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It’s just after the 2011 New Year as I write this.  My brother-in-law and I have decided to give one another some challenges to undertake in 2011.  There are a few of them, but one in particular is the reason for this post.

This particular challenge item is to make $200.

Sounds simple enough, right?  However, the caveat is that the money must come to us indirectly from us trading work for it.

One of the key factors in entrepreneurship is that you don’t trade dollars for hours.  Instead you set up investment vehicles that do the work for you.

You see, you only have so many hours in the day.  If you have to work each of those hours to get money then you have given up some of your life that you will never get back.  This is called “earning a wage” (trading a unit of work for a unit of pay).

There are still more problems.

Even if you can make $1,000 an hour – then you will still reach a limit as to what you can earn.  And you still haven’t solved the problem of getting your free time back because you are still putting in hours to get it - and there are only so many in a day.  You’re eventually gonna run out.

Even if you go to school to become a doctor or lawyer you still have to trade your hours to receive money.

Knowing, and capitalizing from this information is what has always separated the truly wealthy from the working class.  (Note: doctors or lawyers know this - they just take their earnings and invest them instead of spending them.)

Is there something better?

Well, with morals and ethics aside – and even passion and purpose – there is a better way to do it.  It could be looked at as “receiving a return on investment” as opposed to “earning a wage”.  With this model there is no limit to how much you can make (or receive).  You are not limited by time.  You can scale horizontally.

How does this work?

Well, instead of learning a skill that requires you to trade dollars for hours you spend your time creating investment vehicles that bring in money while you are playing golf or sitting on some remote tropical beach.

This can come in the form of many different things.

A real estate investor or landlord buys land once, and can rent it out indefinitely.  An author or songwriter writes a book or song once (intellectual property) and collects royalties on it for life.

(One of the smartest things Keanu Reeves did was to ask for a small percentage of ongoing royalties, in addition to a salary, for his work in the Matrix movies.  In addition to his salary for his acting work, he will continuously be rewarded financially as long as the Matrix franchise makes money…)

You get the idea.

So, back to this post.

Our challenge is to make (recieve) $200 this year,  but we have to do it in the form of a product or service that we create once and collect on many times over (if not indefinitely).

That in actuality is the challenge – to make a product or service that we can collect residual income from – not to make $200.   The $200 just serves as a means to validate that the product is a legitimate one and has the potential to earn money – it is simply a means to gauge our success or failure.

Well, we have a full year to do it, so again you would think it would be pretty easy.  However, we both know it is not.

We work full time, are full time dads and are strapped for every possible resource needed (time, money, energy, a killer idea, etc…)

And that is only part of it.  You can’t make money unless a product is sold.  And it takes much more than making a product/service to get paid.

In fact, I would say that product creation is like 15% and marketing is 85%.

And that is where it gets ugly.

So, to be able to make and produce a viable & desirable product, market it effectively, sell and deliver it hands off is a pretty tall challenge.

I have tried many different times and I have always dropped the ball (most probably due to lack of success and failure to maintain interest in what I was attempting to do - amongst other things to discuss later).

Well, in 2011, I am gonna take another stab at it.

This time, I am going to take all that I learned from the past and use it to my advantage to become successful this time around.

The two most important things I learned is that I have to maintain interest in what I am doing - and I/it must come from an area of expertise/authority that would ensure a quality product or service.

These are two aspects that I failed at in the past, but believe I have an idea on how to fix going forward.

I hope to document this journey here with this series of blog posts.

The next (post) on being what are the two of the most important things in choosing your product/service and niche – and how to be successful with it.

Stay tuned!

Click on either of these two books to figure out how to make bio-diesel at home

This is something that I have wanted to do for over a year or so.

Logistics and information have been my main barrier - but this year, 2011, I am gonna make it happen.

There is a lot of information out there on making bio-diesel from algae, but nothing for the beginner.  Especially in terms of how-to for the complete non-technical, nor mechanically declined newbie.

This is where I had always dropped the ball.

Well, now, I think I will take another stab at it…

But first, some background…

Diesel engines do not run on gasoline - they run on diesel.  These engines can also be outfitted to run on raw vegetable oil (oil from peanuts, corn, cottonseed and soy to name a few), or the raw vegetable oil can be outfitted to run in a diesel engine (bio-diesel).

For a quick and entertaining introduction on bio-diesel, watch these discovery Channel’s “Dirty Jobs” videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcKpIB1HYKM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaaFsWNqLPI

One of the problems is production.

