A Midwest Journal

As much as I’ve enjoyed all this blogging, and talking with each of you, people evolve and I’m no exception.

I’ve told you before about my interest in cartooning and definitely here you’ve seen how I work at raising grass-fed beef.

These two have now become my primary interests.

Reason being that I’ve written my last self-help book and nothing more need be said. There are tons of other authors who need a paycheck from this material and are willing to keep turning out the wordage to keep you subscribing and buying their stuff. Same with Internet Marketing.

It all really moves you to your own spiritual training – where you find essentially that you’ve already had everything you are “looking for”. Again, read my last book – although a great deal of it is in this blog, if you want to look for it.

So to keep up with me, I’m creating one new site and revamping another – Worstell Farms will cover my work at selling the grass fed beef I raise, while Go Thunk Yourself! will evolve into my world of cartoons, comics, and rural living observations – all in parody format.

Otherwise, just to serve all those people who have come here looking for material – I’ve saved this site as static pages so you can find what you are looking for. Eventually, it will drop off the radar as an archive. (But you’ll always see the top 10 over to the right…)

Where I have anything to say in these areas, you can find it over at “A Midwest Journal, Too.” The comments on this site are closed, obviously. But you can pick up the thread there, since all the posts are available in their new home.

The problem is that there is just no way to actually and accurately move these pages so that you can find them in this format. (And I’d earlier posted about the last straw I’d encountered with WordPress.) As well, due to WP’s inherent internal linking problems, most of these pages link right back to this site, even if they are moved. This is why I’ve elected to make these pages static – to continue to provide the service people are looking for.

Again, if you want to follow my ongoing work, see my Worstell Farms site on grass fed Missouri beef, or Go Thunk Yourself for my latest cartoon parodies.

So I leave you with these links and hope you succeed in everything you do – it’s really true that you will, anyway…

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Thanks forvisiting this site and sharing this information.
If you’ve found it valuable, please consider donating via PayPal to enable our continuing research.

Or – buy a book from my “Go Thunk Yourself” bookstore.

Our latest releases, featuring “Freedom Is — (period.)”

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The Key to a Better Life

Time management is basically about being focused. The Pareto Principle also known as the ’80:20 Rule’ states that 80% of efforts that are not time managed or unfocused generates only 20% of the desired output. However,  80% of the desired output can be generated using only 20% of a well time managed effort. Although  the ratio ’80:20′ is only arbitrary, it is used to put emphasis on how much is lost or how much can be gained with time management.

Some people view time management as a list of rules that involves scheduling of appointments, goal settings, thorough planning, creating things to do lists and prioritizing. These are the core basics of time management that should be understood to develop an efficient personal time management skill. These basic skills can be fine tuned further to include the finer points of each skill that can give you that extra reserve to make the results you desire.

But there is more skills involved in time management than the core basics. Skills such as decision making, inherent abilities such as emotional intelligence and critical thinking are also essential to your personal growth.

Personal time management involves everything you do. No matter how big and no matter how small, everything counts. Each new knowledge you acquire, each new advice you consider, each new skill you develop should be taken into consideration.

Having a balanced life-style should be the key result in having personal time management. This is the main aspect that many practitioners of personal time management fail to grasp.

Time management is about getting results, not about being busy.

The six areas that personal time management seeks to improve in anyone’s life are physical, intellectual, social, career, emotional and spiritual.

• The physical aspect involves having a healthy body, less stress and fatigue.
• The intellectual aspect involves learning and other mental growth activities.
• The social aspect involves developing personal or intimate relations and being an active contributor to society.
• The career aspect involves school and work.
• The emotional aspect involves appropriate feelings and desires and manifesting them.
• The spiritual aspect involves a personal quest for meaning.

Thoroughly planning and having a set of things to do list for each of the key areas may not be very practical, but determining which area in your life is not being giving enough attention is part of time management. Each area creates the whole you, if you are ignoring one area then you are ignoring an important part of yourself.

Personal time management should not be so daunting a task. It is a very sensible and reasonable approach in solving problems big or small.

A great way of learning time management and improving your personal life is to follow several basic activities.

One of them is to review your goals whether it be immediate or long-term goals often.

A way to do this is to keep a list that is always accessible to you.

Always determine which task is necessary or not necessary in achieving your goals and which activities are helping you maintain a balanced life style.

Each and everyone of us has a peek time and a time when we slow down, these are our natural cycles. We should be able to tell when to do the difficult tasks when we are the sharpest.

