 The speech that I am about to give is a variation of one that I have given in many venues, different kinds of groups, different kinds of goals. I have given it at the Austrian Scholars Conference to men who are well into their careers, accomplished in their careers. Some people have found it useful and have begun to apply it. I have given it to high school groups, which is really where this speech ought to begin on almost any campus, anywhere, because the earlier you understand the concept of the job versus the calling, the more effective it will be in your life. But the best and most effective presentation that I would give of this speech I gave repeatedly in an obscure location, which you would not normally think would be possible. I gave it on a regular basis for several years in the inner city of Memphis, Tennessee, specifically to men and women who had never held a full-time job, sometimes 45 and 50 years old. It was my assignment in this organization to be a motivational speaker for them for a specific goal. The organization was very skilled and it had a program in which these people, all of them who finished the one month program, would be able to get their first job. They had a program for virtually anybody who could get through it who would be able to be placed in that person's probably first full-time job. The problem was the dropout factor. They would get the jobs, but they would quit those jobs after a relatively brief period of time. Now, of course, all of them didn't quit, but they wanted to reduce the dropout rate as low as possible. So it was my job to come in for a presentation of one hour to convince people who had never held a full-time job not to quit their first full-time job. And that was not as easy as it sounds. I did this for several years. What I found is that there was not a person in the room in any of those sessions who did not understand exactly what I'm going to give to you. Now, as to whether they would implement it, that's a completely different question. It's not enough to know the good. You must also do the good. Knowledge doesn't save. But when I give this, I want you to understand that the level of sophistication and commitment in this room is simply light years ahead of the commitment and understanding that I found in those inner-city areas of Memphis. Because of the importance in the last hundred years of Max Weber's famous essay or series of essays on the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, the concept of the calling as described by Weber has become very important in academic circles. Obviously, there has been debate almost from the day that the essays were published back in 1905 regarding the accuracy of his assessment. But there's no question that Weber was able to get the concept of the calling into wide use. What I'm going to describe here is what I believe a mistake in Weber's analysis. Weber was arguing very clearly that when Protestants and especially Calvinists and Puritans looked at their occupations in life, they would make judgments regarding their commitment to God and their success in their commitment to God in terms of the success that they were experiencing in their occupations. Now, there's lots of subtlety. I wrote a doctoral dissertation that was fairly closely related to this issue. As I've just summarized, it's an overstatement. Push came to shove. This was pretty close to how the Puritans did look at their work in life. The problem with Weber's analysis was he defined the calling as the occupation. And that has been a traveled path for academics for a long time that has led to a series of dead ends. And I don't want it to lead to a dead end for you, and so I'm going to give you my modification of the Weber thesis. With respect, surely of the Puritans, of whom I am probably one of the last remaining examples, there was an understanding that commitment to God, commitment to higher purposes, and the discipline and especially self-discipline associated with your work was supposed to lead to success. Not always, of course, defined as monetary success. But there was a distinction which has to be made and which implicitly they did make, but that distinction is not clear to most people, unless they've been told. And that is the distinction between the calling and the occupation. Now, the occupation is fairly easy to define, and that is the work within the division of labor economy in which you have a specialized advantage which enables you, in the famous language of America, to put food on the table. Now, as people who are influenced by Austrian economics, we can have all kinds of sophisticated analyses of how you are enabled to put food on the table, having to do with the division of labor and specialization and capital investment and genetic skills and occupational advantages and all the rest of it. What I'm here to tell you is that in only the rarest of circumstances is a person's occupation also his calling. And the calling I define in a very specific way. The calling is the most important thing that you can do in which you are most difficult to replace. And that is not necessarily your occupation. And in fact, in most occupations, you are not all that difficult to replace. And a lot of people have been fired over the last four years who found out how true that was. Not everybody is the starting quarterback of an NFL team who in fact in that case probably would be difficult to replace. Now, the distinction between the occupation, that is the activity by which you put food on the table and the calling, that is the most important thing you can do in which you're most difficult to replace, is not understood early enough in people's lives and especially the lives of young men. And so what happens is that there is a great temptation, I think for men more than women, to regard their occupations and success in their occupations as the essence of their callings in life. And for most men, that mistake is made until they get up to