’t think you can get paid for, and he explains how you can apply these lessons to your own passion.

A big part of what makes this possible is recent changes in the internet, such as blogging, social media, keyword research tools, self publication tools, PR sites, freelance sites, etc. This really does make things a lot easier, and he goes into a lot of detail about how this all works.

But while he includes a lot of detailed information, this is not a book purely focused on the internet. It takes a very broad perspective, starting with “I have a passion. Now what?” and helping you figure out ways to turn it into a career. It deals with issues like cultivating the right mindset, and getting your family on board. It presents a lot of practical information, plus tons of resources for learning a lot more.

Considering the glut of career books we see these days, I was pleasantly surprised by Career Renegade. I’d suggest following Seth Godin’s advice: “Go, read it, get started, hurry.” Be a Career Renegade.

It’s been 20 months since Tim Ferriss released his world-renowned best seller The 4-Hour Workweek. He gave us his secrets for liberating ourselves from the “deferred life plan.” We’ve had time to put it into practice. So why haven’t we?

This is the question I explore in my new free ebook, Why We’re Failing the 4-Hour Workweek (or, Reflections of a Pro Blogger). For the last two and a half months, I’ve been happily jobless as a full time blogger, and free to work on creating a permanent alternative to the 9-5. But how has it worked out?

We’ll skip right past the flashy pictures of lavish parties and six-figure AdSense checks, and get a behind-the-scenes look at the world of pro blogging. You’ll get a glimpse of the harsh realities of entrepreneurship, and the tough choices a blogger is forced to make. Perhaps most importantly, you’ll see what’s wrong with the system, and how to deal with it. Oh yeah, and it’s really entertaining too.

When you’re done reading it, leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Do you have trouble keeping up with all the demands on your time? Have you attempted a 4-hour workweek before?

You might know Jonathan Fields, the recovering attorney who now writes about work, life, entrepreneurship, and play on his blog Awake At The Wheel. He’s recently come out with a free ebook (no email required) called The Fire Fly Manifesto, in which he asks:

“Do you consciously choose to pursue a soul-sucking path defined by excess money, toys, burn-out and increased agitation, anxiety, depression, alienation and false security or will you take this window as an opportunity to rebuild your living around the quest for purpose, passion, health, friendship, love, time spent doing what you love with people you love, a body that doesn’t horrify you, a heart that’s not on the verge of failing and a career that fills your soul and provides enough to live very comfortably in the world?”

This ebook is a short, thought-provoking read. Near the end, he introduces his new blog Career Renegade, with its audio interviews with real career regenades.

This is all free. But for a little money, you can pre-order his book Career Renegade: How to Make a Great Living Doing What You Love (it’s out January 13th). If you pre-order his book, you get free admission to Flight School, his 16 hour online training program about accelerating your career evolution (it goes live January 1st, and you need to enter your book order confirmation number to sign up for Flight School). And if you’re one of the first 1,000 people to pre-order the book, and you sign up for Flight School by December 15th, you get access to his two upcoming live Q&A calls.

Yeah, all the offers are a little confusing, but you can start with his free ebook The Fire Fly Manifesto.

I just wanted to post an update about Naomi Dunford’s Online Business School, now that I’ve finished going through most of it. I just sold another one this morning, so I know some of you want to learn about Naomi’s six types of online income streams:

• Coaching/consulting
• Services
• Selling physical stuff
• Ebooks/downloads
• Niche sites
• Affiliate marketing

Plus these bonuses:

• Two sections of Dave Navarro’s 30 Hours A Day program to help you get more time, money, and freedom.
• Two audios from Havi Brooks to help you find a peaceful place in the midst of all this financial uncertainty, worry and fear.
• James Chartrand and Harrison McLeod’s Write For The Web so you can write good website copy, niche sites, or become a freelance writer.
• Michael Martine’s SEO-Nomicon: SEO Magic for WordPress to get serious traffic to your site.
• Josh Hohman’s Fool-Proof Niche Control Using Silos, which Naomi says is kind of like her niche websites module on steroids.
• Naomi’s own personal Rolodex of the products and services and websites that make IttyBiz run smoothly.
• And Naomi’s favorite, the Emergency Money Plan, for when you have no start-up capital and you need to pay rent by the first and you don’t have a clue what to do.

