I’ve always learned by doing, so I decided to chime in and share my philosophy – Stop reading and start taking action!

Someone responded and informed me that I “was stating the obvious” and gave me a whole list of reasons why reading is good (the guy seriously needs to bring back reading rainbow if the whole entrepreneurial thing doesn’t work out for him) and he was going to make seven figures from all of the books he read (note that he said make, not made).

I come across people like this all of the time. They believe that bringing an idea to market and building a profitable business requires a certain type of elite knowledge only gained from books written by guru’s who became rich selling business books – very similar to what I discuss in this post.

I’m definitely not the first person to say this but there are a lot of really dumb millionaires. You probably won’t make a billion if you’re dumb, but reading a book by a business guru won’t get you there either. If you are the one reading the book, chances are it’s already too late – you need to be the one writing it. I hate to say it but there is no secret knowledge passed on by the elite entrepreneurial “illuminate”, only connections – because after all it is all about who you know.

I have a pretty simplistic philosophy when it comes to business, and that’s what works for me. In college I was inspired by a few classes I took about Japanese Sumi-e art. The idea is to create a composition in as few strokes as possible, make each brush stroke meaningful and to speak through the voids left by simplicity.

“The goal is not simply to reproduce the appearance of the subject, but to capture its soul. To paint a horse, the sumi-e artist must understand its temperament better than its muscles and bones. To paint a flower, there is no need to perfectly match its petals and colors, but it is essential to convey its liveliness and fragrance. Oriental sumi-e may be regarded as an earliest form of expressionistic art that captures the unseen” Read more about Sumi-e.

Success as an entrepreneur isn’t about complexity or elitism, it’s about clarity. There is no 49 step program that will lead you to the promised land. Find simplicity and clarity in your life, idea, product or company and that is what will lead you to success, regardless of how you decide to measure it.

Many developers killed it with iPhone apps in 2010, however 2011 is the year of the tablet.

As always, there are huge opportunities for those who get in early, and even though the iPad has been out for a year the game is just getting started.

The media is still completely obsessed with the iPad and holiday sales for the iPad 1 were through the roof. I have never seen a single product receive so much hype and essentially free press. It’s just crazy to think that 12 months ago the tablet market was created out of thin air and yet these products now dominate tech news on a daily basis.

A few days ago Apple announced their second quarter earnings and iPad 2 sales were a bit of a disappointment, not because of slow sales but because Apple can’t produce them fast enough – now thats a good problem to have!

The Blackberry Playbook was just launched and will add fuel to the fire, however the reviews are a good indication that RIM and Motorola are still a year or two behind Apple with the hardware and software. This confirms that developing for the iPad is still the place to be, at least for the next year.

A recent poll showed that even though iPad sales were high this holiday season, only 5% of adults in the US currently own a tablet computer. Think about that for a second, 95% of consumers are not yet a part of this market.

If 20% own a tablet by 2013, the market is going to quadruple in size in the next 2 years. There are not many, if any other areas of the market that I can say are going to grow that quickly with relative confidence. If the second and third year growth of the iPhone are any indication of what we will see with the iPad – those who are able to build popular apps are in for a wild ride.

So you’ve decided to jump on the iPad app bandwagon and have a killer idea. There are really three different ways to have your new app developed. Assuming you know Objective-C, you can develop the app yourself. You can outsource the work and have a freelancer develop it for you. Or you can hire a professional app development company (the most expensive of the three options). Option number three is only recommended for those with an existing service and a large budget. Below I am going to cover the first two options in a little more detail.

If you are brave enough to attempt building the application yourself you will need to register as a developer and join Apple’s iPad development program which is $99 a year. This gives you access to the iOS Dev Center and the SDK along with the interface builder, iPad simulator, guides and tutorials.

There are quite a few third party tools and frameworks that make the learning curve a bit easier and essentially allow you to create an iPad app quickly using a drag and drop interface, however the tradeoff is functionality. I don’t recommended taking this route unless you just want to create an app version of your website.

Here are some good tutorials for getting started with iPad app development:

How to prototype interactive iPad applications in 30 minutes or less using Apple Keynote – This shows you how to build a iPad app prototype with no programming knowledge what so ever. Very useful if you plan on designing the app yourself, but having it developed by someone else.

iPad Programing Tutorial – Hello World++ – How to create a very basic interactive app for the iPad.