A field of corn may only yield 50 gallons an acre - and take significant time to grow), whereas algae may yield 6,000 gallons an acre - and take significantly less time to grow.  They can also grow indoors, underground, year round - and make use of vertical scaling.

The oil density of algae could be anywhere from 20 to 70% of its mass!

Plus the growing of algae converts CO2 to oxygen to boot!   Very Green!!!

To see people doing this, simply hop on over to YouTube and do a search for “algae” and “bio diesel”.

The basics are this:

1. Grow algae in a some kind of reactor (basically a tank with flowing water,  UV light, an algae strain and some food for the algae).
2. After the algae grows, and causes the density of the water to be primarily algae, it is harvested.
3. After harvesting, all the water is removed - either through some form of centrifuge or filter, or drying.
4. You are left with pure algae
5. You then need to extract the oil from the algae - this can be done with an expeller press.  You will be left with dried algae, and oil.
6. The oil will be a raw form of vegetable oil that can be used in an diesel engine outfitted to run straight VO (vegetable oil).
7. The oil can be converted to bio-diesel so that it can run in any standard diesel engine.

As I had mentioned above, I always dropped the ball when I needed information and instructions for a small scale testing operation.

Well, I now have an idea of how I am going to make it work.

I will give myself the entire year to make a batch of oil (converted to bio-diesel) to run a small diesel generator.

I found a small generator on Amazon that I would purchase to do my testing…

Amazon link

Hopefully, I could get a used one pretty cheap from eBay or Craigslist.

But that comes later…

When it comes to growing and harvesting algae, most of the contraptions on the internet seemed pretty complicated.

You can do a Google image search - or a video search on Google or YouTube for “algae” and “bio reactor”. There are a few home jobs and people selling either them or instructions for building them yourself.

The problem I foresaw was the harvesting, drying, and extraction of the algae…  This was never covered.  Nor was cleaning these bio-reactors.

Some typical bio-reactors:

(just do a Google image search on algae bio-reactor)

The approach I will take will be about as simple as I can get!

I will not build a complex bio reactor, but just use a basic 40 gallon fish tank/aquarium.

For the aeration, I will use a bubbler - probably more than one.

For the UV Lighting, I will rig a couple lights each on both side of the tank.

I will fill it with water, an algae strain, food and let it go!

For harvesting, I will use a basic water pump to pump all the water out of the tank (with algae) into another tank (or just a large, heavy duty Rubbermaid/Tupperware bin).  But with some sort of filter in place to retain and hold the algae.  More on this later.

For algae separation:

Once the algae is in the filter container - most of the water should be out, but I will need to let it sit for sometime to get as much water out as possible.

Once that has completed, I will have to move the algae over to a drying table to get the rest of the water out.  For this entire process, I do not know how long it will take… We will just have to wait and see.

(Before I go forward, I will need to research on how to make sure all the water is out.)

After it is as dry as it can get, the algae will have to go into an press.  This will get the oil out of the algae.

To see how that works, watch these videos:

Those are larger scale operations, but you get the idea.

You can get a much smaller home press - which is the route I will take for my experimentation:

or: 

Once extracted, you will have leftover algae without the oil.  Ill have to research what this can be used for - maybe it can be sold. 

As far as the oil, it is crude, and needs to be filtered cleaned, and potentially made into bio diesel:

Well, that’s it for now…

I will make another post after I have done some research on parts / costs / procedures…

Until next time!

Lorem

I created this post as a placeholder.

I think it is about time to update it.

The two primary things I wanted to use this for was to document what I was doing in terms for “eating healthy” for the new year and specifically to meet my challenges.

They were:

1. Eat one meal replacement salad four times per week for 40 days straight (starting on Jan 1).  To clarify, for at least 4 meals, I will replace that meal with a hefty salad - not incorporate a salad into that meal.  This means a lot of Jason’s Deli, Souper Salad and homemade ones as well.
2. Drink at least 4 green shakes per week for 40 days straight (starting on Jan 1).  In case you dont know what a “Green Shake” is, it is simple a smoothie made with an array of super healthy green vegeatbles + added fruits for sweetening and taste.  They get their name becuase they are green :-).  Do a Google web/image/video search on green shake and you can get a ton of info.
3. Do a fast food fast for 40 days.  This is pretty sef explanetory.

So, those are the challenges.  As you can see, they revolve around a 40 day time span.  The reason for that is specific, but wont get into it here.  You can do a Google search on the spiritual significance of 40 to find out more.  Also, many people believe that 40 days is the right amount of time to gerninate new habits or break old ones.

