Photos From Our Recent Trip to Turkey

Hi everyone,

Darla and I just got back from Turkey. We had a great time exploring ancient cities, visiting Istanbul, and spending time with Darla's brother and his family. You can check out a selection of our photos at:

Photos


Tomorrow we leave for nearly 6 weeks in China. We are leading the TESOL internship class, which is 8 students who will be teaching English. Please pray for safety, good health, and that God will use our team.

Danny?

Powerful Video on Teamwork.

Wow, check out this video on teamwork. Make sure you watch until the end.

Top 5 Things to Look For In a Home Business

Hi everyone,

Often people ask me about home businesses. Usually these people are just wanting confirmation on a decision they've already made, however some are really looking for a good home business. If you are looking for a home business, here are the top things to look for.

#5 - Low initial start-up investment - Most home businesses do have a start up fee - in fact for it to be a business there is going to be some investment (otherwise it is likely a job). These start up fees do not have to be high. You can find many good home businesses that require less than $500. Even better look for a business where you can get started for between $100 - $300.

#4 - No inventory - Watch out for home businesses that require you to purchase inventories. In these businesses you're often a distributor and you will need to sell those inventories to friends, neighbors and others. Certainly some home business companies have become successful by running these sorts of business, however many people are left hurt along the way. Many distributors buy big inventories and are never able to sell them. With technology today there is no need for anyone to stock inventory.

#3 - Strong Management - Unfortunately many home businesses start each year under inexperienced management. Often these are people who were top distributors with one company, and decided to start their own company and recruit distributors themselves. Generally these people are successful at marketing, networking and sales, however few of them have any success in management. Look for a company to work with that is run by people with Fortune 500 management experience. These people know what it takes to grow a business, to manage a workforce, facilitate product manufacturing etc. If you are looking for a business that will last, find a company run by these sorts of people.

#2 - No Risk - Look for a business without risk. You should find a business where everything you spend to get started with the company comes with a solid money-back guarantee. Look for 60-90 days to try out the products and the company and be sure you can get your money back after that time.

#1 - At Least 10 Years Old - Very few home business companies last five years, and out of those companies many more do not make it to ten years old. There is nothing magical about the ten year mark, however most companies that make it ten years will continue to survive for sometime. Anytime you hear about a "Ground Floor Opportunity" you should run. This is a sure danger sign. Many companies today are trying to get around this by partnering (or purchasing) a shell company that has been around for a number of years. That way, instead of admitting that they are a new company, they will claim that they are a 10 year old company. In reality, only the shell company has existed for 10 years, and they are very new at running as a home business opportunity. These companies have just as much risk as any new company. Look for a company that has been involved in the home business industry for a full ten years or more.


Hopefully these tips help. Feel free to share other tips that you have found useful.

Danny Gamache

The Power of Perspective

This is from a speech given by David Foster Wallace as the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address - May 21, 2005.

The full speech can (and should!) be read at:
http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html

"The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.

By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.

You get the idea.

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.

But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down."

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it."

Danny

Great Resource

I want to recommend a wonderful resource for those of you in a networking home business. The site is http://www.greatestnetworker.com/ and it is a site for John Milton Fogg, author of "The Greatest Networker in the World". On the site you can listen to a sample training call, and you can read, or listen to the book "The Greatest Networker in the World". I strongly recommend checking this out.

Danny

MySpace & Facebook

Hi everyone,

Now you can find me on both MySpace & Facebook. It has been fun using both of these systems. I think they are important for the new face of business. I prefer Facebook, but come find me on both!

Facebook
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=826085649

MySpace
http://www.myspace.com/dannygamache

Danny