How To Build iPad Apps With Xcode and Interface Builder – Highly recommended tutorial that will walk you through building your first iPad application, a simple calculator.

This is the most popular route for those with little to no programming knowledge. Just because you don’t know how to program doesn’t mean you can’t create a great iPad app. I know of quite a few apps that were outsourced and have become immensely popular.

If you decide to go this route, it’s VERY important that you stay on top of the development process. There are plenty of horror stories about developers in India ripping people off through oDesk and eLance, however there are a lot of precautionary measures you can take to minimize this risk.

Whenever I create a new job on oDesk I only send the job out to those with over 1000 billing hours and 4.5 / 5 stars.

oDesk allows you to choose a flat price for the project, or pay by the hour. Once the project begins, you are provided with a screenshot of the developers desktop every few minutes allowing you to make sure that they aren’t billing you while playing World of Warcraft.

For an iPad app generally it’s better to pay by the project – you don’t want to have the developer back out halfway through because they have another job that is paying them better hourly. I highly recommend offering a bonus as an incentive for meeting the deadlines and this will also help to ensure the quality of the work.

Hopefully this post inspires those who are still on the fence to jump off and make something happen. There are plenty of ways to find success in the world of apps regardless of your technical knowledge or financial situation!

When I was 21 years old I had the opportunity to experience first hand the inner workings of traditional media and the massive scale of cable news.

Arnold Berk is a long time family friend, Korean War veteran, and businessman who built and sold a multimillion dollar tax business.

Arnold called me up in late 2008 during the financial meltdown to discuss a plan he had come up with to help protect Main Street America from Wall Street – he called it “The Berk Plan” (you can see it here). He wanted to know if I was interested in helping him promote it online since he heard that was my world. I agreed to help, I thought his ideas were solid, more importantly my middle name is Burke so I had a vested interest to see it through – even if the spelling was a bit off.

Together we came up with a game plan for marketing, I would handle the online promotion of The Berk Plan and Arnold would take charge of handling traditional media.

To kick things off he decided to take out a $15,000 full page ad in the Washington Post (and paid for it with his own money) to get the attention of our senators and congressmen as well as the major media outlets.

Meanwhile, I managed to get The Berk Plan featured on the frontpage of Reddit.com

After the ad appeared in the Washington Post, we were completely bombarded with comments and emails, as well as inquires from major media outlets. Arnold decided to start giving all of the news outlets my cell phone number and telling everyone I was the official media coordinator (I’m sure he got a kick out of it at the time).

So here I was, 21 years old, getting calls from CNBC and Fox News, having to moderate who gets the exclusive. Arnold was in good hands though because I find myself in crazy situations like this a lot.

After seeing The Berk Plan in the Washington Post, CNBC and was interested in having us on. So the next day Arnold and I went up to New York City, did a press conference outside of the AIG building and then headed to the Wall Street Journal Building where CNBC had a satellite studio that allowed them to stick your talking head on the news.

I can’t quite describe the emotions I felt when we arrived at the WSJ building. It really wasn’t until then that I realized the enormous scale of these major media outlets. Inside the building it was somewhat empty because it was the day before New Years Eve. On our way up to the studio I looked out the window and my heart sank. Literally right next door their was a huge crater where the World Trade Towers once stood.

We were escorted to a room with a bunch of cameras and surprisingly it was just Arnold, myself and the cameraman.

Watch Arnold on CNBC

I’ll never forget standing there watching Arnold, thinking that it’s just the three of us and yet this is going out to literally millions of people on the biggest financial news channel in the world at prime time. Even though I was able to get us on the frontpage of major online social sites like Reddit and Digg, this was so much bigger than that.

About 15 minutes after leaving the Wall Street Journal building I got a call on my cell from a lady with Fox News. She wanted us to come on and talk about The Berk Plan the next day on Fox Business. I explained that we were in NYC now and it would be kind of a hassle to come back up the next day, especially since it was New Years Eve. She assured us that they would take care of everything, and even agreed to send a car down to Philly to pick us up.

Sure enough the next day I found myself in a town car with Arnold heading back up to NYC, ready to go through the whole routine again.

