I’m really dating myself, but my favorite period in the history of popular music was the late 1970s, early ’80s.

That’s when punk music ruled.

We rock fans had spent almost a decade swamped with gooey, orchestral, overproduced, faux rock ’n roll.

Then a few brilliant rockers got the idea in their pin-cushion heads to strip the sound down to its basics.

They shed all the lush strings and marshmallow studio techniques and amped up the guitars and drums and focused on pounding rhythm.

So rock music was captured by the punks and, at least for awhile, we stood knee-deep in terrific bands like the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Germs, X, and Dead Kennedys.

I’d hang in little L.A. clubs like Club 33 (on Venice Boulevard, as I recall) and Madame Wong’s in Chinatown. I loved it.

The music was great because it was, well, the real deal.

That whole punk attitude anchored into my system. So when I got the chance to launch my own business, it was instinctive to break the rules. To strip everything down to the basics. To just get on with it.

I didn’t have the patience to seek out business partners or “investment angels.”

Instead, I did some serious bootstrapping and got things rolling.

Take my advice…

Get a punk attitude.

Get it done.

Sometimes, even the head-bangers get it right.

“F—king ignore the system, use it when it suits you.” – Johnny Rotten

A month or so back, Jerry Gillies, author of the prosperity classic Moneylove, wrote this truth on his blog…

“None of the economists or politicians really have a grasp on the central issue of the current historically high unemployment rates. This is simply that we have moved past the point where working for someone else is the best option for being successful.”

Bravo!

I recall Gillies making an important point during a seminar quite a few years ago — that to be of financial worth to a typical employer, you had to create five times the amount of your salary and benefits.

Jerry followed this up by asking, “Isn’t it time to cut out the middleman — in other words, your employer — and keep a much higher proportion of your daily bread?”

After being unceremoniously dumped from a corporate job in the mid-1990s, I decided to follow this sage advice to cut out the middleman and pursue self-employment.

Thing is, I did so before it got so damn easy to do so.

Only the porn dudes were making moola on the internet back then. These days, all you’ve gotta do is drum up a good idea, find an online crowd to sell it to, and start spinning off digital products. And you can do that with just a laptop computer and a smidge of how-to knowledge.

Very cool.

But here’s the bad news…

You still have to overcome some fear, some reluctance, and a whole lot of procrastination.

Are you up for it?

Here’s a little booster shot that might help…

http://www.wallyconger.com/stopworrying

I’m gonna risk sounding like a heartless bastard.

But when I read last week that workers at Toyota’s largest plant in Australia had waited 13 weeks to find out who among them would be laid off, I didn’t shake my head in sadness at the 350 lost jobs.

Nope.

Instead, I wondered what most of them had done in those weeks to prepare for the falling axe.

Said one dismissed Toyota employee: “I’ve worked there for 18 years. What am I going to do?”

Well, by my calculation, fella, you had three full months and umpteen paychecks to figger out that little puzzle!

(Toldja I’m a heartless jerk.)

Hey, I was “victim” to a massive corporate layoff a few years back. And yeah, I wasted plenty of time around the Xerox machine with my cohorts, gossiping and worrying about the threatened “restructuring.”

But I also busied myself planning what I’d do when the slashing and burning began.

I started reading lots of business and motivational books.

I started building my marketing skills via Dan Kennedy, Jay Conrad Levinson, and others.

Then, when The Day came — when my boss told me, hey, see ya around town — I was ready.

How ready are you for what’s become, in this day in age, inevitable?

Take a look at the stuff loaded on my Kindle, and you’ll find lots of what’s called “pulp literature” — everything from the Tarzan novels, to Doc Savage, to The Shadow, to…

Well, most recently, I’ve been devouring old pulp stories from the 1930s about The Spider, one of the Shadow’s vigilante competitors.

The Spider was really New York millionaire Richard Wentworth, who battled criminal warlords by donning a black cape, slouch hat, and vampiric makeup or a face mask.

Before costumed super-villains were a mainstay in comic books, The Spider fought bad guys like The Red Mandarin, The Brain, The Bloody Serpent, The Silencer, Judge Torture, and The Emperor of Vermin.

If you like chaotic gunplay and heroes willing to kill their enemies, you’ll love The Spider stories (particularly those written by Norvell Page). The Spider’s weapons of choice were Browning .45 M1911 automatic pistols, and the death count in a single Spider novel usually ran into the hundreds, sometimes the thousands.

Very, very cool (if you’re into this kinda thing, like I am).

The Spider also had a distinct “brand” that terrorized the criminal underworld. Wentworth would leave a red-ink “spider” image on the foreheads of the criminals he slaughtered. This seal was hidden in the base of his cigarette lighter.

Even in his peculiar business, The Spider recognized the importance of good “branding.”

Have you recognized its importance in your business?

I just got back from WonderCon, a three-day sci-fi, comic book, multi-media geekfest, which was held this year at the Anaheim Convention Center, right next door to Disneyland.

