I was studying up on propagating mushroom spawn. The instructions I found at first started with an emphasis on requiring a clean room, or an air filtration hood, HEPA filters, an autoclave, 90% wood alcohol and chlorine, and pasteurization equipment. They babbled on about agar and petri dishes. By the time I was finished reading it, I had two prevailing thoughts:

1. There’s no way in the world I could ever manage to do that the way they described.
2. There’s GOTTA be an easier way, to simply replicate nature. Because NOTHING in the procedure they described had ANYTHING to do with nature.

So after a little more research, and some careful thought, I was able to come up with a process to do the same thing they were doing, in half the number of steps, that never once mentioned a clean room or autoclave.

The process they described not only called for sterilization of anything introduced into the process, it also called for sterilization OF the product. Now… Sterilization KILLS living things. That is the purpose of it! They were trying to PROPAGATE (that is, encourage the growth and reproduction of) a living thing. Sterilization of that living thing is counterproductive, to say the least! Even if it only involves sterilization of the outer surfaces, it will introduce genetic alterations to the entire body.

They were SO concerned with sterilizing everything, that they were willing to GUARANTEE damage in one way, in order to avoid the POSSIBILITY of damage in another way. Silly!

Nature doesn’t work that way. Nature works in a happy jumble of controlled and balanced contaminants. As long as you don’t get them out of balance, the risks are minimal.

Mushroom culture in an artificial environment has a HIGHER incident of bacterial and foreign fungal contamination than outdoor grown mushrooms. Now, people who grow them outdoors do not sterilize everything, and they don’t wear clean-room suits and booties to harvest. Artificial environments DO require that – and they chase themselves in an ever tightening circle of contamination elimination, which is a pursuit that is completely futile because you can NEVER eliminate all contaminants. NEVER.

What they have done, is create an environment with no natural limiters. So if a single contaminant gets in, it just runs unchallenged. This is blamed in careless or sloppy conditions. But it isn’t that at all. It is because of too MUCH control, not because of insufficient control. This is a primary problem with ALL industrialized farming and food processing.

In nature, naturally occurring bacteria and fungus balance and limit one another. This happens in the human body, and in the garden and forest, and even in your kitchen if you are not too much of a germophobe. The more sterile you try to make things, the more out of balance they get. Reasonable cleaning with water, and once a day with soap, keeps things IN balance. Washing hands after handling obvious contaminants is also wise. But trying to sterilize every surface is not only futile, it is counterproductive.

A little more research on mushroom culture shows that people have had great success in chopping up a mushroom with a clean knife, putting the pieces between sheets of fairly clean, damp cardboard, and letting it do its thing. The mushroom – having been intentionally inserted in LARGER amounts than any opportunistic contaminant, quickly propagates and overcomes any opportunistic contaminant anyway. Things stay in balance, with lots of peripheral contaminants running around doing their thing, and not hurting the mushroom culture that you wanted to grow in any way at all.

Nature is the same way. Mushroom spores culture every day, and they don’t do it in sterilized soil.

I heard the comment “But what if some other kind of fungus grows instead of the one we wanted?”. Not to worry. There are thousands of different kinds of fungus in the world. You are surrounded by them all the time, and they perform all kinds of useful tasks inside and outside of the human body, and in nature all around. Only two or three of them EVER look anything like the one you are trying to grow. The chance that one of THOSE would grow at all in the environment in which you are attempting to culture your prize mushrooms, is a gazillion to one chance against that ever happening. Everything else that might grow there would be present in SMALLER concentrations than your deliberately cultured mushrooms, so they’d have a hard time producing much visible fruit in the first place, and in the second place, if they did manage to, it would look so different than what you are culturing, that you’d easily recognize it. The WORST possible outcome would be that it might SLIGHTLY diminish the productivity of your mushroom environment. That just isn’t even anything to worry about!

I’ve used mushroom culture to illustrate the point here, but it applies to all areas of life. Properly managed gardens and farms are never sterile, and the fact that they are not is a BENEFIT, not a problem! Once we start trying to introduce unnatural controls into a natural environment, we begin an escalation of a sequence of problems that only grow the more we try to constrain them. You can’t put nature on a leash and not expect to get your hand chewed off. It isn’t reasonable to expect that man can do something better than nature. Nature has just had way more practice at it!