The Berk Plan promotion was a success and it’s one victory we achieved almost exclusively through traditional media. Using new media is great for promotion but traditional methods can be more effective depending on your audience. Although some have already declared traditional media dead, that day I learned that in some cases, nothing could be further from the truth.

During a phone call yesterday, I told him I was thinking about writing a blog article about his saying. He was quick to point out that although he would like to take credit for it – the saying was actually passed along to him when he was first starting out by a very prominent builder at the time named Mayer Blum.

Like many self made entrepreneurs, my grandfather struggled when first starting out. One of his first projects was rehabbing historic homes in a very wealthy area of Philadelphia. Selling high priced items to the wealthy, should make you a lot of money, right? Unfortunately this isn’t always the case, my grandfather found himself putting a lot of effort in but making a very small profit. However his entire mindset and business strategy changed after Mayer Blum took him out to lunch one day and gave him some advice that he would never forget.

About once a month Mayer would call me and ask me to join him for lunch. I never refused since he picked me up in his limo and took me to his private club. This club was so exclusive that I couldn’t have got past the doorman for any reason, by myself. Mayer was nearing 80 at the time and I soon realized that he missed the action of business and simply was remembering his early days through conversations with me.

He gave advice and introduced me to members of his club who were prominent bankers, lawyers, politicians and other major players in the business life of the city.

One day he was complimenting me on a particular house that I was working on, but was making very little money on the project. I expressed my concern and he gave me an answer that shaped my business approach for many years.

He said “Buck your work is good and you are doing an important job for the section of the city where you are rebuilding those old houses. When it comes to the money your father should have explained: When you build for the classes you’ll eat with the masses. If you build for the masses you might be eating with the classes.

- from Bucksays.com (my grandfathers blog)

Traditional brick and mortar entrepreneurs and internet entrepreneurs can both learn from Mayer Blum’s advice. Many of the world’s largest companies found success through applying this very principle.

• Apple & IBM built a personal computer for the masses.
• Microsoft built an operating system for the masses.
• Google built an online advertising platform for the masses.
• YouTube brought online video sharing to the masses.
• Facebook built an easy to use social network for the masses.

These days, iPhone and Android apps are all the rage, and you can see this philosophy at work right in the Apple App Store. 90% of the top grossing apps are simple games that are either free, or $0.99. These companies are building products for the masses – everyone loves games and everyone has $0.99 to blow. What’s crazy is the games priced at $0.99 are grossing more than games priced at $15.

You can see this for yourself, just look at the number of ratings an app has. Right now only around 5% of people who download an app actually end up rating it. This means that if an app has just 6,000 ratings it has probably been downloaded over 120,000 times! As of this morning, my favorite app built for the masses – Angry Birds has 482,000 ratings. Try doing the math on that. It’s hard to comprehend the scale at which the Apple App Store operates however those who were able to master the art of thinking big early on have become the big fish in this enormous sea.

You don’t have to look far to find bad financial advice these days. Many of these so called financial experts will tell you the same thing: Find a steady 9 to 5 job, pinch pennies for 30 to 40 years, and if you’re disciplined enough you will be rich by the time you retire.

The truth is that many of these so called financial experts, like Suze Orman (who is worth $25 million dollars) do not live by their own advice. They haven’t become rich because of their frugality. They are rich because of their entrepreneurship, million dollar book deals, tv shows and seminars.

Popular sites like GetRichSlowly encourage readers to live as cheaply as possible and avoid any kind of debt like the plague. Ironically this site was secretly bought by Quinstreet, a company that focuses on generating new customers for the credit card companies and banks.

I’m a big believer in having a solid portfolio of assets, putting your money to work, and developing a comprehensive long term financial plan. However my long term plan doesn’t include living broke now so that I can live rich when I’m a senior citizen.

Living “broke” doesn’t necessarily mean financially broke. Many people don’t realize that money is not your most valuable asset – time is.

Are you really willing to give away 90% of your most valuable asset on the premise that you will be able to enjoy the last 10% relatively comfortably? You only live once. There is no turning back or starting over.

I have always valued my own time over EVERYTHING else, which is why I’ve never had a 9 to 5 job working for someone else. Most people don’t realize just how valuable their own time really is. I actually wrote about valuing your time and self worth last year.