Learning to say “No”. You actually see this advice often. Heed it even if it involves saying the word to family or friends.

Pat yourself at the back or just reward yourself in any manner for an effective time management result.

Try and get the cooperation from people around you who are actually benefiting from your efforts of time management.

Don’t procrastinate. Attend to necessary things immediately.

Have a positive attitude and set yourself up for success. But be realistic in your approach in achieving your goals.

Have a record or journal of all your activities. This will help you get things in their proper perspective.

These are the few steps you initially take in becoming a well rounded individual.

As the say personal time management is the art and science of building a better life.

From the moment you integrate into your life time management skills, you have opened several options that can provide a broad spectrum of solutions to your personal growth. It also creates more doors for opportunities to knock on.

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Thanks forvisiting this site and sharing this information.
If you’ve found it valuable, please consider donating via PayPal to enable our continuing research.

Or – buy a book from my “Go Thunk Yourself” bookstore.

Our latest releases, featuring “Freedom Is — (period.)”

As we examined in the recently-published “Get Your Self Scam Free”, there are just 3 experts who laid out the exact buttons and patterns which make you a scam sufferer over and over.

If you are wanting to get all the scam artists and telemarketers out of your daily life now and forever, you have to become conscious of their techniques and completely scam-proof yourself.

The actual reason is that I’ve been working to get you all this data is so that you can recognize a fraud for what it is and stay away from the appeal and trap. You don’t have to get the refund you didn’t get taken by.

To begin with, let’s review what the book told you so far:

Maslow told you that we all have a hierarchy of needs, running from the real physical up through emotional, social, cognitive, aesthetic, growth, and right up to self-actualization.

Cialdini revealed to us that these requirements have been glommed onto by scammers who have taken advantage of the six main elements to apply: Reciprocation, Commitment and consistency, Social proof, Liking, Authority, and Scarcity.

Levenson exposed to us that the reason these 6 succeed for scam artists is peculiar to only 3 distinct desires:

1. Security,

2. Approval,

3. Control.

Through these 3 experts, you certainly see how you are hard-wired, but as well how you’ve been educated through social contacts and familial training to quickly be a scapegoat of anyone who realizes how to use these key points against you.

Anything you don’t get the anticipated outcome from is a rip-off. But it really amounts to your own ability to figure out for yourself and actualize your own life around you. The more choice you give in to other persons, the more burdensome your own chains become.

A pathway to become scam-free:

Lester Levenson actually found that the largest situation people had was not in that they were hard-wired to be easy mark’s or fall guys. It was that they kept holding onto whatsoever it was that kept them that way. All the bad mental habits you have were learned and can be unlearned. Levenson expanded approaches you can use to release these negative mental habits from your life and quit using them for good.

The ease of these steps are:

* Accept whatever it is that is bothering you.
* And let it go.

It’s really that plain. Even if you don’t consider you can let it go, to some degree you already have.

When you see you’ve been beguiled by some con artist, simply accept that as a fact. See the emotions behind it, the desire for security or approval or control and then just release it.

Don’t try to figure it out or fret over it, just recognize it – and then let it go.

When you release in this vein, those issues are gone for good. At least as far as that particular scam. As you continue this, you become progressively more scam-free. As you gain knowledge from each of these situations, you’ll avoid more and more. Now this doesn’t mean you get totally free overnight, but it is possible. Morelikely is that you are going to discover yourself releasing increasingly more situations you find yourself in where you don’t get the expected outcome.

And as you do keep releasing, you are then even more able to simply treat the people involved in that scenario as you would like to be treated. This will give you the best outcome.

You want to begin doing this with all non-optimal situations you run into. Do this all day long.

That is the secret recipe for getting scam-free completely.

Now there is a lot more to Levenson’s release technique, also called the Sedona Method.

In the Appendix of “Get Your Self Scam Free” are several Sedona releasing sites and their products so you can explore more how to apply this by yourself. Both have a lot of free material on their sites as well as free downloads or low-cost introductory material you can use to improve your life with. Certainly, being able to release anything and everything that is bothering you is far more applicable to your life than just the scams you will quit stumbling over.

Here’s hoping you are able to put this to good use – for yourself and all your family members and close friends. The fewer scams we fall for, the more we can hold onto and expand our native abundance. No reason why we can’t all be wealthy if we use this…

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Thanks forvisiting this site and sharing this information.
If you’ve found it valuable, please consider donating via PayPal to enable our continuing research.