Any time you see instructions for cultivation of anything that starts with “you will need a clean room environment”, or “a ratio of 18% protein and 13% soluble fats”, or even “a finely prepared soil-bed that has been double dug and enhanced with a 1″ layer of compost tilled in to a depth of 6”, you may know you are in the presence of a fool who thinks they know more than they really know. A mushroom does not grow best in a clean room environment, a chicken does not naturally eat soy meal or calculate the protein content of the food it eats, and Adam and Eve cultivated food for their rather large family using wooden tools which were not capable of finely tilling the soil (yes, there are easier ways, but the point is, they grew a successful garden without double digging).

Humanity prospered long before scientists analyzed everything to death and determined to make it more complicated than it has to be.

Keep it simple, and go back to the way nature really does it, and everything gets amazingly simple, and solidly successful.

Update: Since writing this, we have successfully propagated mushrooms in non-sterile conditions. Multiple types, in various mediums.

I remember cutting firewood with my father. He’d use the chainsaw, and us kids would stack. It seemed that he cut just about as fast as we could stack. There were usually two or three of us. I’d also used a chainsaw plenty in my teen years, and a little since then. So when a neighbor kindly offered some trees for us to cut for firewood, to earn a little extra cash, it seemed like a good idea. Another kind neighbor found a buyer who would take all the mixed hardwood we could cut, at a price of $50 per rick, and the buyer would provide pallets and wrap, and would pick it up. They did not need it chopped, just cut to length. Average price of cut and chopped firewood of this type was about $75 per rick, so it was a reasonably good deal.

We tromped down and surveyed the trees. Lots of brush to clear off, but some good wood in there. Kevin fired up the chainsaw, and started cutting. The saw was having an off day, and it fussed and fumed. We managed to get about half a rick cut. All elm. People here don’t like elm much. No one seems to be able to agree on the reason, but everybody agrees that they like everything else better. So now we had half a rick of elm. Slow going, and the saw was having a hard time keeping up.

We cut some cedar as well. That was slow too, because cedar has so many limbs to remove. We got about a quarter of a rick of that. We figured the cedar was worth it if we split it into kindling and sold it by the bundle.

We then started cutting oak. The saw was feeling a bit better when we started, but it chugged its way through VERY slowly. After a few cuts, it started smoking. Badly. And bar oil was pouring off the end of the bar. After Kevin pulled the bar out of the log, the chain was still steaming.

I let it cool some, and sharpened the chain. You could SEE the rounded corners on the ends of the teeth. You could also see them sharpen up as I filed. Not good.

It was good for four more cuts. Exactly four, I counted. Then it started smoking again. A generous neighbor joined us to help. He brought his own saw. He fired it up and started cutting circles around Kevin. Our poor little saw chugged and choked its way through a log, and in the same time, the neighbor chewed his way through about six. After four more cuts, the saw was again, smoking and dripping.

When the neighbor quit, we quit. Our saw was just not up to it, and never would be. No amount of sharpening would ever make that chain right. No amount of babying would get that little saw to handle oak logs.

Some facts about chainsaws:

They come in different sizes. And the smaller sizes are made for different purposes than bigger saws.

The baby ones – 14-18″ are made for “occasional home use”. That means if you have to trim a few limbs off a tree now and again, they’ll do fine. These saws have a narrow kerf, and a low powered engine. And the saw chains are made from softer metal, so the teeth wear down MUCH faster. I guess with the smaller kerf they thought they could get away with it. Generally, the smaller the saw, the punier the chain width, and the weaker the engine. Some brands are complicated to start, hard to keep going, and difficult to service. Others are made with the attitude of dumbing down the servicing, but usually the parts are of such poor quality that what was meant to save time just results in a LOT of frustration.

The middle sized ones – a few 18″, but mostly 20-24″, are made with a larger engine, and harder chain metal. They have a wider kerf, and they can cut circles around the baby ones. The larger ones again, are more powerful. Ease of servicing varies widely. There are also Professional and Home models in this range, but usually even the home models are far more durable than the smaller saws. They may have either a medium kerf chain, or a wider kerf chain – wider is generally the most durable chain, but also takes the most power.

The daddy saws. Ok, so most loggers use a 24″ bar, a few have a 36″ bar that they use for extremely large trees. But a 24″ is standard. So here we are mostly talking about larger engine size. More power. You’ll pay twice the price for them. Sometimes more. But they’ll work more reliably, and cut much faster, and they’ll be worth repairing when something breaks. They will generally have chains with the widest kerf, which are made from a harder metal, so they last longer, and require sharpening less frequently.