maybe my age. Now, for a woman it's a little easier because women have children. And at the point at which they have children, they are very much aware of the fact that at least until those children are grown, they have a calling in which they are extremely difficult to replace as mothers in relation to those children. Men do not have the same degree of commitment to fatherhood as a calling, as mothers do, at least not in most cultures, certainly not in a high division of labor culture like ours. And why is that? Because the man is focused very, very early in his career on his success in his occupation and giving very little consideration to whatever it is that really is his calling. Now, the woman has faces that problem later in life when the last child departs and you have that what is known as the empty nest syndrome, which ultimately is a reconsideration of her calling. And the woman feels this tremendous loss as the last child goes out and the father who's been supporting the kid is going, so long, kid, don't be a boomerang. Don't come back with $25,000 of debt in five years to move back in, which is what is happening, of course. In a biblical example, the best case you have of it is the case of the apostle Paul. There is one brief verse in the book of Acts, chapter 18, verse 3, in which it specifically says that Paul was a tentmaker. Paul was the writer of the most important series of letters in the history of Western civilization. It changed Western civilization more than any other series of letters ever did. And yet he supported himself as a tentmaker. Now, the Scriptures give no information whatsoever as to the quality of the equipment, as to his marketing capabilities, as to the price competitive nature of tents and all the rest of the things that the standard economist would want to know about how he put food on the table. But he was very clear as to why he did this in his epistle to the Corinthians, second epistle, in which he was raising funds. He said, I did not take anything from any of you. And he was entitled to do it, and he didn't. And he did it specifically so that he could maintain independent judgment and have independent influence over that congregation and all the other congregations because he never became dependent on any of them for putting food on the table. He did it as a tentmaker. The issue of the independence that you have in that which is most important in your life has something very close to the issue of how you put food on the table. Because in those issues in which you're putting food on the table, you're clearly subordinate to somebody, usually one boss or a series of bosses in a hierarchy. And to some extent, as a subordinate, you're dependent on them. And you're under constraints. In the area of the calling, it is completely different. And the more independent you are financially in those areas, the greater your degree of not autonomy but of independent influence, which is not dependent on somebody else's money but is dependent on whatever skills of communication or influence or leadership that you personally possess. When you go into an employment situation and you really know you're dependent on that check to come on a regular basis, you are in a situation in which the exercise of your calling could be called into question or at least compromised. This is especially true if you hold an ideological position which is clearly out of sorts with an employer or with the industry in which you are operating. And certainly from the point of view of people who have come a long way to get a week's information as concentrated as this week has been for you to shape your thinking in a particular way, you are going to go back in whatever environment you came out of, and if you were not a sore thumb before, you surely will be now. And that is, as they say, part of the territory and to the extent that you remain committed to the kinds of materials that are published on the Lou Rockwell site or on the Mises Institute site to the extent that you, as we say, internalize that particular worldview and implement it either verbally or in print or in some manner, you are going to find that people regard you at best as an eccentric, and this is the price that every new movement pays. Now, we may not think of the Austrian school as a new movement, but really in the United States it does constitute a new movement. If you regard the movement as really beginning with the arrival of Mises in the early 1940s and his time at New York University, you realize the extent to which he was at best an eccentric. You may know the story. New York University hired him as a visiting professor and never paid him a dime until he retired in, I think, 1966. For almost 25 years, never paid him a dime. The money was raised independently, partially through the Volcker Fund, partially through the donations of some of the people you will see on the walls as you go through the halls of this organization. They raised the money. The university had hired a man who was clearly, even in those days, one of the most influential economists of the first half of the 20th century, they would not give him a full professorial position, they would not pay his salary. Now, that's what it means to be at best an eccentric. They gave him a room, they gave him some students, and as it turned out, not with universal rule, but as it generally turned out, the auditors who attended Mises's Graduate Seminar became the most influential people who came out of that seminar. There were a few exceptions. Obviously, one is Israel Kursner. Hans Sennholz was another who went through the program and got his doctorate under Mises. Lou Spadaro was less influential, but did go through the program and did have influence, and George Reisman certainly has had influence. So he had four men who got their doctorates under him, and there were a few people, like Bob Anderson, Robert Anderson, who did get their masters under him and did have influence, but