Or – buy a book from my “Go Thunk Yourself” bookstore.

Our latest releases, featuring “Freedom Is — (period.)”

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Doing some number crunching in my head the other day while out for a walk. And at that time I thought that corn might upset my figures on raising cattle.

But I was wrong.

Corn will raise on average about 80/bu. average an acre on the ground we have. Clay hillsides and silted bottom ground. Marginal land. What Missouri (and the rest of the country) grows most of it’s cattle on.

Now, if you take 30 acres and raise corn/soybeans alternating years, you end up making some profit.

Corn: 80 bu./acre @ 3.50/bu. = $8400.

Now, take off the spraying and fertilizer: -$2000

And take off hiring someone to do it (their fuel, repairs, labor, and seed): -$1000

So you might make $5400. Last two years we had crop failure on corn planted anywhere.

Beans: 40bu./acre @$8.00 = $9600.

Same inputs: -$3000

So you might make $5600

Cattle: 2.5 acre per head (conventional grazing in Missouri) = 12 head.

Say you raise half of these to full size. 6 cows and their 6 calves being brought up to full weight at about 1000 lbs. We get about $.80/lb. live weight at the auctions.  = $4800

And take off the cost of hay during the winter (about $200 per finished calf for two winters) and you’re pulling down $3600 for profit.

So it’s a no-brainer to raise row crops, right? Not so fast…

On grass-fed beef cattle, you can further cut inputs and raise value-added premiums.

1. You only grass feed them and start doing ultra-high-density stocking or intensive managed grazing. Means you feed hay about one week a year on average, which is about 2-4 bales. (At $40 each, this cost is then down to $160 – or $320 for two years for the whole herd.)

2. UHD managed grazing will increase herd size, sometimes as much as 4x – to it’s now possible that the original 30 acres will now hold 30 head. Let’s keep 15 momma cows and 15 calves to full weight.

3. Now, you take it to a USDA-inspected locker and start selling the individual pieces of those cattle directly to your clientele instead of taking them to auction. While the possible total sale can be about $3000, you take off processing and marketing costs, which might run $500. $2500 per animal sold.

15 x $2500 – $320 = $37,340 annual profit

Can you do that same leverage by value-adding to corn or soybeans? Much less, you are spending around7-10 hours a week raising this crop, and almost nothing of that is in the tractor seat – most of it is walking around and moving fences.

In a word, No. Not that I’ve been able to find, anyway.

UHD managed grazing (also called Mob Grazing) cuts overhead from $400 per animal to $320 per herd. All while multiplying herd size by at least double and sometimes up to 4X. (Because you have to keep increasing herd size to keep up with the grass and it’s increased yield.)

But even with conventional grazing and a grass-fed product, if you part it out and direct market you can increase the premium to $2100 per animal compared to $600 profit.

Increase herd size by more than double, increase profit per animal by over triple – 6x your after-input income. In the above case, it is nearly 8x.

While you don’t spend the time in the field, you are now direct-marketing your beef, which is a different skillset. Not as dangerous or physically demanding. And if you are a real people-person, it’s probably more rewarding than exhausting.

Now, this is saying that your other on-farm overhead costs are the same for both scenarios.

But you can also see why row-crop farmers have to be big in order to pay for all their equipment and chemicals.

The kicker is, if they went to selling all-natural beef instead – and had their kids grow up to be marketers and stay around the farm – those same thousands of acres would be able to support several families instead of barely one.

Now, your mileage will certainly vary.

But crunch the numbers for yourself and find out that grass fed beef cattle beats row-cropping hands down.

(And we didn’t get into how grass fed beef don’t create but a fraction of “greenhouse gases”, since you only burn fuel to take them to the processing plant, plus ultra-high-density managed grazing actually sequesters more carbon than these cows can emit…)

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Do we do this on our own farm currently? No, we are in the middle of phasing over. Right now, our 20 cows will bring us the most at auction prices by selling only 1/4 of them as finished beef and the rest as stockers (yearlings). But we aren’t switched over to UHD managed grazing (mob grazing) yet.

Getting there, though…

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Thanks forvisiting this site and sharing this information.
If you’ve found it valuable, please consider donating via PayPal to enable our continuing research.

Or – buy a book from my “Go Thunk Yourself” bookstore.

Our latest releases, featuring “Freedom Is — (period.)”

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