I also wonder how many people will say “Yes. I saw that amazing place!” and turn around say “Nuh. I will never be able to go there.”

[Update] Here is an other shot of the awesome place. Click to find the original resource. http://www.zadan.nl/pics/mount/

Well this picture brings up a good question. What is the purpose of my life?

I found a great personal development blog by Steve Pavlina. I also found his method to identify the purpose of your life in 20 minutes. I think I found mine.

Travel Around The World And Bring Happiness And Excitement To Other People’s Life.

This finding really changed my point of views about what I do for living. If what I am doing doesn’t serve the purpose of my life, I am wasting my time and life achieve nothing but other people’s purpose. I know I love traveling and taking photos, but I haven’t really thought about why I like it so much and the real reason why put up my digital photography blog and the happiest blog on earth!

Today I was all alone for the Christmas. So I went on a discovery tour to visit the Talking Stick Casino in Scottsdale AZ. I took some photos and was able to sit on their balcony for a while to think about what Steve said in his article. Watching people dumping their precious money into the slot machine, it makes me wonder what the purpose of those people’s life are? Seeing people waiting in line for over an hour on Christmas day and pay for $42 for a NOT very healthy over-eating buffet, I bet they don’t know their purpose of life.

While I was trying to find out my purpose of life, I realized the purpose has to ADD VALUE TO OTHER PEOPLE’S LIFE. Not mine. It really makes the purpose searching process much easier. Give it a try!

There is no guarantee that I will be able to achieve the purpose of my life, but it means I am willing to die for it. It’s crystal clear. By looking back my life, there is a lot of stuff I have to get rid off. Or I’d better change the way I live and do business. It’s killing my dream.

At the moment, I still don’t have the guts to put everything behind me and go for a ride like I did in 2006. At current age, it’s hard to draw a line between brilliant brave and impulsively stupid, and chose the right side. I will find out that pretty soon.

What’s the purpose of your life?

Have you visited Mt. Roraima, Venezuela Guyana? If so, please tell me about it.

Now it’s time to get my life back to the reality and move forward on my exit plan. If you did not already visit my digital photography blog, you can check it out. There will be more HDR Photos available soon.

Taking digital photos is my passion. Recently, I started learning how to convert my image into HDR imaging, which will show more detail and color that normal human eyes can’t see. I have spent too much time on processing the HDR image, I will soon get a faster laptop with more horse power.

In the past 8 days, I was totally out or reach. It was the perfect time to test my passive income strategies. Although I haven’t really made huge passive income while I was away from the computer and Internet, I did make money that covered my cost of the trip. Isn’t that awesome!

One of my online store got hacked. I will decide what to do with it. The good news is that no credit card information was stolen. I have the site up and running while I was at airport waiting for my flight back home. It’s also good to know that there are few new orders in the past 8 days that are taken care of by my partner.

Now my local project is getting new helping hands. I really hope my handy man can speed up and make more sales. It will definitely turn my project into a profitable business without me doing most of the work. Finger crossed. It’s currently break even.

New vacation plan is on my way.

Lately, I discovered the High Dynamic Range photography (HDR) and start playing around the concept on Photomatix Pro on my new digital photography blog on Outography.com. I now have perfect excuse to take a lot more photos. I am also planning a trip to the east coast and Caribbean in the coming weeks. I am sure I will create more HDR images soon.

My two of many Tax lien investments came back. It wasn’t very impressive, but I now learned how it really works and how to best invest on those properties. The return was not good due to the amount of the investment and the time spent on getting those properties invested. I sure can do much better job next year.

My project have not really going as strong as I expect, but the passive income has grown steady.

Feel free to visit my new digital photography blog and give those photos a rating.

Image Source: Petoskey Clock Tower

Just found out this old post I did a long long time ago. Clock is ticking – Are you working hard or working smart! I have one confession to make.

What a loser I am.

Yup! I don’t have to hear that from you. I admit that I haven’t really changed that much other than the fact that I did move forward. I am not moving fast enough.

Here was the goal I set a long time ago and I posted on my Facebook wall.

Duh! Crap! What am I doing here?

