The Big Winner

May 31st, 2008 by admin

The Guitar Hero series includes some of the most successful games ever made. The story of Harmonix, the company behind the games, is even more impressive. The Harmonix story is one of true persistence. The company worked diligently for ten years and produced several acclaimed titles like Amplitude. Their major success came with Guitar Hero in 2005.

Here is the interview:
http://www.gameinformer.com/News/Story/200702/N07.0219.1006.10335.htm?Page=1

Some great quotes:
“It’s torture for the creative team that’s making the game, because when you make a game that the reviewers are loving and the playtesters love it and whatnot, you feel like just on a creative level that you’ve succeeded. But as I mentioned this morning, it’s only half the battle, because if you make an experience that can’t be effectively marketed, then you’re just dramatically capping the number of people who will ever have access to that experience. For us, it was really hard to go through that experience, but we came out of it having learned an important lesson, which is that we needed to think up how to sort of wrap up these experiences in a form that sort of made it easier to reach out to a wider audience of people.”

“One of the challenges with any game development is that you can only make great games when you have great people. If you try to grow too quickly just for the sake of growing, you’re going to end up hiring people who are not AAA people, and the quality of your games will suffer. We’ve tried to be pretty strict about controlling our growth rate to make sure the caliber of our people stays high.”

May 30th, 2008 by admin

Max Levchin is the founder of Slide and the co-founder of Paypal, which was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion. Levchin’s stake was worth $34 million according to Wikipedia. Needless to say, he is one of the most successful and innovative technology entrepreneurs in history. Because of that, I wish he had more than just three entries on his blog!  Nevertheless, the posts are excellent, especially the top ten list of launching a social networking dev platform:
http://maxlevchin.wordpress.com/2008/01/22/how-to-launch-a-successful-social-networking-development-platform/

and here is the full blog:
http://maxlevchin.wordpress.com/

May 29th, 2008 by admin

For a while I’ve been reading personal finance blogs like Get Rich Slowly and The Simple Dollar. These blogs helped me understand the basics of frugality, investing, retirement planning, insurance, etc. Recently, a new personal finance blog known by the exciting title How to Make 7 Million in 7 Years exploded on the scene. This blog breaks the mold of personal finance writing and is in fact more of a wealth & business growth blog. The author went from being $30,000 in debt to having a net worth of $7 million. He accomplished this through commercial real estate investment and entrepreneurship. Real estate and entrepreneurship are the classic engines of growing wealth according to books like “Get Rich, Stay Rich, Pass It On” written by George Walper and Catherine McBreen.

AJC, the author of “How to Make 7 Million in 7 Years” outlines a three part plan to making and growing wealth:
Making Money 101: This stage includes debt repayment, saving & frugality
Making Money 201: This stage is all about active investing such as starting a business and selling real estate
Making Money 301: The final stage focuses on moving from active to passive (income-generating investments)

The blog goes into much greater detail on the last two stages. This niche (growing wealth) remains unexplored by many personal finance authors, which is why AJC’s blog is such a breath of fresh air.

May 28th, 2008 by admin

I found this post by Dean Jackson while looking through Chris Yeh’s bookmarks on del.icio.us:
http://www.copywritersboard.com/copywriting-discussion/4967-60-minute-naked-truth-sales-letter-starter.html#post40510

I’ve been lurking for a while, and I thought I might contribute something that has helped me write several million-dollar sales letters for myself and others.

I think most people find the hardest thing to do is to get started writing.

It’s easy to get caught up in trying to figure out the best hook, or headline…but I have found an easy way to get a really quick head start on a letter.

I’d rather be golfing than sweating out a sales letter…so I’m very interested in achieving QUICK results.

It all starts with deciding exactly what I want someone to do…and then sitting down for 60 minutes to write an unedited hand-written letter baring the NAKED TRUTH of what I really want.

I sit down with a pen and a legal pad, and I start writing a stream of consciousness hand-written letter to ONE person I imagine as my IDEAL prospect.