when you think of the influence of Rothbard and the young men who went through with Rothbard as outside auditors, you realize that the average student at New York University had no clue as to who he was, and in fact, faculty members redirected students away from his classes, self-consciously and deliberately, because of who he was. He was an affront to them. Now, Mises had food put on the table, but not because of his work at NYU. It was because of who he was and the support that he had from generous men and from the Volcker organization to support him in his efforts. He wrote Human Action during the time he was at NYU. He wrote Theory and History. Remember, he did this into his 60s. He's beginning a second career, which is not easy. He was born in 1981 and Human Action came out in 49. So he began to serve as this tremendous representative of a position which had been, in a sense, widely recognized before World War I, had been widely respected until 1936 with the publication of Keynes's General Theory, and only after World War II went into decline worldwide. And at that point, he starts the second phase, or you might say third phase, of his career. And that's pretty old to start the third phase of your career. It is not easy. He never gave an inch. He never gave an inch. And then as I also like to say, the other phrase, more American phrase, he stuck to his guns. I like that phrase better. And most important, he stuck to his knitting. He never stopped. When he retired, it was said at the time he was the oldest full-time professor teaching in the United States. He was well into his 80s when he quit. And productive till the end, people in the class said his hearing had gotten worse, but he was still as sharp. The responses were still as sharp as they had been in the early days. And I heard that from Percy Graves and his wife, Bettina, and they'd been there for 17 years, and they knew that he was as sharp as he was when he first came in. Now, that's a gift. We cannot count on that. But he did not waste his gift. Now, there are other stories like it. Rothbard's is a comparable story. Rothbard got his degree in 56 at clearly the triumph point of the Keynesian worldview. He could not get a job in any New York higher institution except teaching engineering students economics in a program that did not even have an economics major. They had no idea who he was. And they found, as you know, if you're on the Mises site, they found some of the old tapes and you can get those tapes and you're listening to these tapes of classroom materials and you're thinking, this is unbelievably high-powered stuff which I'm sure went completely over the heads of the engineering students. They were just there to get their grade and get out. He did that for decades. He put food on the table. That was his job. That was not his calling. Rothbard's calling was the production... Well, actually with Rothbard, it is tough to narrow down. Certainly it is the production of monumental primary source documents of economics. And especially that incredible year of 62 to 63 with America's study of the 18, 19 depression, man economy and state a couple of months later and then six months or seven months later after that America's great depression. I mean, there's a three-book one-year project that I don't think most of us will ever match. And then he became active in libertarian politics. He became active in the anti-war movement. He did an astounding history of the United States up to but not including the American Revolution and he would have done that except the device that he was using to take his notes broke and found out that it was obsolete. They could never find another unit to get his notes back so he never got the fifth volume out. Now, he treaded in my area especially which was American history prior to the Revolution and as I read that book, every page I think, where did he find that? How did he find that? I have never heard of that. Page after page after page. Doing research in that four-volume series that is literally incomparable matching the productivity of specialists in graduate schools at the very best colleges and universities who themselves probably never turned out a series comparable to it and in terms of new material relevant and ignored probably their whole lives never achieved anything like it and he did it as a sideline venture because it was interesting to him. This is astounding. And then at the end, he came back to do his history of economic thought and I've never seen any like it is in its ability to match the historical events that are taking place in the lives of these economists and then talking about the ideas that they developed out of both the ideas that influenced them and the events that were taking place around them. It's a unique, remarkable two-volume series and it would have been a three-volume series and possibly four except he died as he was beginning the third volume. And there'll be nobody, I think, come along in my lifetime who will be able to produce a comparable third volume compared to the first two. So he never lost his touch and he never lost his motivation. But the fact of the matter was until very late in his career he didn't have a job even remotely resembling the kind of high-level positions that his peers had who did not have half or a third of his capabilities or of his output. He never stopped the calling. He never stopped battling for the ideological defense of the position he held with respect to the implementation of Austrian economic theories and Austrian economic worldview to the world around him, whether the world was politics, whether the world was some aspect of art or culture. He had this broad range of interests always coming back to his calling, which was the defense of liberty by means of the Austrian economic worldview. And there was no one else like him and I don't think in my lifetime it is likely that there will be another one like him. He came at the right time. He