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Five Minutes on Friday, Six Minutes on Saturday: Listen to Music, Save Japan; Email a Company, Save 200,000 Sharks

Guest post by: Timothy Ferriss

Article Overview: It doesn’t take a lot of time, money, or sacrifice to do an incredible amount of good. Hence the name of this post (and potential series): Five Minutes on Friday. Even if it’s not Friday, this post might interest you…

Five Minutes on Friday, Six Minutes on Saturday: Listen to Music, Save Japan; Email a Company, Save 200,000 Sharks

It doesn’t take a lot of time, money, or sacrifice to do an incredible amount of good. Hence the name of this post (and potential series): Five Minutes on Friday. Even if it’s not Friday, this post might interest you…

Can you — and can I — take just five minutes each Friday (or Saturday, Sunday, etc.) to fix big problems and feel awesome in the process? Sure. It need not suck or feel like work. In fact, it can be like getting a Christmas present. Or perhaps like slaying bad guys as The Punisher.

Pretty sweet on both sides. Here are two quick options for your five minutes this week…

Listen to Music, Save Japan Make a $10 or greater donation to Music for Relief for earthquake and tsunami relief in Japan and receive a kick-ass exclusive compilation of music from incredible musicians. To get people to take action, the offer is only good for a few days. Listen to the music (listed below) and make a donation here: http://japan.downloadtodonate.org/

Current Tracklisting:

Hoobastank — Running Away (acoustic)

Shinedown – Shed Some Light (acoustic live)

Sara Bareilles — Song For A Soldier

Flyleaf — How He Loves (live)

Staind —Right Here (live)

The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus — 21 and Up

Angels & Airwaves — Hallucinations

Taking Back Sunday – Best Places To Be A Mom

Placebo – Bright Lights (live)

Black Cards – Dr. Jekkyl & Mr. Fame

B’z — Home

Surfer Blood – Take it Easy (Live)

Ben Folds – Sleazy

Slash featuring Myles Kennedy – Starlight (live)

Counting Crows – Colorblind (live)

R.E.M. – Man on the Moon (live from Tokyo)

Talib Kweli – GMB

Plain White T’s — Rhythm Of Love (live)

Elliott Yamin — Self Control

Pendulum – Witchcraft

Patrick Stump – Saturday Night Again

Linkin Park — Ishho Ni

Pretty sweet, right? Click here to download the tracks.

Email/Call a Company, Save 200,000 Sharks More than 100 million sharks are now slaughtered annually to fuel the shark fin soup trade. The soup is non-nutritive, expensive, and doesn’t even taste particularly good (yes, I tried it in China in the 90′s). It is served mostly as a status symbol at Asian weddings, formal functions, and high-end restaurants.

How is this fine soup made?

Shark fins are cut-off the sharks in a process called “finning.” The practice is wasteful, unsustainable and ecologically unsound. Here’s how it works: sharks are caught on long-lines (miles of line floating in the oceans, affixed with hooks and bait), brought to the boat, and have their fins are hacked off. Next, since shark meat isn’t worth as much as shark fins, the mutilated but normally live animals are thrown back in to the water to sink and die.

Sharks cannot reproduce fast enough to keep up with mass-production shark finning. In the Atlantic ocean alone, shark populations in many species have decreased more than 90% percent in the last 15 years alone. It’s fucking disgusting.

I wanted to be a marine biologist for nearly 15 years, and if there is two things to remember about sharks, here they are:

- Most sharks don’t attack humans and have no interest in us whatsoever. I’ve dived with hundreds of sharks without incident.

- If you destroy apex predators (predators at the top of the food chain), the rest of the food chain topples soon thereafter.

If the oceans go to hell, so do we. To stick it to the bad guys and help the good guys, here are two five-minute options:

1. Boycott and Publicly Shame Restaurants That Serve Shark Fin Soup

Below is a list of Canadian and US restaurants that still serve shark fin soup. Boycott them, write to them, and — corporations hate bad PR — publicly shame them for inhumanely slaughtering sharks, using blogs, tweets, Facebook, e-mail, or whatever you have:

United States List of restaurant perpetrators

Canada’s list of restaurant perpetrators

2. Join Future Shark Adventures

The University of Miami offers year-round shark expeditions, including weekly tagging trips in the Florida Keys, Great White Shark expeditions in South Africa, and Diving and Tagging tiger shark adventures in the Bahamas. Click here for more information.

If you have other creative ideas on how to promote ocean conservation, please contact Dr. Neil Hammerschalg at nhammerschlag-at-rsmas.miami.edu. To learn more about shark protection, visit these sites:

http://www.wildaid.org

http://www.sharksavers.org

http://www.rjd.miami.edu

http://www.sharktrust.org

Yes, I really love sharks. Here, I tag my first shark off of Miami as part of Summit Series: a beautiful female tiger shark. Truly gorgeous.

Have a fantastic weekend, all. Take the five minutes if you can. It will make you feel incredible, and it will have an impact.

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Article Tags: email, five minutes, japan, music, sacrifice, sharks, six minutes, time money



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Re: Are you satisfied with your ISP's services? - The same in my case my ISP holds my phone number. What i don't like is that if i have a technical problem the process take to much time and they will never hurry up to solve the problem. Save God this it not happening to often. Another think that bugs me is the advertising .... to many offers and advertisements that are annoying people.
Re: Promote Websites You Don't Own! - For most new small businesses jumping into online marketing for the first time I would steer clear of PPC advertising. For a while at least. Without a decent understanding of how search works and the whole PPC thing, including quality score, split testing of ad copy and landing pages, negative keywords, etc., you burn through your money pretty quick while trying to just learn and often end up with a deeply negative return on investment. Instead I would maybe spend that part of the budget on doing more of some of the other things you mentioned. Maybe buy another directory link or two. Another press release. More local offline advertising. Save the PPC for when the budget is not quite so tight and those other marketing efforts are already bringing in business. You can then better afford the learning curve costs and time required to get it right, and most importantly get it profitable.
Re: New McDonalds McCafe concept... - Well.. it's probably not fair to contrast Japan work practices to the US. Their culture is so different over there - they have a much higher regard for doing things right, don't they? It's no accident that most of the Quality Assurance systems came out of Japan! I lived in Japan for a year... about five years ago. Of course I was in Misawa and never got to the big city of Tokyo...
Re: Soul Crushing Cubicles - There are lots of "crushing cubicles" in Japan too! Last Saturday I had three hours to kill in town and rented a cubicle in a cyber-cafe, drank coffee, checked my email and snoozed in the reclining chair. Very pleasant! But for some people cyber-cafe cubicles are their only homes. Another "crushing cubicle" experience is a "capsule" in a "capsule hotel". The guy in the first photo reminded me of the kind of desk space occupied by some "ALTs" (Assistant Language Teacher) in Japan. Japanese school staffroom desks are notorious for being cluttered with junk and endless piles of papers and forms. I was a part time ALT for a while and enjoyed the experience - but full time? No thank you!
Re: What inspires you? - Inspiration is nothing it is what you called to do? Some work for money, some work for satisfaction, some work because they have priorities in life. It is the passion to do something for achievement or to show that you can do it by using one's talent. I know there are people who are doing great things with their limited skill sets. So, my view point about inspiration is to Dream Big and try to achieve it. I would rather add "Listen to your self". Listen to Inner guide and follow it. You will reach great heights. Robert


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