Monthly Archives: May 2015

The Trap of “Look How Much Money I Just Made”

Performing magic professionally means that you’re also a small business owner. That means that any of the money you make performing is actually money that goes into your business. 

It’s easy to think that after doing a magic show it FEELS like easy money. You can leave the house for a few hours, have some fun, perform a few tricks, and come back home $1,000 richer. Compare that to everyone else you know who needs to go to work for an entire week to earn what you make in a single afternoon.

This type of thinking is very deceptive though because what you make from performing is NOT what YOU personally earn. It is NOT your salary. Your performance fee is what the BUSINESS makes. The money is what you’ll need to operate on to sustain your entire business.

For example, let’s say you perform at a show that pay’s you $1,000. Let’s see how that would breakout into your business bank accounts and personal accounts.

Performance Fee: $1,000
Sales tax / Income tax (25%): $250
Business account (25%): $250
Personal savings (15%): $150
Rent (20%): $200
Your wage (15%): $150

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Pure Text: Copying and Pasting Text Without Extra Formatting

Here’s a quick tip to reply to emails even faster.

I find myself often copying text to pasting information into my emails. The problem with that though it that a simple copy/paste would also include all the additional unwanted formatting from the original source.

Here’s a sample photo where I copied text from my website and pasted it into the email. You can see it also pasted all of the unwanted formatting like the background color, font color, etc.

extraformatting

I’d constantly have to change the font, font size, and color back to the original. This meant that I had to manually reformat all the text over and over again. Every time it annoyed me and I knew there had to be a better way!

I went searching on the internet and I came across a lightweight tool called PureText. Here’s the program description from their website:

What PureText Will and Will Not Do

PureText only removes rich formatting from text. This includes the font face, font style (bold, italics, etc.), font color, paragraph styles (left/right/center aligned), margins, character spacing, bullets, subscript, superscript, tables, charts, pictures, embedded objects, etc. However, it does not modify the actual text. It will not remove or fix new-lines, carriage returns, tabs, or other white-space. It will not fix word-wrap or clean up your paragraphs. If you copy the source code of a web page to the clipboard, it is not going to remove all the HTML tags. If you copy text from an actual web page (not the source of the page), it will remove the formatting.

PureText is basically equivalent to opening Notepad, doing a PASTE, followed by a SELECT-ALL, and then a COPY. The benefit of PureText is performing all these actions with a single Hot-Key and having the result pasted into the current window automatically.

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