understood his calling. He never deviated from that calling except I will say from time to time he would go off on projects that the rest of us maybe didn't fully appreciate but never because it was just an amusement always because he was in a systematic in his attempt to extend his worldview to specific areas of thought and culture. And that was his calling. And sometimes he got paid and sometimes he didn't. But he never stopped that calling. It was his ability to stay focused throughout an entire career which Mises also possessed that enabled him to have the leverage that would bring 150 of you to this room for one week and to get other people to raise the funds to make this possible because of the work really of two men. Obviously there were others because we had the names of many of them on the walls they didn't do it in a vacuum but had it not been for those two men you would not be here and I would not be here. Now I give these two examples because I think they're relevant to everybody in this room. At least to everybody in this room who is really convinced that the information which you've been given in the last week in a very condensed form on a broad range of topics is accurate information is true information and therefore should be internalized by you and implemented over the next however many years you have to work on your calling. You will be tempted along the way to regard your occupation as your calling for a very few number of people and that in fact is the case. You do have a few people who achieve that. Certain individuals do get full-time academic tenured positions and can teach students and they're good teachers and they really should be teachers and at the same time because of circumstances they're in a position to teach what they really believe is the truth and there are those people who occasionally come but not very often and when they come and an individual makes good and effective use of it I think that's a good thing for the spread of the information which you've been given this week. It is a positive thing. It is a high-risk venture I guarantee you. And most of the people in this room and most of the people watching any video in this presentation will not be so blessed as to get somebody to pay you to pursue your calling. Now ministers in churches sometimes achieve it. Occasionally you'll find an actor or an actress who actually can make a living and really does an impressive job. Certain artists do it athletes do it but then the calling can't last for very long because of age. So the person who achieves real mastery in his calling and great success in his occupation that person is blessed in a unique way and my general recommendation is don't try to pursue that. If it comes that's a great thing I don't think the odds are in your favor. I want to talk a little about my own situation there are a couple of people who have done things rather like what I've done Mark Scousen has been successful in pursuing both his calling and his occupation and making money at it over the years but he's been bounced around from time to time and that's always risky when you find out that you thought you had an occupation and you don't and he and I have both been involved in newsletter publishing for almost 40 years and independent book writing and marketing for almost 40 years and so after while you get the hang of it and I recommend it if you have the skills that is to say I have lots of employers and some of them fire me every day I get these cancellation notice but fortunately there's usually another one that says new subscriber so it's not that I'm autonomous it's just that no one of my employers can inflict enormous pain on me that's an advantage I want to talk a little about my own situation in the sense not so much of that you can duplicate what I've done because I guarantee you will not be able to duplicate what I've done because certain circumstances are unique but I want you to understand the thought processes and the strategies that I personally use and have achieved a degree of success in both occupation and calling and if you can find similar ways in your own circumstances to do something similar to what I've done then I strongly recommend it I had something happen to me I had just turned 17 and it was a turning point in my life I was in a room a high school room and I was running for the president of the student body and it was the room in which we went to vote and exactly one year later before I had been running for the presidency of the scholarship student scholarship organization in that same room while the vote was going on and it struck me that there was this one year period and it seemed for an instant it was the classic deja vu event I realized boy this is I was here just hardly any time ago that was one of the most important events in my life because that was that moment of truth that happens as you enter adulthood that says the clock is ticking and it's ticking a lot faster than you thought and that affected me because I realized the clock is ticking and there psychologically there was a realization that what everyone knows about death was made manifested in a clear manner to me psychologically and so I began to pick up the pace a little over a year later I was becoming very interested in Austrian economics I had been reading the Freeman for at that point about two years it started in 56 I began reading it no later than 58 and possibly in 57 because somebody handed it to me somebody did me the favor of showing me the Freeman which for a lot of us was how we came into this movement in the same way that Lou Rockwell's site serves that function today the Freeman served it 50 years ago and I was beginning to read more carefully in articles by Mises and Hayek and I at least was aware of them and I decided at the age of 18 that what I was reading in a tabloid called Christian economics which is a tabloid sent out from price a month to almost every Protestant pastor in the