Some facts about wood:

Cutting evergreens is easy, and even a bad chainsaw can cut through it without completely choking up. Other softer woods too. They can make a mediocre chainsaw look ok, and you can make pretty good time. I don’t remember my Pa ever stopping to sharpen a chainsaw during work – though he did so at night in his shop.

Cutting hardwoods is hard. And harder. Some hardwoods are hard, and others are like trying to use a breadknife to saw through granite. They’ll systematically dismantle all but a good saw, and they are even hard on that. You’ll still have to stop to sharpen every hour or two, at best.

So… back to the original topic. Earning money doing this. Yes, you can earn money cutting firewood. You can earn enough in a day’s work to replace a full time job, if you want to put in a long day, or if you have a helper.

You’ll have to get the wood for free too. If you have to pay for a permit, or pay someone else a cut off the top, it isn’t going to be worth it. But you CAN get wood free, if you find out who has property that they are clearing. Often they’ll bulldoze trees, and then just light them on fire. If that is the plan, they are usually perfectly willing to have someone come in and salvage some firewood first.

But you can only do it if you have the right tools to start with. If you don’t, you’ll end up with a lot of frustration, and VERY little output to show for it. If you don’t already HAVE the right tools, then it isn’t going to be worth getting them if you are desperate for cash, because it is probably going to cost you several hundred dollars to get a chainsaw that can keep up – and you are likely to need two of them to really produce.

If you have a little backyard chainsaw and think that you can go and cut hardwoods all day, and make something at it, you’ll be disappointed. A little one can’t even handle an entire day of work, even if you keep sharpening the chain. You’ll need something better, and bigger.

If you do happen to have it though, firewood can be a nice way to earn a little on the side, or to fill in the gaps if you are unemployed.

But you gotta have the right tools.

If you don’t, then look for other ways to profit locally – You might be surprised at what you can do.

P.T. Barnum said there was one born every minute. I think he underestimated. But then, I am a bit of a cynic.

So what defines a sucker? What characteristics do people have in common, who get sucked into fraud, scams, get rich quick schemes, and all those dishonest propositions that take your money and fail to deliver the implied promises?

I’ve been scambusting for more than 10 years. I’ve investigated, reviewed, and reported many scams. I’ve been brutally honest in exposing near-scams – you know, those half-lies that aren’t exactly illegal, but aren’t ethical either.

In that time, I’ve learned a lot about the makeup of people who perpetuate those scams. And I’ve learned a lot about the kind of people who fall for them. They pretty much fall into two categories:

1. The ignorant. I mean truly inexperienced and uneducated about business, the internet, human nature, etc. It takes the average person a year or two of exposure to such things to really figure out what the warning signs are that something should be avoided, just like moving to a new town and not knowing where the slums are. There is hope for these people, they will probably gain wisdom and learn to avoid slumming it online.

2. The greedy. People who are willing to let their greed overpower their common sense. This group of people are the reason why internet marketing empires, resale rights products, Forex trading with eGold, mlm companies without a viable product, illegal gifting scams, and a gazillion other online establishments continue to flourish. They live by the motto, “It couldn’t hurt to try it, it just might work.”, and they tend to get scammed over and over with an unending parade of nearly identical cons, with only one or two facets that are different – the greedy person reasons that if one or two of the immaterial facets are changed, that somehow, it is different than the last scam that bit them, and they ignore the fact that it is build on the same shady and rotten foundation. There is less hope for this group – wisdom has a harder time triumphing over greed than it does over mere ignorance.

See, a greedy person KNOWS the thing they are reading is too good to be true. They KNOW it has a catch. That little voice in the back of their head TELLS then that it is wrong, but they ignore it. They ignore it because they WANT. They want the promised pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, even though they KNOW leprechauns are not real. So they spend their days chasing rainbows and illusions, and paying for the privilege, instead of telling the scammers exactly what they can do with their pressure sales pages and their “limited time offers”.

I heard a line in a movie I saw years ago. “You can’t cheat someone unless they’re lookin’ to cheat you first.” I wondered at that. And then it made sense. The card sharp could cheat a table full of men, because they figured they could put one over on him and get his money. He let them think that, just long enough to take THEIR money.