WonderCon is kinda the younger, half-pint brother of July’s massive Comic-Con in San Diego. You might call it Comic-Con Lite.

But small as it was when compared to Comic-Con — maybe 40,000 people vs. the 130,000 they squeeze into San Diego — I still got to rub elbows with folks like Joshua Jackson, John Noble, and Blair Brown (from TV’s Fringe), action movie goddess Milla Jovovich (who was promoting Resident Evil 5), and even Larry Thomas (the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld).

It was nerd heaven.

Funny thing, though…

We shared the convention center with two other groups. A girls’ volleyball tournament filled Hall B. And members of the United Spirit Association — cheerleaders and dance teams — were crammed into the arena. So in the lobbies, it was a real mix of cultures, with female teen athletes, wookies, and superheroes snapping pictures of each other.

Goes to show that there’re enough unique interest groups in this world to satisfy just about everybody. You just have to find your special niche.

In business, are you positioned so your niche of potential customers can find you?

If not, it’s only a matter of building your personal brand properly.

So what’s stopping you?

Congratulations to Gopi Kannan!

In case you didn’t get the news before now, he’s the 36-year-old elephant who won last week’s half-kilometer long elephant race, held each year during the Anayottam festival at Guruvayur Temple in India.

It was Kannan’s ninth victory, this time in a field of 26 elephants.

And as winner, he got to carry the idol for all the important rituals that took place during the 10-day festival, which is dedicated to the Hindu god Krishna.

Pretty cool, huh?

I’ve got a question, though…

Just how fast can pachyderms run?

Pretty damn fast, it seems. But in Kannan’s case, he just had to run a little bit faster than his competitors.

So the business lesson here is, in order to succeed, you just have to stay a little ahead of the rest of the pack.

And there may be no better way to do that than to build yourself a brand that sticks in people’s minds like, well, like a speeding elephant.

Wanna get unstuck from your corporate rut?

Do not — I repeat, DO NOT — miss this blog post by James Altucher!

http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2012/02/how-to-break-free-from-being-stuck/

Remember that 1980s TV series Cheers?

Sure you do. It still runs 24/7 on cable, just about everywhere.

And if you remember that show, you’ve gotta recall its theme song…

Sometimes you want to go
where everybody knows your name,
and they’re always glad you came.
You wanna be where you can see
our troubles are all the same.
You wanna be where everybody knows
your name.

Boy, that sure describes my lifestyle these past few years.

When I walked into Red Dirt Coffee House this morning, I was greeted by name no fewer than seven times — by the owner, her sister, two employees, and three customers.

In fact, one new customer standing at the counter turned to me and said, “Gee, you’re quite the superstar. Who are you?”

That’s what comes when you become what I call a “coffee house kingpin.”

And something else that comes — that is, if you work it right — is greater cash flow.

In my experience, there’s no better place to uncover hot new business prospects, loyal customers, and hidden income streams than your favorite local hangouts.

If you haven’t yet figgered out a strategy for shrugging off the ol’ 9-to-5 treadmill, you might want to consider the kingpin way of life.

It’s hard to beat.

So I didn’t make it over to my favorite local coffee house as early as I like, and the place was PACKED.

Every table and seat was taken.

I had to settle for moving my “portable office” to a nearby Starbucks this morning, which got me thinking…

What’s so cool about being a “coffee house kingpin” is that you can run your business from any-damn-where.

Maybe your everyday base of operations is the neighborhood McDonald’s. But if McDonald’s is for any reason unavailable, it’s a snap to carry your laptop or iPad to the next local hangout on your list.

And there’s even a bonus in doing this: new faces mean a fresh batch of potential customers and clients.

Have you decided to be a coffee house kingpin yet?

I love stories about inventive ideas like this one…

About a month ago, this guy in Washington State dressed a green plastic skeleton in a white sweatshirt and stuck it in the passenger seat of his Mazda, just so he could drive “legally” in the carpool lane.

He might’ve gotten away with his scheme, too, ’cept he got pulled over by a state patrolman for speeding 82 mph and making a series of crazyass lane changes.

What a numbskull.

Reminds me of people who carefully research a market, develop a brilliant business concept, launch it, then blow the whole kit and kaboodle with a simple boneheaded slip-up.

And the slip-up is almost always something that could’ve been avoided simply.

One of the biggest business gaffes — and surely the most easily sidestepped — is letting your reputation or personal brand grow “organically” through inattention and (gulp) the mistaken opinions of others.

Great branding is critical to success. In fact, my friend Bolaji O told me recently that branding was the “missing piece” of his online business “puzzle.”

You know, by taking just a handful of clear-cut steps, anybody can harness the power of personal branding.

Don’t be a dim blub like the guy with the plastic skeleton in his car.

His blunder only cost him a $454 fine.

Bungling your business brand can cost you a helluva lot more.

http://tinyurl.com/7afrpe6