country was intriguing to me Christian economics was mostly written by Austrian economists who didn't have any commitment one way or the other theologically it happened to be financed by the richest Calvinist who ever lived his name was J. Howard Pugh and he was the head of Sun Oil of the famous Sonoco organization and he was a free market guy and he hired a man who had been a I think a Quaker of friends who was also a free market guy and they edited and sent out this tabloid I don't think most pastors read it but I read it and so I was introduced to Mises and Hayek and Sennholz and the people of that generation who were the defenders of Austrian school economics and I thought as I read it there's a disconnect here because the pastors aren't very sophisticated who are reading it with respect to economics and yet at the same time the economists didn't believe in God and I thought and it's called Christian economics this is very peculiar and so I decided at that point that what I would do for the rest of my life investigating the relationship between free market economics and Christianity and that was the beginning of my calling that was 52 years ago and so I began to pursue that knowing clearly in my mind that no one would ever pay me to do that of that I had no doubt that there would be no one to put money in my pocket for me to put food on the table for my expertise or lack of expertise in either reconciling or at least understanding the relationship between Christianity and Austrianism or certainly free market economics but I had my calling and I was 18 and that's a tremendous advantage and I knew no one would pay and so then my goal was over the next actually 10 years 12 to get through academia and find if I could get somebody to pay me to do anything and as it turned out in terms of academia the answer was no which was a good thing for me because I went into business and publishing and have done okay the second phase of that began within a couple of weeks of each other in 1973 when my book came out Christian economics series of essays many of them out of the Freeman and my wife said to me nobody's ever written an economic commentary on the Bible you might try that from Genesis to Revelation you think there's anything there and I thought you know nobody has ever attempted to do that that was approximately I would say either probably March of 1973 and the first article came out in my father-in-law's newsletter in May of 1973 on Genesis 1-1 May of 1973 was the first public announcement that I had begun the project at 5 a.m. this morning my automatic membergate based website GaryNorth.com published volume 31 and I'm done except for the 1400 videos that I now have to produce because a friend of mine became a multimillionaire a few years ago he started a business before YouTube but it was video based and he had only two ideas at first one was bandwidth will get cheaper and the second one was Americans don't like to read and a lot of people have been made multimillionaires on those two principles so because I've got it done with the footnotes 39 years and you want to know the odd thing and I've written about it on my site my primary article on my site this morning it'll be over the weekend tells the story and even I find it rather odd this story I made the decision in in 77 that the pace of one article a month was not enough I wouldn't get done and so I decided I said basically took a vow which I don't think is a good idea most of the time and I said okay I can find a house that I want to buy if I get a good deal on a house and I get my I just lost my job with Ron Paul because he was not reelected I didn't want to live in Washington DC enough was enough so I said if I can find a house in a new location located close to a good library I said I'll tell you what I'll do God I'll tell you what I'll do I'll put in 10 hours a day 50 weeks a year until I reach 70 years old in February of 2012 and I had to break that vow in the late I think 98 when we were involved in a move and I had to stay in Texas and my wife went to Arkansas and for six months for six months I could not do my writing because I didn't have my library if you add the six months to February of 2012 my vow ran out will run out in two weeks and I finished it this morning have you ever heard of Parkinson's law work expands so as to fill the time allotted for its completion and that's what I found I had a two week leeway to finish a 30 from that point a 35 year project and I had two weeks to go I got it done two weeks early now there was no way that I could have known that here's what I did I had to make a decision really in 73 but certainly in 77 I could not possibly know there was going to take 31 volumes I could not possibly know how many chapters it would take it turned out it was about 700 chapters maybe a hundred appendixes and four separate volumes of appendixes to finish the thing I could not possibly have known what I was getting into and my wife said she surely had no idea what I was getting into so I went with an input based program because I didn't know what the output would be and sometimes you have to do that now if you have a goal and you have a time you can figure it out and you have projects ahead of you and it's this, this, this you got the things scheduled then you can go output based and that's better because there is the labor theory of value is not true it's output that counts but if you don't know then you go with input because that's all you've got and so that's what I did now of course the problem is this is only phase two of the project because now comes the important part I've got to take the 31 volumes I've got to take everything I've known from Mises Rothbard, Hayek, Kersner and the rest of it and I've got to get it into some variant of human action and then do the videos for that too so phase three begins Monday morning and that I don't know how long that's going to take but the clock is ticking and that I understand