There are a number of other things I am working on in terms of eating healthy that center around added things: such as milti-vitamins, concentrated greens, fish oils, etc…  Removed/reduced things:  white starches, caffeine, beer, concentrted juices, etc…  And modified things:  replacing some coffee intake with green/white and black teas, etc…

As an update to this post it is in the second week of 2011 and I have met week 1 with success:

4 MREs (meal replacement salads) and 4 green shakes.

Ready for week 2!

As part of my 2011 New Years resolutions, I have decided to get into shape and get healthy.

This is also the result of a challenge my brother in law presented me with (which you can read about here).

Part of that entails running a half marathon before the end of 2011.

In this post, I will document my journey to completing that Marathon.

For starters, the half marathon that I have chosen to complete is this one:

White Rock Centennial Half Marathon

It cost $70 for non-members, and is expected to sell out because it only will allow 2100 runners.

It is on may 7th.

This will give me about 5 months to prepare…

To start things off, my initial weigh-in on January 1st is 205 pounds.

I will document my running on this post as well

______________________

January  1  --   .9 miles
January  2  --  1.8 miles
January  3  --  rest day
January  4  --  rest day
January  5  --  3.0 miles
January  6  --  4.5 miles (2.5 straight, last two: walk/run intervals)
January  7  --  rest day
January  8  --  5.0 miles (3 straight, last two: walk/run intervals)
January  9  --  rest day
January 10  --  

______________________

Stay tuned to this thread, as it will be updated with my latest results…

This blog post is about new years resolutions.  I haven’t written to this blog that much – but decided to fire it back up for the purpose for which it was intended:  logging “personal” journal entries. (Web based Logging -> Web Log -> weBLOG -> Blog).

So, I will use it to capture my journey through some of the new years challenge that I have taken for myself.

It all started when my brother in law (Richard) asked if I would accept the idea of each of us deciding to choose and challenge each other with news years resolutions/challenges.

It is an idea he got from Tim Ferriss (author of 4-Hour Work Week and the 4-Hour Body), an author we both have read, listened to and respect.

I suggested we come up with “joint challenges” together and make it “interesting”.

We came up with 10 to be completed before the end of 2011.

If either of us fail, then we lose the challenge and have to suffer the consequence(s).

The price for failure that we decided upon was to wear the NFL jersey (or some form of apparel) of the others team for at least 5 key dates during the 2011 football season.

For example, I am a cowboys fan, and he is a Saints fan.  If he loses – he has to wear a Cowboys shirt/jersey to work in New Orleans amongst his peers, and perhaps on game day.  At least 5 times.  I would do the same.

So, for starters, here are our 10 challenges that we each have to complete in the year 2011:

1. Run a half marathon
2. Sign up for and attend at least 8 visits to some form of MMA training
3. Fast food fast for 40 days
4. Go green:
   1. Scott: Add 4 meal replacement salads per week for 40 days
   2. Scott: Add 4 green shakes/juicings per week for 40 days
   3. Richard:  Add something green every meal for 40 days
5. Lose 20 pounds
6. 5 Books to read jointly and discuss (So far we have decided on):
   1. 4-Hour Body (link)
   2. Born to Run (link)
   3. I will teach you to be rich (link)
   4. How to make millions with your ideas (link)
   5. [tbd…]
7. Create a product/service, market it and make $200 (This must follow the entrepreneurial rule of not trading dollars for hours.  Meaning, work once - collect residual income for ever.  An example of this would be creating a form of intellectual property or own real estate that you rent.  More details to come…)
8. Establish online presence
9. Curl at least 35 lbs. at least 10 times (I personally would like to use kettle bells)

Well – that’s it for the joint resolutions.

I have a number of others here that I will include for just me:

1. Go more veg
2. Go more natural
3. Organize and downsize considerably – both mentally and physically
4. Read the Bible cover to cover (more on this later)
5. Reduce significant debt
6. Establish second form of income (residual – this will hopefully use item 7 above as a springboard)
7. Remove amalgams (mercury based fillings)
8. Radically alter my diet for optimal nutrition and health
9. Get seriously healthy!  Healthier than I have ever been  (Many items above will serve as a catalyst to this)
10. Makeover office
11. Develop/Establish/Implement better household management
12. Develop/Establish/Implement better personal goals and achievements - and the means to make them happen
13. Get happier (lose some baggage :-))

There are actually many more than this that I will bring up later, but for now – these are the high level ones.

I will also go over these in more detail as I start them.

For starters, on January 1 – I weighed in.

I am 205 pounds.

I also did my first run.

Well, that’s it for now…

I will use this post as a starting point and update it often with links to other posts and related links.

Stay tuned for more as I document this journey!!!