And so it is with scammers. They lead you on, let you think you are going to get something for more than it is worth, or that just this ONE time, the laws of common sense won’t prevail, or that the illegal thing they want to rope you into isn’t illegal enough for you to get caught.

In fact, this characteristic of greed, and the propensity for greed to overpower common sense is something that scammers count on. They make a living on poor choices of other people – and they count on the fact that most greedy people, once taken, won’t confess it to anyone else, out of embarrassment. Or in some instances, because they knew it was illegal or bordering on it. So the scammer gets away with it, and goes on catching other greedy flies in their spider web, because the flies that have been caught are too embarrassed to warn the prospective victims.

Now, while scams can only exist when the world has plenty of greedy prospective victims, the scams are created and perpetrated by people who are also greedy – but they are not only willing to let their greed overpower their common sense, they are willling to let it overpower their morals and scruples. They are willing to actively take advantage of people, or even actively harm them, in order to fill their pockets. The only kind of people who can make money at it for any length of time, are those who are completely ok with taking someone else’s money and not giving what was promised in return. Sadly, some people seem to progress from scammed, to scammer. Greed eventually degrades them.

The best protection anyone has against getting scammed, is to not let their greed get in the driver’s seat. Keep common sense firmly behind the wheel. That is also your best protection against becoming a scammer – because greed is a poor master, and common sense doesn’t like dishonesty, so it will steer you away from becoming something dishonorable.

If enough people did that, the scams and sucker traps would go away. But since the world seems to repopulate itself with suckers at a phenomenal rate, it is up to you and I to protect ourselves against the spiders, and to keep raising a warning voice to the flies.

I share almost everything I know concerning successful website and business operations. I even share that knowledge with my competition when they ask. I sometimes volunteer to share trade secrets with my competition. I often publish articles or instructional pages with specialized instruction which most people in our situation would not share without charging for it.

We not only sell website services, we also sell webmaster training instruction. So why in the world would I GIVE away what I’m selling? Wouldn’t that undermine my profits and train my competition for free?

That has to be one of the biggest myths of paranoia in the business world. It is perpetuated by people of limited imagination, who think that the only way to do business is the same way everyone else is doing business. When you are competing with a gazillion other businesses and have not truly differentiated your business with a good dose of the best elements in your personality, and when you have failed to truly connect with your customers or clients, then yeah, it is a bad idea to be too free with your competition.

But when you are not just one of the numbers, but something unique, and when your business is as much YOU as it is standards of excellence, and ESPECIALLY when you’ve diverged from the other lemmings in your particular professional arena to develop NEW and BETTER standards, or more effective policies and procedures that give you an edge and make your clients feel the difference, then you can share your expertise freely, and you’ll have little to fear from your competition.

Why is that?

Skills are just skills. If you learned them, then anyone else can. There is no issue of competition there. If you don’t kindly help someone when they ask, and they are trying to learn the same skills you already learned, then they’ll just go learn them somewhere else anyway. So there is no real profit or benefit in NOT sharing them.

There IS a benefit in sharing them. You establish yourself as THE go-to expert. Many of those you help will soon be approaching you with subcontracting proposals, or referring clients or customers to you when they cannot meet their needs themselves. Plus you get a reputation as a REALLY NICE, and HIGHLY QUALIFIED person. Yes, your competition will in fact help you gain that reputation, and to uphold it. They will quote YOU instead of other experts in the industry.

So no need to be paranoid about sharing skills. Be nice, and helpful, and it will help you more than it harms you.

Beyond skills, a wildly successful business also requires something totally unique and beyond the norm. For us, it was development of a totally new and separate standard for small businesses, as differentiated from corporate businesses, because the website needs were totally different, but this was almost never acknowledged by web professionals as a group, and when they did, they merely scaled down the same old corporate standards, which in fact, did NOT scale down effectively. This is the thing that makes you a BETTER option than your competition.

So, with the first thing, that unique thing that you developed and created, those individual methods for operations that separate your success potentials from your competition. The stuff of which trade secrets are made. The same question arises as for skills. Won’t sharing them hurt you and get you more competition?

Not really. In fact, the same thing is true. YOU are the one who developed it. That makes you the undisputed expert. You’ll get MORE people who will cooperate with you, make referrals, and improve your reputation than you will those people who would cause harm to your business by what you share.