now how does it apply to your situation you are in the best position in the history of man you are in unique situation which has never existed before in humanity let me explain by let me tell you my strategy and then you'll understand let me tell you my strategy for legacy never before in the history of man has it been possible for a writer to write a book and be confident that that book would stay in print that would have to be publishers all along the way who would keep that book in print there would have to be a market and you know how few books survive a test very, very few books survive the first printing their remainder but today because of the web and specifically of one or other multiple organizations but the one that I think there are a series of them they will enable you scribed is one but there are others scribed will enable you to write a PDF on the site once and it will never be taken down for as long as scribed is in business and if you use Alexa or any of the rating services you find that scribed is high enough it's in the top I think 300 sites out of what 300 million that probably scribed is going to stay around so you can get your book up there and in 100 years, 200 years 300 years the PDF book will still be there now the next phase you got to have video is YouTube likely to survive I think it is is it number three I think Google is number one Facebook is number two YouTube is number three is that going to survive I think it is is bandwidth going to get cheaper is the market going to get larger so you can put your video up you need your two minute video because nobody is going to give you three you need your two minute video which is essentially a teaser for your 15 minute video and the call out comes out up at the end of the two minute video and you click it off you go the guy will read it what do you do with that you get him to your scribed book or your scribed article you got two steps now short video script off he goes whatever it is you have written that can be in a thousand years now you got the language translation software we are reversing the tower of Babel and when you use Babel fish on most of the European languages it is not perfect but you can get the basic idea of that article no matter what language it is in at least of the major European languages and that is going to continue so now you have not just in your own language but you are getting it and will have it you know within 15 years or 20 it is going to be really accurate so now you get the whole world so that leaves the website where you have the videos the links the interesting comments whatever you need wordpress.com gives you that for free I don't think so so there it is basically you get your website to find your existing readers you get youtube to do the videos you have got scribed to post your articles on a permanent basis nobody has to come up with the money to keep whatever musings that amuse you from getting out to the entire world this has never happened in the history of man and it has only developed in the last 10 years this is an opportunity of simply inconceivable proportions from the point of view of a professional writer or a professional speaker never has this happened before now your situation is that you are literate or you wouldn't be here you wouldn't be here if you weren't a reader you wouldn't come and if you're a reader you can learn to write and you may be able even to learn to speak now you're in a position not to go down the road of facebook comments and the usual what amounts to dear diary websites but you're in a position to begin your academic career which you can maintain for the next 50 years or 60 if you do it on a systematic basis you can do it I would start with book reviews that's how I started my first well I mean for money that's how I started in 1965 I did book reviews that's how Murray started Rothbard was paid by the Volcker organization to do book reviews they sent him the book he couldn't believe it I get a free book and they're paying me to write the book review he was ecstatic and he wrote great book reviews because I was at the Volcker organization back in 63 and I would read them they were great book reviews you get your skills writing and doing analysis by doing book reviews of the books you wanted to read anyway and you really should know and if you want to know how to read a book and read it analytically you buy the famous book called how to read a book and you read it and by the way if you read that book really carefully what you're going to find is that you're going to learn to write too because he shows you how to break down the whole writing process kind of as we say today reverse engineer as you develop the skill of doing the book reviews of the books you should have read anyway and you should really master anyway don't do it with the light stuff do it with the stuff that matters that really grabs you do it with the classics do it with the books that are published on the Mises Institute then as you begin to apply it in your own field do it with those books too in a period of time you will build up an inventory of published material and you can go back if you say boy I was a bonehead and you can go back and rewrite the thing you're not stuck for life you don't get married to a website you begin your skills as a writer on the basic things that you ought to be doing anyway which is analysis then you can branch out you can take a narrow, narrow topic you find that narrow topic if you find it boy more power to you you find that narrow topic in which you really can make a difference if you do it for 25 years you become the clearing house for the people of an Austrian or perhaps even broader free market perspective saying boy there's a ton of stuff on that site you really have to start with that site you know why that works you know what the key fact of all academicians or virtually all academicians the key fact is they're so lazy and they want to get a book review