I write the letter like they are the ONLY person who is going to get the letter, and I’m not concerned about the grammar, or the look, or the techniques of copywriting.

No one is actually going to see the letter…so I don’t edit myself.

I can get myself to sit down with the thought of having to get it all done in less than one hour. Sometimes, when I look up, it’s been 2 hours…but it didn’t feel like it.

Here’s the 10-part letter formula.

Dear Dean,

1) I’m writing to you because I want you to:

[insert my naked truth reason I’m writing…as if I were making my request known to a lamp Genie who could grant my wish]

ie: Take out your credit card and pay me $39 for my new book called…

2) The reason I’m writing to YOU specifically is because I think you want:

1.
2.
3.
etc.

3) Here is a list of what you get when you [buy my book]:

1. You get ______ — which means ________
2.
3.
etc.

4) If I were trying to guess the top 10 questions or objections you have about buying this today…they would be:

1.
2.
3.
etc.

5) So- here’s how I would clear those up for you:

1.
2.
3.
etc.

6) I want you to be completely without risk…so here’s my guarantee:

7) It’s really easy to get started…you just:

- click this button
- fill in this form
- call this phone number
- return this coupon
etc.

Once you decide to get started here’s what’s going to happen:

9) You need to do this right NOW because:

10) Here’s a list of people who have already [done this] and exactly what happened for them:

When you’re done with this exercise, it’s easy to start taking the naked copy elements from it and dressing them up to take out in public.

Try it, and let me know what you think.

Dean

May 27th, 2008 by admin

Warren Buffett’s business partner and fellow billionaire Charlie Munger gave an excellent presentation on investing entitled The Art of Stockpicking:

“I’m going to play a minor trick on you today because the subject of my talk is the art of stock picking as a subdivision of the art of worldly wisdom. That enables me to start talking about worldly wisdom a much broader topic that interests me because I think all too little of it is delivered by modern educational systems, at least in an effective way.

And therefore, the talk is sort of along the lines that some behaviorist psychologists call Grandma’s rule after the wisdom of Grandma when she said that you have to eat the carrots before you get the dessert.

The carrot part of this talk is about the general subject of worldly wisdom which is a pretty good way to start. After all, the theory of modern education is that you need a general education before you specialize. And I think to some extent, before you’re going to be a great stock picker, you need some general education.

So, emphasizing what I sometimes waggishly call remedial worldly wisdom, I’m going to start by waltzing you through a few basic notions.”

The full piece continues here:
http://vinvesting.com/docs/munger/art_stockpicking.html

May 26th, 2008 by admin

The New York Times has a great profile of famed music producer Rick Rubin and what drives him:
(via IHT)
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/09/02/technology/02music-man.php

Rick Rubin is listening. A song by a new band called the Gossip is playing, and he is concentrating. He appears to be in a trance. His eyes are tightly closed and he is swaying back and forth to the beat, trying at once to hear what is right and wrong about the music. Rubin, who resembles a medium-size bear with a long, gray beard, is curled into the corner of a tufted velvet couch in the library of a house he owns but where he no longer lives. This three-story 1923 Spanish villa steeped in music history — Johnny Cash recorded in the basement studio; Jakob Dylan is recording a solo album there now — is used by Rubin for meetings. And ever since May, when he officially became co-head of Columbia Records, Rubin has been having nearly constant meetings. Beginning in 1984, when he started Def Jam Recordings, until his more recent occupation as a career-transforming, chart-topping, Grammy Award-winning producer for dozens of artists, as diverse as the Dixie Chicks, Slayer, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Neil Diamond, Rubin, who is 44, has never gone to an office of any kind. One of his conditions for taking the job at Sony, which owns Columbia, was that he wouldn’t be required to have a desk or a phone in any of the corporate outposts. That wasn’t a problem: Columbia didn’t want Rubin to punch a clock. It wanted him to save the company. And just maybe the record business.

