GOYA: More than beans and painters

I always thought – nay, KNEW – that I was an awesome, fantastic, devastatingly handsome and intelligent snazzy-dressing fantastmo that Natalie Portman can’t stop fascinating about, but the other day I got something in my inbox that really showed me a deeper level of myself. What I saw got me excited. And no, it wasn’t Viagra spam. As I understand, Viagra works at a mechanical level. You still have to manage the excitement yourself.

What happened was that I received a nice little emotional kick. When you blog, you’ll sometimes get “pings” or “trackbacks” in your email from other people who link to your blog because it’s awesome and arousing to Natalie Portman. And last Thursday, I got a ping from this post by Joseph Fosco, all about how he’s going to start an online business – in part thanks to some inspiration provided by yours truly.

Bad. Ass.

I don’t know if Joseph will succeed or fail. I don’t know if he will be the next big thing or if he’ll fall flat on his face. I only know that I’m rooting for him big-time, and that it feels great to know that my tales of woe, triumph, and waffles have gotten someone to take action. Whether Joseph does well or poorly, he’s gotten off his ass. He’s doing something. He won’t have to look back in five or ten years and wonder what might have happened had he tried out that business idea he’d been considering. He’s taking the bull by the horns and taking his destiny into his own hands instead of only being led around by his environment, an employer, or the economy. Whatever happens from here on out in this new venture is up to him, and him alone.

I really like knowing that I helped nudge him toward that place. People shouldn’t be victims in life. If people have a shot they’d like to take in life, they should take it. They shouldn’t let that round go bad, as it molders forever in the chamber.

All of this got me thinking. I decided that I could spearhead something. I should spearhead something. Maybe if I up my own inspiration level a bit, I can get one more Joseph off of the fence. That would be worth it – just one more ambivalent guy or gal moved to action. Just one more person deciding to not be a puppet of the world around them, made of felt and with a puppeteer’s hand stuck up their butt.

Therefore, I’m declaring June of 2009 to be “National GOYA Month.” This initiative has little if anything to do with a certain questionable Mexican bean-processing conglomerate. It has to do with the other kind of G.O.Y.A. – Getting Off Your Ass. I’m going to bug my readers, my Twitter followers, and anyone I can reach about getting off of their asses this month. If you’re thinking about doing something, my goal this month is to get you to do it – or, failing that, to get you to stop pretending you’re going to do it “some day.”

(Incidentally, this does not mean I’m going to stop writing about the hilarity of fart noises during June. Prosperity can go along with grossness. I don’t want to reveal the guy or his idea, but someone emailed me with a poop-related website idea that he wants to try to make money off of. Suffice to say that it wasn’t about shock porn, but that I was a little ashamed at knowing right away what he was talking about when he told me the website’s name.)

But let’s be clear about something during this whole GOYA month: No matter where you find your help, inspiration, or education, it’s all totally up to you to make it happen. You and only you. If you succeed, you get all of the credit. And if you fail, the only person who gets 100% of the credit for at least taking a damn shot is you.

One of the cool things about starting to become an M-List internet celebrity who has clawed his way up from the N-List while Natalie Portman ogled his ass from below is that I’m starting to get a lot of email from people who’ve read my stuff and had a question about this or that. I’ve gotten several emails, Facebook messages, and Twitter DMs from both old and new friends who wanted to know how I got started in this whole internet biz (the making money part, not the working like hell for no tangible reward part at which I’m already quite adept).

When I hooked up to teach at Project Mojave, for instance, a few people asked me below the radar, “Is this legit?” Because there’s this thought that most of what goes on online is shady, and that any sort of program aimed at making money is probably a scam. Apparently I’m non-guru enough that people felt they could ask me and I’d answer honestly (which is true), and I responded that you’d get out of it what you put into it.

I said, “Yes, it’s a real thing. Yes, you can do it. No, you don’t have to be a super whiz kid. But you do have to DO THE WORK. You have to GET OFF YOUR ASS.”

I said, “If you look at yourself and can’t say with absolute truth that you won’t GET OFF YOUR ASS and do what it takes, then save your money because you’ll be wasting it.” See, Clay Collins, who created Project Mojave, is more than just a guy who has an avatar that makes him look like present-day Richard Gere while he is in fact a 28-year-old guy who looks nothing at all like Richard Gere. He’s also a genius at finding, testing, and developing niche markets. But this is only meaningful to you if you’re going to GET OFF YOUR ASS – because Clay is cool, but he’s not so cool that he’s going to do all of the work and then just hand it over to you.

But even more than Project Mojave, people ask me about Online Business School, the course offered by my new bestest online buddy Naomi Dunford – the course that taught me how to get started, that gave me the tools to make $3000 in my first month.

People ask me, “Should I buy OBS? I mean, it’ll make me so much that the cost for the course will be nothing by comparison, right?”

And I sort of say, “It won’t do anything. It’s a series of audios and videos. It can’t wax a car, eat a sardine, watch Grey’s Anatomy, or seduce Natalie Portman. Although maybe the latter is possible because both of the Dunfords can be really seductive. Especially Naomi’s husband Jamie. Ooh la la!”

I say, “I’m not going to talk you into buying anything. In fact, if I’m going to talk you in any direction, it will be to talk you out of buying something that you think is a magic bullet. Believing that a program or even personal coaching from the pope himself (What? The pope has an aWeber list of like ten million) will magically make things happen for you will get you metaphorically kicked in the internet business nutsack.”

So prerequisite number one in the GOYA program is to not buy shit unless you think you actually stand to benefit from it. Don’t spend a dollar if you don’t have a dollar to spare. Find the free stuff online instead; it’s everywhere. If you have the dollars and want some tools to give you a big head start, then yes, Online Business School is awesome, and you should pick it up. (So is Project Mojave, but registration for that is temporarily closed.) But don’t buy anything at all that you aren’t going to hit a thousand percent. Don’t spend a dollar if you’re a douchebag; douchebaggery can be had for free. Don’t buy if you’re suspicious or cynical. Don’t buy if you’re going to blame me, Naomi, Clay, or God if things don’t work out. And don’t buy if you’re stealing from your mortgage payment to do so.

But let’s get back to the base truth here, shall we? You don’t need to spend a dime. You just need to do something. You just need to get off your ass. I’ll help where I can. Comment on my posts with questions. Hit me up on Twitter. Share your tales. Pay it forward. Inspire your friends. Tell whoever you can.

I’m not going to steal Naomi’s thunder about helping 1000 people quit their jobs or steal Pace and Kyeli’s thunder about changing the world. Instead, I’m going to quote Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid to try to shame you out of ambivalence. He said:

“Walk left side of road: safe. Walk right side of road: safe. But walk in middle of road? Then sooner or later: squish! Just like grape. And by the way, why hasn’t Natalie Portman done more nudity? That scene in Hotel Chevalier was really unsatisfying.”