The winning bidder can use the one-hour consultation to ask Steve about anything:

You can ask for help or advice regarding anything you desire — personal or professional challenges, blogging, online business, career transitions, financial abundance, health, relationships, spiritual growth, habit change, etc. You can even spend an hour pitching me on a business proposal if that’s your thing.

In the last year Steve’s marriage imploded, he basically left his wife and two kids to be with other women and explore the personal growth aspects of domination/submission.  But don’t worry about the effect the divorce will have on his two kids, they’re are fine with it because

Las Vegas is a place where divorce is pretty common, so our kids have friends that have seen their parents get divorced

So no worries about the kids. Attesting to his financial/business acumen he and is ex “own” two houses in Las Vegas that have no equity and are under-water on their mortgages.

Right now the bid is at $820. Act now, go big and perhaps, for about a thousand dollars or so, you can spend an hour being told how to live your life, improve your relationships or conduct your business affairs by this man.

UPDATE, July 28: I wanted to check out what the current bid was at it looks like the auction listing has been removed from eBay. Then I found out why on twitter.

During the “Spiritual Warrior” five-day retreat, for which Ray charged approximately $9,000, participants were pushed to their spiritual and physical limits by fasting for 36 hours and cramming into a 415-square foot, sauna-like hut – essentially a wood frame covered in tarps and blankets. People were passing out and vomiting, but still urged to stay inside the sweat lodge.

Hard to know what to make of this one. To believe in one’s program to the point where you recklessly endanger your followers is either the pinnacle of obliviousness or hubris. James Ray has his side of the story posted on his website.

This is Ray’s second fall from grace. He blew himself up financially when the DotCom bubble imploded. He turned that story of overreach into a parable upon which he built his comeback.

With three dead bodies in the closet, the comeback trail might be a tad rougher this time.

Examples are that 80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers, 80% of your support tickets are caused by 20% of your users, or as an incredibly oversimplified generalization: 80% of your results come from 20% of your assets or inputs. The 80/20 Rule was named after an Italian economist named Vilfredo Pareto who in the early 1900’s noticed that 80% of the Italy’s farmland was owned by 20% of the population.

The basic management philosophy behind recognizing the Pareto Principle is that you can leverage your results by narrowing your efforts to the 20% of tasks or inputs that result in the majority of your output.

Over the years I’ve also come to recognize what I call the Inverse Pareto Sinkhole. This is the enemy of productivity and the enemy of leverage (the “good” kind of leverage). It’s a black hole and a vortex, it diffuses effort and waters down results.

Think about what developers call “Creeping Featurism”, or Feature Creep. To quote Wikipedia

Feature creep is the proliferation of features in a product such as computer software. Extra features go beyond the basic function of the product and so can result in baroque over-complication, or “featuritis”, rather than simple, elegant design.

What I’m talking about is what happens when the vast majority of your time and effort gets sucked into something that even if it is executed flawlessly, will result in very little output.

It’s getting hung up on one question on an exam worth one measly point but you waste 25% of your allotted time on it which could have been better spent on other questions worth more points.

It’s a new rock band in a garage spending all their time arguing over what the name of the group will be instead of writing songs and rehearsing material.

It’s analyzing a company’s balance sheet and spending 75% of your time validating the assumptions of one line item that accounts for less than 1% of the company’s assets.

It’s basically getting sucked into spending a lot of time on getting that one thing “just right”, when that one thing, considered against the backdrop of the entire task at hand, is inconsequential.

That’s The Inverse Pareto Sinkhole. Meetings, are famous for them.

For the most part, I find meetings useless. Meetings typically devolve into one long Inverse Pareto Sinkhole. It’s just a group of people getting together and everybody just gravitates toward some piece of minutiae dear to themselves and tries to get the entire meeting wasting time on it.

When I’m in a meeting I spend the majority of my time keeping it on track and throwing these inconsequential bits of nothingness over the edge with comments like: “Let’s note that and you can take up via email later” (…with somebody who gives a rat’s ass), and “Ok, well let’s park that for now and try to concentrate on the larger issue of XYZ”. I find this process exhausting, so I generally avoid meetings LIKE THE PLAGUE.

I’ve found I can get much more done via email, or in a real pinch, a phone call.

There’s a reason I bring this up, as I’ll post shortly.

From this premise, people are advised to think about things they want, visualize abundance, focus their intentions, don’t dwell on what they don’t want or focus on things that are absent from your life. “Energy Flows Where Attention Goes”.

Which is for the most part, all true. The entire Law of Attraction “phenomenon” can be summed up as: Your biases impact your outcomes. It’s really that simple. There is also a hardcore scientific basis for it in physics: Inertia. Things tend to keep doing what they’re already doing.

This is why depressed, negative people seem to drift into a downward spiral that feeds on itself, while annoyingly upbeat pinheads walk on pink clouds and consistently roll sevens through life. The rich get richer, and the poor…not so much.

Each success or failure, if seized upon by the mind as “this is completely normal for me”, sets up the expectation for the next sequence of events and heavily influences it’s outcome.

Positive Mental Attitude works because it sets the stage for succeeding. To succeed at something requires work, fortitude and tenacity. In order to cultivate these things, you need optimism, energy and the belief that the outcome will be in your favour. Otherwise, if your mental state is permeated by fear and self-doubt, then even if you are proceeding along a positive outcome path: you are more likely to abandon it at the first speed bump or obstacle.

Most of us walk somewhere down the middle. We have good days and bad. We have up phases of our lives and down. At the extreme ends there are people who are lost in the downward spiral of negativism – they simply can’t buy themselves a break and seemingly act as a magnate for cataclysmic drama. And then there are those creepily happy people who put a positive spin on everything that happens to them no matter what – from personal bankruptcy to head lice – it’s all good.

Both extremes deny pragmatic reality in unhealthy or potentially negligent ways. I read a blog post from a self-help guru the other day who declared with pride that he never saves money because he’s confident in his ability to manifest abundance around him whenever he needs it.

That may work, for now. But if you go back through history, there have been times when Positive Mental Attitude gurus weren’t in big demand. It’s fine, even helpful to be upbeat. It’s reckless to throw caution to the wind.

Prepare for bad times and you will know only good times is a pretty good maxim. It acknowledges that both exist. The more naive adherents to Law of Attraction or PMA will have you believe that you can “manifest only good things into your life”, the way some of the more clever money managers believe they can hedge out all risk. It looks possible in theory but when it collides with reality it tends to not work.

There is a big difference between writing your own ticket in life and “manifesting reality”. I don’t care how high you’re vibrating and how much abundance you’re visualizing: if you don’t have a serious method for producing income in your life, a pile of money is not going to fall out of the sky into your crotch.

The Law of Attraction and Positive Mental Attitude are tools that aide you in the execution of a strategy. They are not magic beans that allow you dictate reality (they only allow you to dictate fantasy).

In the meantime, feel free to read what this website is all about.

If you subscribe to the newsletter, we won’t sell or distribute your address and basically the letter is mainly used to email digests of what we will be posting here.

Alternatively, you can subscribe to the RSS feed in your favorite newsreader.