If I want to make $1M a year, I have to make $2 every minutes none stop and no sleep. If I work 8 hours a day. That means I have to make 3 times of that per minute. So I have to make $6 a minute at $360 per hour rate with no vacation, no weekend and no sick day for 365 days.

I really don’t want to work. So everything I do must generate passive income.

Passive income. I can’t count how many times I remind myself about creating the passive income.

So here I am.

My passive income from Google AdSense and affiliate marketing is growing. However, it’s not the true passive income that I am looking for. Why? I have no control. If Google decides to stop sending me the check every month, I am over. I need have a product that I have 100% control. So I can set my own price and rules.

My true passive income is now subscription based recurring income. I am building the system to help local business getting exposures on the Internet, Social Media. Now I am in the stage to build my own network, platform or a fancier one – The Promotion Engine.

Once the customer is registered and listed in the system, they will pay me either monthly or annually. That’s ideal way to generate the passive income while making me feel good helping more local businesses.

Even better, since I hold the most valuable asset, I have control. Now, I have much larger company asking for my content.

There are two issues.

1. I have spent too much time and making far less than what I have made on my previous job. If I need to make $1M revenue by the end of 2011. I need to scale up!
2. There are too many competitions out there that is currently larger than I am and grow faster than I am. I need to build something even better.

Solutions

1. One of my customers actually hit me on my head. The easiest way to scale up is to scale the profit margin. If I can increase the profit margin 10x, I can reach my goal 10x faster.
2. I actually like competition. It gives me the motivation to do better job. So instead of distributing my content to other companies, I am going to build my own content distribution channel.

That’s on my business side. On the personal side.

I have stayed at my ideal weight 150lb for 2 months now. I also start my golf practice. My wife and I are also planning our annual oversea vacation. Life is good other than the fact that I have not reach my goal.

Not too long ago, my aunt was diagnosed with breast cancer. She finished her surgery and started doing chemotherapy. A lady came to her and told her about the miracle juice. The lady has been drinking the miracle juice for 20 years and is cancer free. Now my aunt is drinking that miracle juice too. She is recovering faster than any one of us can imagine. So it must be very good.

It may sounds too good to be true. However, it doesn’t hurt to drink all natural fluid. My wife and I have been drinking this miracle juice for more than a week now. We feel great!

Just last week, my wife ordered the Breville BJE200XL 700-Watt Compact Juice Fountain on Amazon. This is so far one of our best investment on our healthy living other than playing golf, go to gym or walking between life and death or hiking in the mountains. Extremely healthy lifestyle is also our 2011 New Year Resolutions.

I am a believer of healthy & wealthy living. Without healthy body, you won’t be able to enjoy your wealthy life. Without wealthy lifestyle you can’t really live healthy. We glad that we finally invest on the juicer.

This Miracle Drink will be effective for the following ailments:

1. Prevent cancer cells to develop. It will restrain cancer cells to grow.
2. Prevent liver, kidney, pancreas decease and it can cure ulcer as well.
3. Strengthen the lung; prevent heart attack and high blood pressure.
4. Strengthen the immune system
5. Good for the eyesight, eliminate red and tired eyes or dry eyes
6. Help to eliminate pain from physical training, muscle ache
7. Detoxify, assist bowel movement, and eliminate constipation.  Therefore it will make skin healthy & LOOK more radiant. It is God sent for acne problem.
8. Improve bad breath due to indigestion, throat infection,
9. Lessen menstrual pain
10. Assist Hay Fever Sufferer from Hay Fever attack.

Absolutely no side effect.  Highly nutritious and easily absorbs!  It’s very effective, if you need to lose weight. You will notice your immune system will be improved after 2 week routine. Please make sure to drink immediately from the juicer for best effect.

When to drink it:

Drink it first thing in the morning with the empty stomach. After one hour you can eat breakfast.

I only drink this once a day. Since it contains raw potato, I don’t want to dramatically change my diet with lots starch in the juice. I have also replace my morning coffee with this Miracle Juice. So I can keep my energy all day long.

Have you tried the miracle juice? What have you done to live healthy and wealthy?

This is going to be a fairly long update on my new 2011 resolutions post and change life in 100 days.