Everyone thinks that sharing that kind of information will backfire and someone will steal their concept and set themselves up in direct competition, claim the fame for it, and sink the originator of the idea.

That is actually EXTREMELY rare. Pretty much the ONLY time it happens is when someone has a good IDEA, but no ability to actually do anything with it! If you are already successful based on some unique changes you’ve made to your business, then you are not in that category.

In our years in business, there have been people who tried to immitate us, or even to steal our systems and pass them off as their own. So why am I still recommending sharing openly?

Because the people who are the type to try to steal something rather than build their own, invariably lack the self-discipline and determination to actually turn what they stole into anything effective. They think they can steal it, slap up a quickie website (they’ll NEVER take the time to build a good one), and that the money will pour in without any effort on their part. They are completely blind to the fact that even if you have a great product or service, it takes a LOT of work, patience, repetition of boring tasks, and time, to actually earn anything from it. They make a hasty slapdash effort, and never even climb out of complete obscurity. No one else EVER knows that they have what they stole, because the very characteristics that caused them to steal it will ensure that they never make a profit from it.

You might also feel that putting it out there in print will just mean that other people can read all about it and never have to pay you for it, especially if you are selling training on the topic. Again, there is no need to fear that it will decrease your profits, quite the contrary.

A body of toothsome information validates your expertise. It helps people realize that you know things they don’t, and that they CAN’T find elsewhere. If you hide all the really juicy bits, then they have no reason to feel that you know anything that every other of your competitors does not know.

When you write about just a bit more – and actually start sharing those secrets, then people really understand the depth of your expertise and how different you are from all the rest. Oh, a few will read that, and feel it is all they need. But the hungry ones – the ones you REALLY want as students, they’ll want it straight from the teacher. They’ll realize that they can learn it much better from an organized training program than they can from digging through a website to get it bit by bit, or having to assemble it and sift the quality from multiple websites. It will increase your client base, not decrease it. And it will increase your reputation, not undermine it.

So, again, you really have nothing to lose, and a great deal to gain, by freely sharing information, including your own specialized knowledge, even in referenceable ways.

The last element that makes your business successful is your personality, or your artistry. This is the part that no one else CAN immitate. It is all you, and comes from something within you that you cannot teach to anyone else, nor can they successfully copy it. They’ll inject their own personality into it, and even if they INTEND to become “you”, they’ll persist in being themselves, and they’ll appeal to a completely different clientele than you do. So no need to fear that – you are each an artist, with your own style, and customers like what they like, and having more or less competition isn’t going to make some personality types want to work with YOU any more or less. It is beneficial to have good associates to refer problem clients to – a client who just cannot work well with your style may do well with the style of one of your competitors, and by referring out, you get out of potentially difficult situations and still come out looking good.

Now, I’m not recommending that you give away your product, or that you give away, for example, your website content or other intellectual or material assets. THOSE, they have to get on their own. I would not give away my templates, systems, site structures, custom software, or other items that I typically charge for. I don’t print my curriculum online. But I share most of the secrets in it, here a little, there a little. That sharing goes on working for me night and day, convincing people to invest in our expertise.

There is no need to be paranoid of your competition. Make friends of them instead, cooperate with them, and build a professional network that benefits all of you. There is far more to gain by being open and helpful than there is to lose.

This is true of your customers as well – be willing to educate them into being informed customers so they know how to make good choices. If they are do it yourselfers, be helpful, and answer short questions (there comes a point where you can’t answer time consuming ones, but up to that point, be helpful and generous). You don’t have to give away any hands-on work – but answer emails kindly and generously. It pretty much always comes back to your benefit.

I’ve answered questions for total strangers countless times. Some I never hear from again. Others come to me later for services when their circumstances change – sometimes they come to me many years later. They remember me because I helped them when no one else would. Often, it comes back to me by way of a referral. Someone calls, again, often many years later, and says that they were referred by someone I helped, who could not say enough good about me. They validate my expertise, my integrity, and assure the prospect that I won’t charge them unreasonably.

You can’t buy that kind of advertising.

Once you rid yourself of the resentment of your competition, and open up to cooperation, you start an amazing synergy that helps all of you be just a bit better than you could be on your own.

And there isn’t ANY reason to be paranoid about THAT!

Our company is now offering Cottage Industry Consulting, to help businesses identify and encourage artistry in their own business.