Let me give you an example of why frugality and the whole penny pinching mentality is flawed:

Dave is browsing the internet and comes across an article about frugality. He decides to take the advice of these financial experts and has given up all of the goods and services deemed “unnecessary”. He is now a slave to his own daily routine, having to spend 5 hours every weekend doing lawn work after firing the landscaping service he used to pay $50 / week for. This means that Dave is now working for $10 an hour on the weekend.

What if Dave continued to pay the landscaping company to manage his yard and instead used that time to start a small online business that made just $1000 a month? This would pay for the landscaping service and he now has an extra $800 in his pocket – a much better return on his investment. Instead of working for $10 an hour on the weekend, Dave is now working for $50 an hour.

The best road to wealth is action. The financial experts will teach you how to die rich all day long but if you want to live rich you need to take a different approach, you don’t have to wait for anyone, or anything.

This is my local Starbucks. One of a few in my neighborhood, the one I have the most affinity to. I’ve been coming here since they opened the doors fifteen or so years ago and have seen the store and the brand change considerably in that time. It was a few logos ago. Before wi-fi. When all they sold was coffee, mugs and pastries. But today’s shop is filled with sandwiches, salads, assorted granola bars, CD’s, iTunes cards, gift cards and more. Most striking too is how one side of the place looks like a room at my local library with long tables and countless electrical outlets where people come to plug in. Students. Business people. A cup of coffee could buy you hours of time. Not just any time. Digital time. A digital network to be precise.

It’s been four months since Starbucks launched the Digital Network. A company who in the beginning of their corporate life wanted to differentiate themselves by creating the third place. A place which wasn’t your work environment. Or home. But a place which would be comfortable and make you feel almost as if you were home, and let you kick back and spend some time. The Digital Network is perhaps one of the most visionary experiences they’ve created yet.

By going online, you not only get free wi-fi but you can spend the whole time on their network; reading pages of an ebook, pages of USA Today, blog posts. You can also access the Starbucks iTunes pick of the week and download a free song. You can read about things going on in your neighborhood. Look for a job on LinkedIn. Access your Starbucks card, check out your balance, add more money. Learn more about Starbucks. How brilliant is this? It’s no wonder people love Starbucks. Sure, they love the coffee but it’s more than that.

Stephen Gillett CIO, EVP Digital Ventures at Starbucks shared these thoughts with me about the Digital Network: “Since the arrival of the Starbucks Digital Network in our US stores, we’ve received a great response from our customers. The network offering differentiates Starbucks and highlights our passion for creating a unique customer experience, our heritage of recommending culturally-relevant works and focus on giving back to the community.” Stephen’s on Twitter, where you’ll find him tweeting often about Starbucks’ digital efforts.

People love the Starbucks experience. Consider this: as of today, Starbucks has 19,737,353 people who “like” them on Facebook. That’s the second most popular brand. Coca-Cola is #1, for today anyway. I became a fan of the page a few weeks back. I wanted to see what it was that Starbucks was doing on their Facebook page that would draw so many people in, day in and day out. For one thing, Starbucks is respectful of their Fans. They’re not posting zillions of posts all the time. They post every couple of days or so. They offer promotions. Around Christmas time they had the 12 days of Sharing. Buy a mug and get a free $5 gift card. Or, buy a mug and they’ll throw in a CD.

They post about the latest new drinks. Coffee beans. Chinese New Year. They share stories. They promote Starbucks VIA with a promise. “We’re confident that you’ll love VIA. However, if you don’t, we will replace with a bag of House Blend on us.” They speak to fans conversationally. They’re one of us. And we’re one of them. And fans respond. They write about their favorite drinks. They ask why there aren’t Starbucks in Brewer, Maine or in Vietnam. They write that they love Starbucks. And that they’re addicted to the coffee. But it seems that they’re also addicted to the experience.

I’ve never written on a brand’s Facebook wall. Before today that is when I wrote on Starbuck’s wall as research in part for this post. I wrote about listening to Ellla Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. Four people immediately liked the post and within an hour I received a message through Facebook from a man working on his dissertation on Starbucks and the customer experience. He asked if I’d complete his survey for his Starbucks research. Yes, of course I would. Starbucks story is intriguing. Contagious. People love different things about it.