Really. There is nothing to be proud of. My new resolutions in 2011 hit a small road block. One of my helping hands decided to find a job to pay bill. I can’t blame on him. Everyone has different financial situation. I can only say that I feel bad that I cannot afford him to help me moving forward.

With about 24 days left to change my life, I have a short exit plan. It’s not a plan to exit my journey, but a plan to exit what I do to make significant changes to turn my world inside out.

Here is the summary of the top 3 things to change my life and to make 2011 a better year.

1. Extreme Healthy Body and Life Style
   This is the most important part of my journey. I will be hiking in the mountain in Sedona in the coming week. I am back on practicing golf. Re-join gym after the reopen of gym with a new ownership at new location. Other than having some coffee time at Starbucks, I haven’t eat out for months. I drop few pounds and inches. I felt great.

   The only thing I can’t really control is my vision. I have bad presbyopia at age of 42. It primary due to my long hour in front of computer.

2. Automation & Execution
   My #1 handy man is quitting on me. What can I do about it? I have to speed up the automation process. Even the sales and marketing process. I rely on human interaction and in-person sales approach too much! It’s also not may original idea about running an Internet based business. I am slowly moving on to the fully automation on broadcasting the content users generate. With few minor configuration, the content can be distributed to 52+ different sites automatically. This will dramatically low my cost to pay someone to do the work. Everyone of those sites can potentially generate Google Adsense income too.Of course, I have to re-think what I have done wrong in my process. If I can’t afford my sales persona to sell my products, I must have some serious problem in my business model. If I can’t pay for the eggs, how will I hatch the chickens? I have something important to figure out.
3. Cash Flow and Proper Investment
   Just invest few thousand dollars on telecom stocks. Some of them have pretty good potential and hopefully get good return in few months. Those are true passive income.

This is my current update.

Road blocks:

• Finding the sales force – Having my helping hand quitting on me makes me realize that how vulnerable my business is. I’ve tried to post job position on Craigslist and end up getting flood with spam and scam. Most people looking for job don’t take commission based sales position. That means I won’t be getting any helping hand at any time soon.
• Revenue Model – An entrepreneur friend I met at forum hit me really hard on me! He simply made me realize that I am facing the uphill battle. I have to sell to both business and consumer sites in a very crowd market. The profit margin isn’t that great. The ROI is too low. Even I pay 30%-60% commission on every sale to my sales representatives, the price tag just isn’t that attractive.

Action Plan:

• Cold Calling – I will try to hire stay home mom, un-employed part-time sales to make call. They will get one time commission on every success transaction. This will lower my cost to pay them recurring commission.
• Affiliate Program – I guess it’s time to implement affiliate program and go viral.
• Email Marketing – This is one of my weakest points. Need to finish the process to automate the sales process.
• New game changer – Once I have the above process in place, I can move on to my two other ideas.

That’s for now. Really. I have to give myself a time line before I have to find a Corp American job.

It’s almost the end of 2010 and beginning of the 2011. What are your new year resolutions?

First of all, we just got a new baby boy in our family! It’s going to be a great year for our family.

I did a post few days ago about my confession of year 2010. I also plan to change my life in 100 days.

Things are going well so far to me!

Here are my new year resolutions that will help me accomplish my goals to change my life!

As you can see from the above header image, I play golf. I was not a big fan of golfing until few months ago. Now I am addict to it. I love hiking and walking on the green grass. I am not much of hitting tiny golf ball and put them in the hole. I really enjoy the environment and driving the golf cart like riding a off-road 4×4 Jeep.

New Year Resolutions:

1. Extreme Healthy Body and Life Style
   Keep extremely healthy body is my #1 goal in 2011. Playing golf will be just one of the ways to get there. We will try to play golf or hiking at least twice a month. I truly believe work hard and play hard is the only way to become true lifestyle entrepreneur! My wife and I have also switched our daily nutrition into organic foods. Organic Milk, Soy Milk, Organic eggs, Organic apple and so on. We also control our portion and do more exercises. Our body fat and weight is not nearly below average. We truly believe the healthy body is the only guarantee that you will be able to enjoy your hard working money!
2. Automation & Execution
   Procrastination is still my #1 killer to my success. I have so many great ideas and potential, but without proper execution, an awesome idea is just a useless assumption. Hiring new employee and helping hand is inevitable! Growing pain of business is the side effect, but it’s only type of pain that is enjoyable. In 2011, I will be focusing Viral Marketing, Social Media Marketing and Branding that can help scale up the projects. It’s also the best way to lower marketing cost and advertising spending. There is no free lunch! You have to give before taking. Automate what I do and duplicate them will double or triple the profit.
3. Cash Flow and Proper Investment
   If you look at all the rich people in the world. All top 20 billionaires make even more money on investment. The more money you have, the more money you can make. This has been a true statement to me. It doesn’t mean you need to be greedy. It simply means to use your money wisely. Fortune is a result of accumulations of finance IQ and cash flow.