so they don't have to read the book and if you provide competent book reviewing from an analytical perspective that they think is reliable they will come to your site over and over and over because you're the man whichever sex you are you're the man on that topic in that field with that perspective that's what I recommend you start small and you keep at it you stick to your guns and you stick to your knitting and it's only going to cost you time alright there are a couple of things you need to buy I'll give them to you quickly you need to buy a lavalier microphone for about 20 bucks Audio Technica sells one you can get one at Radio Shack that one step a 20 buck lapel mic will turn whatever you're doing on the web into something that looks professional if you do webcam please get a daylight balanced fluorescent light on each side of the webcam to come in on your face because the screen reflection will turn your face you will become a smurf is what you will become the blue face of death will confront everybody who comes to that site so that's going to cost you alright 30 bucks maybe you get a good editor you get a sony editor for movie studio for 65 bucks or so and you use screencast software like Screencast-O-Matic or Screener and you can whatever you have on that screen you can narrate, you can use your cursor to circle things, you can underline stuff it doesn't cost you a dime that's all free for less than $150 you can produce web materials that are really first rate that sound good, that look good that match the quality of whatever you're saying on screen are simple tools you can get started very rapidly with these tools now not everybody will do this I realize this in the old Pareto 2080 distribution I'd like to believe that 80% of you will do this and 20% of you say it's not worth my time I know the reality it's probably 20% of you will say I'll do this 20% of you say it's not worth my time and 60% will say I'm going to do that because you haven't it hasn't gone click yet the clock has not speeded up on you yet let me tell you though the power of compound interest is nothing compared to the power of compound writing if the writing is good the power of building an inventory of book reviews, analysis applications of the world view which you now presumably believe in that process over 10 years, 20 years, 30 years turns into at the end an enormous body of material I point out four facts first, the earliest book is dated 1962 that is 50 years before this video second, each dot or each entry represents a book it is not an article or a book review Newsner has written many of these I am not sure if anyone knows how many third, book publishers have published these books they were not self published a buyer was expected to pay for each book enough buyers bought so that publishers kept publishing fourth, the list ends in early 2005 that was over 7 years ago you are right, go to google and search for jacob newsner, books and amazon do this year by year such as 2006 2007, 2008 and so forth see what you find with this in mind let us begin as reported in time magazine the total as of 2008 was approximately 950 books written by newsner that is 20 books a year but he has continued to write since 2008 in a round number this is a grand total of about 1000 books that is one book every 10 weeks for 50 years every 10 weeks he completes a manuscript and corrects the page proofs of any previous book I want to believe that he does not personally index them he has raised the bar as high jumpers say want to try to raise it higher I don't recommend it inconceivable isn't it ok smart guys what mistake did I make I made a huge mistake off the charts mistake because this is inconceivable your mind didn't grab it my mind didn't grab it my sight for two weeks and not one of my very smart subscribers grabbed it I made a mathematical mistake one book every 2.6 weeks for 50 years for 50 years 200 300 page books not written back you know 6 months, 8 months ago with word processing starting in 62 one book every 2.6 weeks for 50 years this is cumulative this adds up now I don't recommend that anybody attempt this because I don't know how this is possible no one else knows how this is possible Asimov was close but he only turned out about half as many and Asimov he thought when he went over 400 was pretty impressive 1000 books in 50 years every 2.6 weeks now I don't recommend anybody try this but what I am saying is this it is cumulative he started 50 years ago and he has not stopped he is called the Pope's Rabbi he literally is in communication with the Pope he thinks he is pretty smart you can't fool that Pope people who will commit themselves to the calling early enough and commit year after year in his case 2.5, 2.6 weeks after 2.6 weeks can achieve enormous results you don't have to be a genius to do it you have to be dedicated you have to have a world view you have to be self disciplined you don't have to be a genius to make a difference that's what I would present then to you today the sooner you can identify your calling that most important thing in which you are most difficult to replace the sooner you are going to be able to get onto a track not equal to this but like this you must pay attention to your job you must get somebody to pay you to put food on the table but see your job as the means of extending your calling that's what I'm saying see your job as I told those men and women in the ghetto of Memphis stick to your job even though it's not the best job because it will enable you to achieve your calling and I give you exactly the same message and I hope with even better results than I had in the ghetto if you will do this you will make a difference if you do this you will be able to look back at 70 or 80 and be able to see on wordpress on YouTube, on script and whatever new technology comes along you will be able to see that you stuck to your guns and you stuck to your knitting and if you do this you will be a success