Don't let weeds grow around your dreams and aspirations.

• Honolulu at Sunset:

Below are the contents of an e-mail I sent to my friends today:



My recent 5-day trip to New York was a real blast — and profitable at the same time.



At Book Expo 2009, I hooked up with several distributors and pretty well decided on which distributor I want to rock with. I intend to go back to New York next year for Book Expo again.

At the Author 101 University one-day seminar, held before Expo, there were two speakers that really impressed me.

The best speaker was a guy by the name of Brendon Burchard who is a master of creating sponsorships for his projects.

Brendon Burchard has already raised $510,000 in sponsorships for his next book.

Brendon inspired me to start working toward my getting an annual winter holiday in Hawaii sponsored by some organization.

So, it's Hawaii, here I come. The question is: Who Will Have the Privilege of Sponsoring My Trip?

Some of you will think this is unreasonable. Keep in mind that I had the following two sponsorships in the last year that came to me without any marketing on my part:

• The National Turkish Society on Quality (KalDer) last November flew me to Istanbul first class, put me up in the Ritz-Carlton in an executive suite for 3 nights, and had me speak for one hour about The Joy of Not Working . This was the trip of my life given that the total cost of this trip to The National Turkish Society on Quality was over $20,000 and I even got paid $3,000 to speak for the hour.
  


• Allstate Financial in Northbrook, Illinois last year purchased 3,750 copies of my book How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free with the Allstate name on it to give to its clients. Nice tidy profit of about $10,000.

So, I am inviting you to dream big as well.

Remember that a guy was able to trade a paper clip for a house on eBay.

One last note: Don't let weeds — particularly negative people — grow around your dreams and aspirations.

Ernie Zelinski
Author of the Bestseller How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free
(Over 100,000 copies sold and published in 7 foreign languages)
and the International Bestseller The Joy of Not Working
(Over 225,000 copies sold and published in 17 languages)