Challenges ahead:

To be honest, I did not do very well in 2010. I expect to see much better results. Even I am doing 3 times better than 2009, I have failed in many ways.

• Stop doing what I do – Obviously, If I am not moving at the expected speed, I am doing something wrong. I should stop doing what I am doing! I have few more days to figure out what went wrong before the new year of 2011. I have also post the similar confession like this one in the few years. I keep doing the same thing over and over! That’s just wrong. It means I haven’t really learned from my mistakes and failures.
• Time is Freedom – Haven’t we learned that time is money? As far as I go on my journey. Time is more than money. Time is FREEDOM! Now I am learning how to use money to buy time. I value my time more than the money I’ve earned. Money is no longer what I am going after. I am going after the FREEDOM, so I can truly become full time lifestyle entrepreneur before I die.
• Goodbye suckers – I am going to say goodbye to some of my Facebook friends, Twitter followers and many other slowlane drivers. Really. I have spent so much time with slowlane drivers that drag me down. I thought I should treat everyone equally in the social media world. Really! I don’t blame on them. I blame on myself not capable of pulling myself out of the comfort zone. I know I will piss many people, but that’s what it takes to drive on the fastlane. Hanging out with the wrong crowd is simply the beginning of the failure.

Image Source: Play hard by szlea

Actions:

Without actions, nothing will happen!

To Be Continued …

I have been reading Maren Kate’s Escaping the 9 to 5 blog for a while, who is one of the well known women entrepreneurs. Maren recently posted her challenge about 100 Days to Change Your Life and hit road block. Now I am wondering what I would do to change my own life in 100 days this time?

I am not as young and beautiful as her, but I do have the same ambition to live on interest and work less than 4 hours a week. Really! I need a guiding light to lead me out of the dark.

To be honest, I have set so many goals in the past. How will I reach my goals in 100 days this time?

What are the changes?

1. Keep extreme healthy condition with more exercise and start playing golf again
2. Completely automate the business and move on to the next one
3. Turn my barter dollar into cash

Really. They are huge goals. I was unable to achieve that in the past 10 months. I am going to get done in 100 days. You can call me crazy. I was not crazy enough to push myself forward. There is no time to waste, it starts now.

My Plan to reach the goals

#1 Get my healthy lifestyle back! Really. I was not really good at arranging my time and execute the plan. I work 14 hours a day, but I only produce 3 hours of works. I am definitely a loser on this one. Now I am back on the exercise schedule. I will go to gym 3 times a week and play golf on Saturday morning. I have done this in the past, I can do it again.

#2 Automate business process Procrastination is so far the #1 killer to my business. I know from the bottom of my heart. I can finish the job faster than I can expect, if I concentrate on getting them done. I have been sitting in my comfort zone for too long. Hire and train the first sales person is a must. There are few tasks need to be automated. The API and data flow are already in place. It’s waiting for me to complete the process in between. It will also lower my cost on hiring freelancer to do those works.

#3 Get the cash flow going. In the past 10 months, I have cumulate a bit of barter dollar that I need to use for good. The idea is to use those barter dollar to trade for marketing and advertising services to help branding my current business and get more customers to pay me cash . I don’t mind to pay tax, but not on the virtual dollar. Actually, I only have less than 60 days to write off all the barter dollar for business purpose. Time is running out.

Winter is coming to Arizona. It’s the best time of the year! Lots snow birds start moving in to Phoenix to enjoy the Sun and to bring more business. It’s also the best time for my business too.