I haven’t gotten to any of the bonuses yet, but I’ve gone through the six modules, each consisting of text, audio, and video. It’s good, really good.

I see it mainly as a great high-level view. There are lots of different ways you can go about making money online, and you don’t want to waste time chasing the wrong thing while missing opportunities that would be better suited for you. So you want to know what your options are, and what they really entail, so you can have a plan to keep you focused.

It doesn’t cover every little question you could possibly have about everything, but it does contain a lot of information that you really don’t want to miss. For example, in the ebooks module, I learned that when you launch an ebook, you’re not supposed to just tell everyone it’s ready. You’re supposed to have an actual launch process, a well-planned and executed strategy, just like when they launch the Space Shuttle. (And since an ebook launch is a full topic by itself, Naomi will try to upsell you on her and Dave Navarro’s How to Launch the **** Out Of Your Ebook. That’s the only upsell, and I bought it because, well, I write ebooks.)

It occurs to me that bundling products is a great deal for everyone. It’s good for the customers because all these things would add up to way more than $397 separately (one hour of Naomi’s consulting time alone is $500), but it’s a great deal when you buy them together. And it’s good for the seller because by selling one big product instead of a bunch of little products, you scare away the most price-sensitive people, who Naomi says are very demanding customers. (As in, they ask you why you have the gall to charge $9 for your ebook when someone else is selling one on the same topic for $8.97. But someone who can afford an $897 product wouldn’t think twice about paying $900 for something that’s a lot better.)

Oh, and I make a brief cameo appearance in the video for the services module. For just a few seconds, my name is visible on Akemi’s Akashic Record reading page. Ironically, I saw this just half an hour after meeting another one of my spirit guides.

So, if you were interested in Online Business School but putting it off, now would be a good time to snag it. Naomi offers a knock-your-socks-off guarantee if you don’t love it: your money back, or personal coaching to make it work for you.

Back in January, Yaro Starak and Gideon Shalwick released a series of 10 free blogging training videos for beginners at BecomeABlogger.com. They were very well done, and while the information was far too basic for me at the time, I remember thinking that the videos would have been nice to have back when I was dealing with the technical challenges of setting up my blog (getting a web host, a WordPress theme, setting up FeedBurner, etc).

Now they’ve released their Roadmap To Become A Blogger, a free ebook and audio that outlines their strategy based on the “X-Factor.” (Warning: video with sound starts playing automatically. I hate that.) It’s proven to be very popular, with nearly 7,000 downloads already.

When I heard them mention the “X-Factor,” I thought it was going to be about blog mojo, but it’s not. The X-Factor is the intersection of multimedia (video, audio, online radio, and TV) and social media (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc).

And this is where it kind of lost me. I liked reading it, but about halfway through it started getting very tech-heavy (beyond just normal text blogging), and I started skimming. On the other hand, if you want to tech out your blog, you’d probably like it.

On Thursday, December 4th at 4 PM EST, they open the doors to their premium membership program that teaches successful blogging. Yaro is the entrepreneurial guy, having made $70,000 from his blog in October 2008, and I don’t know as much about Gideon, but he’s the tech wizard.

Back in April they asked for feedback on their free videos, as well as input that would help them decide what to include in their paid program. Gideon said my feedback was valuable and honest, but I wasn’t chosen as the one person with the best feedback who would be rewarded with free access to the program. (I always like to win free stuff!)

Their 6-month program is $27 per month if you sign up in the first week (with bonuses for people who sign up the first day). After the first week, the price goes up to $47 a month. But the Roadmap To Become A Blogger ebook and audio is free, so there’s no commitment there.

If I were to join one of Yaro’s programs, I’d probably do Blog Mastermind. It’s considerably more expensive than Become A Blogger, but for now I don’t have much interest in multimedia. YMMV.