Perhaps one of my favorite stories is the blog post I came across, a woman who collects Starbucks art. She’s a fan of Starbucks graphics. If you’re a collector of Starbucks cards you may enjoy this link where you can see a variety of gift cards by country.

And speaking of graphics, what other company do you know who could be so bold and self-assured to have plans to remove their name from their company logo? So, how is it that Starbucks captured the palates and the hearts of millions of people around the world?

Can businesses try to emulate the Starbucks brand experience? Is there room in the marketplace for a fourth place? Share your feedback in the comments box below.

Here’s the problem – realistic goals don’t get you to the big leagues. In baseball if you set realistic goals you play little league and that is about it – you never pursue it any further because hitting the majors just isn’t realistic.

I used to set realistic goals, and I accomplished them. One day I started setting ridiculously high goals, and guess what? I accomplished those as well. Then it all seemed to click. I realized that what seemed “realistic” to me was simply what I already knew how to achieve. My unrealistically high goals weren’t really unrealistic at all I just simply didn’t know how to achieve them and had to make myself work harder along the way to figure it out.

Why waste time focusing on increasing your revenue by 10% over a 3 month span when you can shoot for 100% and push yourself to really innovate – many brick and mortar business rules don’t apply on the internet and this starts with scalability.

It’s not our fault that we set modest goals, our brains are wired that way. Regardless of how smart you are, you simply cannot comprehend the scale of the interent and this really evens out the playing field.

You need to train your mind to think BIG.

For Example: Twitter added 30 Million users in the past two months – this means that 370,000 people sign up every single day!

Zynga (the company that created Farmville) is now estimated to be worth more than Electronic Arts at $5.5 billion and is selling $1.6 billion a year in virtual goods on Facebook and other sites. People spend over $4,300,000 buying virtual cows and pigs every single day or $182,000 an hour!

Groupon (who I just bought some tickets from) was founded less than two years ago and is reported to be making more than $1 million in pure profit per WEEK and is already valued at over $1.3 billion.

Let’s say your online business is currently making $5,000 in profit a month but you are shooting for $10,000 sure $10k sounds realistic but we are talking about the INTERNET here – unlimited scalability! Why not shoot for $50,000 or $100,000 / month?

When you aim for larger goals you tend to take a more scalable approach. Instead of writing 3 articles a week for your site, you’ll write 3 a day. You may not hit $100,000 in the next month but you’ll probably soar right past that realistic goal you would have made.

For those of you who are doing 100k a month already – shoot for a mill.

Once you start setting ridiculously high goals you will have to challenge yourself a bit more but you will end up hitting the majors while your competitors are still playing t-ball.

With that said you don’t have to be the next Mark Zuckerberg to kill it online. I started my business in college, at the time I had around $400 in my bank account, I didn’t have a secret savings account or a bunch of money put away for me that I could invest. I needed most of the $400 to pay for rent and food but I still managed to start my first business as a poor college kid with very little money to my name.

I had a few hundred ideas spinning around in my head at the time (ok maybe it was more like 4 or 5) but I figured that regardless of what I ended up doing I would need to pay for two things, a few domain names @ around $8 each, and web hosting. I decided to go with shared web hosting which is extremely cheap (as in $10 a month for a package that allows you to have unlimited sites), the disadvantage to shared hosting is the lack of direct control over the server and the fact that you are sharing the server and severs resources with other sites, however when you are bootstrapping it you need to start small.

These two things were enough to get me off the ground. I did all of the web development and design work myself for my first few sites myself, and just taught myself as I went – which is really the best way to learn. I then reinvested the first few hundred dollars I made from these sites into registering an actual company with the state, which costs around $300 if you use an online service like MyCorporation (it actually varies by state).

From that point forward I had a positive cashflow and would just reinvest any extra money into expanding the company. Eventually I hired a writer to produce content for the site. Before I knew it one writer turned into a team of 20 writers and the shared hosting that I started with turned into multiple dedicated servers handling millions of visitors a month.

When I look back what really amazes me is that I managed to start all of this for under $50. Now compare this to what it costs to start a brick and mortar store – where you have to pay rent, utilities and potentially inventory. This requires a minimum investment of 50 – 100k where as an online business can be started for $20 or $30. This was simply a bargin that I couldn’t refuse and it turned out to be the best decision of my life.