What’s your goal to change your life in 100 days? Share that with me!

That’s it! I am off to gym.

I often thought about some idea and went ahead to Godaddy to purchase the domains. It end up doing nothing and simply waste hosting and domain registration fee. It also drag me down. Idea is worthless, if there is execution beyond that.

Time is money! The truth of wealth on Fastlane is revealed!

Really. I have not wasting any time today watching TV, chat on Facebook. I spent pretty much all day review my current Fastlane progress.

Local Project

My local project meets 3 out of the 5 commandments.

• The commandment of need
• The commandment of control
• The commandment of scale

And it needs some improvement on the other two.

• The commandment of entry
• The commandment of time

The project itself is really high demand (NEED) since the economy is so bad. Everyone is trying to save money here or there. I have almost total control of the project except the integration with Google Map and Ad revenue from Google AdSense. The project itself is also very scalable. It can be expanded into International and multilingual system. It can also be franchisee out eventually.

However, it is not hard to be copied. Actually, I was copying other website and made improvement. The worst barrier to this project is the time I spend on the project. Since I am small, I have to do almost everything from programming, system administration, customer services, copywriting (ouch), marketing (huh?), sales and human resource. I am basically working on a JOB.

I was also trying to win business by lowering my profit margin. I end up giving away my services for FREE. That hurts.

Here is my plan to change the situation.

• Make my service more unique. I am going to add new features, change the design and raise the price. It will add more value to the whole system.
• Hiring someone who are really good at doing what am not good at.

At mean time, I start experimenting a new project that is an add-on services to assist my main project. It’s going to be a subscription based services. It will server itself without any human involvement, once it’s up running smoothly. It will be truly Fastlane.

E-Commerce Project

My e-commerce websites is barely doing anything except generating some Googld Adsense income. Still debate on keeping them or get rid of them.

Adult Project

Well. I have a domain that keep getting traffic from people looking for a very unique lifestyle and niche. The demand is not that high, but it’s very unique. Haven’t had chance to implement it. It doesn’t have the scale to make it very profitable.

SEO Project

I have whole bunch other domains for SEO purpose at the beginning. They are now useless and are solely for Spammer entertainment purpose only.

So some of them must go pretty soon. Paying domain name without making the return back are simply a lose investment. Once they are all gone, I can focus on the one making good money.

Stay tune!

I lost count on how many times I change my blog title. I have tried many things and even claim myself as self-made lifestyle entrepreneur. After seriously reviewing about my goals and achievement, I decided to change blog title one more time. My ultimate goals in this lifetime will be living the dream lifestyle. I want to make living on the Internet and travel around the world one city at a time.

After spending 3 weeks in Taiwan and Hong Kong, it’s time to get back on my feet and plan the next trip. I really miss my 6 months backpacking trip I did in 2007. I would like to do it again while I can still do it.

Really. I don’t care to claim myself as entrepreneur any more. It’s not really my goal. My real goal is to enjoy life with my wife. We love to travel around the world and see things that 99% people in the world don’t get to see. We want to live healthy and wealthy. We love eating different foods and seeing different cultures. The only way to achieve that is to have really passive income to support our dream lifestyle.

So this blog will be dedicated to that purpose.

At moment of this writing, we are healthy and fairly wealthy. We can pretty much quit what we are doing and go on a few years journey without worry about the stuff behind us. The question is what our life will be after that?

Without a static passive income and healthy body, our lifestyle won’t last long.

So here comes the plan.

Goal 1: Keep healthy body and spirit

The #1 factor that 99% of the people in the world never get to live in their dream lifestyle is the health issue. The only way to live in the dream lifestyle is to have a healthy body to enjoy it. I am back on my schedule to work out at gym and practice gold once a week. Eating healthier and exercise are the plan.

A dream lifestyle should start today.

Goal 2: Build wealthy on passive income

This is the only way to guarantee that you can live on your dream lifestyle as long as you want. This is also something I need to work on harder. With wife working full time and burning our saving account, our wealthy is build on top of hard working and past fortune. It won’t last very long. Make living on the Internet and build passive income source is the way to go.

Get back to work!

What’s your ultimate goal? Do you have a dream lifestyle you want to live on? Tell me about it!