I had the privilege of being asked to deliver the first keynote address at NamesCon 2020 in Austin, Texas. A lot of people have been asking if I would publish a video of the presentation and here it is!

I've broken the presentation into three videos that will be published across the coming week. This is the first and covers the topic of Domain Sales.

The presentation looks at the current state of the domain aftermarket, including an attempt to estimate the size of industry and numbers of domains sold each year. On the back of this indepth analysis I present what domain investors can do with this information to help them in their own businesses.

Don't forget to subscribe to my Youtube channel and also here at Whizzbangsblog. This is the first video where I've used my new video recording studio so please feel free to comment on the quality of both the video and also the content itself.

Yep, you read that heading correctly, it’s my birthday today. I’m fifty-four years young, fighting fit (well, sort of) and feel just as energized now as I was thirty years ago. The big difference is I now have a LOT more perspective on life and in particular, what really matters.

At my birthday time, I began to reflect on my life and just how blessed I am. My wife and kids are completely awesome and we’re all healthy. I have a fantastic business in an even more incredible industry. I have friends across the world and can jump on a plane to meet with them whenever I would like. The list goes on and on…..

I remember when I was a teenager my goal was to become a millionaire. I met the girl of my dreams, got married at twenty-one and discovered that with her I was worth far more than a million dollars….I’d discovered something priceless.

This sounds so touchy feely but it’s a real fact of my life. I’ve been married for thirty-two years (thirty-three this year) and I can say that I’m more in love with my wife now than I was when we were first married.

Late one night at the NamesCon conference I was sitting in the bar with a group of people and one of them asked me how is it that I’m so happily married. I will condense a long conversation in one sentence, “Seek first to serve, rather than be served.”

As many readers are aware, I’ve been traveling around the world these past couple of weeks. There’s nothing quite like being away for fourteen days and having only eleven nights accommodation to cause you to question your own sanity about the endeavor. Despite my lack of hotels I managed to jet into Austin and take in the conference that launches the industry each year…..NamesCon!

After checking into the conference hotel, I felt like I was welcoming a long-lost friend as I collapsed on the glorious, soft, wonderful bed. There’s one thing you discover when traveling fifty thousand kilometers in a flying tin can, the seats are hard and not that conducive for sleeping. The quilt felt like bliss incarnate as it wrapped around my exhausted body…..but then I remembered that I had a ParkLogic function that night.

It was with some reluctance that I clambered off the bed, got cleaned up and headed to the San Jac saloon for our small get together. It was a great time to meet a group of existing and potentially new clients as both Matt Herbert (also from ParkLogic) and I struggled with our jetlag. At the end of the night I resumed my horizontal position, closed my eyes and entered a deep sleep…..until 4am at least.

As per my normal routine I find myself in the Melbourne Qantas Club and about to embark on a two-week world whirlwind tour of the world. It sounds glamourous until you consider truly terrifying statistics such as being away for 14-days and only having 11 nights of accommodation booked.

On the bright side I was excited to hear that my flights will no longer be flying through either Iran or Iraq. This put a bit of a smile on my face as I thought of denying the republican guard a chance to play with their shiny new toys (ie. Surface to air missiles).

Being a bit of a geographic aficionado I then prayed that the flight would somehow miss the Ukraine as well. It wasn’t so long ago that a certain aircraft was downed by eager “freedom fighters” in their effort to defend what was “rightfully” theirs. So it will be with welcome relief when I enter European airspace.

This is one of the problems with a round earth. If you keep on heading west (like I’m going to be doing), you end up getting back to where you start. Now if the flat earth people were right then it may be possible to just bypass these crazy regimes…..in many respects, it’s a shame they aren’t right as it would make traveling from Australia much easier.

I was speaking with a person the other day and encouraged them to start reading. Yes, we all read a huge amount of Twitter, Facebook, news feeds and even blogs but what I suggested they do is pick up a book.

We spend so much time “catching-up” that many of us forget that reading is more than just about getting the next sound bite. When you read a good book, fiction or non-fiction, you are entering the mind of another person and getting their thoughts on characters, plot or their views on a particular topic. This meeting of minds can have an impact of you by expanding your own horizons or challenging your own perceptions.

At their core, books are a structured set of considered thoughts that have often taken the author a significant chunk of their life to construct. This considered opinion is very different from a Facebook post which is more often than not, just an opinion or at worst an uninformed opinion.

For example, let’s imagine you see a Facebook post on climate change and immediately “like it”. You have effectively shared your opinion on the topic to untold numbers of people around the world, but do you actually understand the issues around climate change?

When I was in high school my English teacher drummed into me the art of critical thinking. Don’t take on face value what is being said, dig into the facts and seek to understand all sides of an issue prior to making up your own mind. Then, once you’ve formed an opinion, hold it lightly as it may be wrong.

I believe the desire to come to grips with real issues has been in steady decline as the world has become highly defensive in their haste to take offence. From experience, too many people react rather than really think. This may seem quite judgmental but ask yourself, when was the last time you argued against your typical position on a real issue to force yourself to view the other side of an argument?