What that means, most of all, is that the company wants him to listen. It is Columbia’s belief that Rubin will hear the answers in the music — that he will find the solution to its ever-increasing woes. The mighty music business is in free fall — it has lost control of radio; retail outlets like Tower Records have shut down; MTV rarely broadcasts music videos; and the once lucrative album market has been overshadowed by downloaded singles, which mainly benefits Apple. “The music business, as a whole, has lost its faith in content,” David Geffen, the legendary music mogul, told me recently. “Only 10 years ago, companies wanted to make records, presumably good records, and see if they sold. But panic has set in, and now it’s no longer about making music, it’s all about how to sell music. And there’s no clear answer about how to fix that problem. But I still believe that the top priority at any record company has to be coming up with great music. And for that reason, Sony was very smart to hire Rick.”

(The full piece continues here: http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/09/02/technology/02music-man.php)

May 25th, 2008 by admin

Ryan Holiday is a new-media figure who works with several successful people, including one man worth hundreds of millions of dollars (nicknamed “The Executive”):

“The Executive’s big thing is being underestimated. As a rule, he almost never takes credit - the least of which includes not letting me use his real name. The idea is that ultimately it gives you the freedom to actually get things done. Tucker too - you’ve never seen Rudius Media mentioned in the press. They’ve been able to bifurcate themselves from their ego, to submit their emotions to strategy.

When someone doesn’t reckon you with the seriousness that you’d like, the impulse is to correct them. You want to remind them of what they’ve forgotten - your ego screams for you to indulge it. I think though, that when you really step back and think about it, you more often realize that you’ve just been handed an advantage. If you can not take it personally, if you can take the deep breath and hold your bearings, you buy yourself an incredible pocket of freedom.”

(source: http://www.ryanholiday.net/archives/ego.phtml)

Here are some more great posts from Ryan I bookmarked on del.icio.us:

http://del.icio.us/maximumwage/ryanholiday

May 24th, 2008 by admin

Ask the Harvard MBA is a new site from Chris Yeh, the eponymous HBS graduate. This blog is all about gathering advice from successful people and there are few measures of success more widely known than the Harvard MBA. There’s a ton of great stuff so far and anyone can submit a question.

May 23rd, 2008 by admin

Esquire Magazine has a series titled What I’ve Learned, a presentation of assertions and advice from a variety of successful people.Here is a full list of all the “What I’ve Learned” articles:

http://www.google.com/search?q=intitle:%22what+I%27ve+learned%22+site:esquire.com&hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=w4K&filter=0

May 22nd, 2008 by admin

Brian Johnson is an incredibly accomplished individual who continues to inspire others to live their best lives. From his official bio:

“In his past lives, Brian raised over $7.5 million to finance the two leading online social networks he created: eteamz and Zaadz. As a 24-year-old law school dropout, Brian created eteamz—which he grew into a company that now (profitably) serves over 3 million teams and their families involved in youth athletics and counts Little League Baseball® as a client. After selling eteamz in 2000, Brian spent a few years as a philosopher, immersing himself in philosophy, psychology, mysticism and optimal living. He created thinkArete.com, a site where he began distilling the universal truths of optimal living. Over 10,000 people signed up to receive his daily newsletter, The Philosopher’s Notes, where he broke down the wisdom of his favorite teachers, showing how everyone (from Nietzsche to Buddha to Rumi) is saying the same thing.

In an effort to integrate his philosophical and entrepreneurial selves (yes, he’s a Gemini), in 2004 Brian created Zaadz—a company named after the Dutch word for seed committed to leveraging world-class social networking tools to connect, inspire and empower people committed to transforming their lives and our planet. (Think: MySpace for people who want to change the world.) Feeling the dharmic pull to immerse himself back into studying and living the universal truths, Brian sold Zaadz to Gaiam, Inc. (Nasdaq: GAIA) in the summer of 2007.”

His new site, thinkArete, is absolutely amazing. It includes advice and universal truths from hundreds of successful individuals.