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Success From Scratch: Mental Strategies for Success in a Survival of the Fittest Environment
Develop High-Level Awareness and Mental Strategies to Advance into Massive Success!
There is an infinite amount of material out there on how to succeed, how to make money, how to trade stocks, how to grow your business, how to enhance your career, etc. Nowadays, we have no shortage of people teaching others how to be successful. The majority of people who read and take courses on "how to" material never actually succeed with it. That is a sad fact, because many people could have the beautiful and successful lives they want, but they are missing some key components that would get them results.
Success opportunities may be presenting themselves to you every day, but the problem is they are in a language in which you may not be fluent. The point of this book is to teach you how to become “fluent” in the language of success and opportunity, so you can step out and receive this new world you can now perceive with full clarity and understanding.
This book covers creating real success from scratch. It does not matter if you are at “knowledge” scratch, financial scratch, or “entry level job” scratch. It does not matter if you filed bankruptcy yesterday. In fact, being “at scratch” is perfectly okay because it has nothing to do with becoming successful. Where you are starting from means nothing, as long as you open your mind to the concepts I will be sharing with you to sculpt the right psychology to produce success and opportunity.
There is an infinite amount of material out there on how to succeed, how to make money, how to trade stocks, how to grow your business, how to enhance your career, etc. Nowadays, we have no shortage of people teaching others how to be successful. The majority of people who read and take courses on "how to" material never actually succeed with it. That is a sad fact, because many people could have the beautiful and successful lives they want, but they are missing some key components that would get them results.
Success opportunities may be presenting themselves to you every day, but the problem is they are in a language in which you may not be fluent. The point of this book is to teach you how to become “fluent” in the language of success and opportunity, so you can step out and receive this new world you can now perceive with full clarity and understanding.
This book covers creating real success from scratch. It does not matter if you are at “knowledge” scratch, financial scratch, or “entry level job” scratch. It does not matter if you filed bankruptcy yesterday. In fact, being “at scratch” is perfectly okay because it has nothing to do with becoming successful. Where you are starting from means nothing, as long as you open your mind to the concepts I will be sharing with you to sculpt the right psychology to produce success and opportunity.
- GenresSelf Help
208 pages, Paperback
Published July 18, 2017
10 people are currently reading
96 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
August 26, 2017
Nice book. Fast read. Here are my raw highlights from Kindle.
The correct exchange I want for you is to achieve success to the point where you can use money to buy time and freedom. That’s the exchange that most people look at and wonder how the “lucky few” were able to achieve it. This book is all about teaching you how to be part of that few.
When you realize that your actions up to this point have been created by everyone and everything else but you, you can finally approach the world in a way that allows you to be a kid in a candy store. The only thing stopping you from the success you desire is the mindset that you’ve developed from years of conditioning.
On the flipside, if you’ve developed the opportunistic lens, you see nothing but upside. Even when things are negative, you see an upside. You see that there are opportunities under your nose everywhere you turn because of your viewpoint
One of the best success strategies in the world— choose to be around positive people.
As you climb, you’ll realize there are always new thresholds to cross, and you have to continue the “rewiring” process. Some people cool off as soon as they break one or two thresholds; that is unfortunate. As you gain momentum, the climb won’t feel as tough because breaking through thresholds is part of your new behavior as a whole, and it has a cumulative effect.
success. I firmly believe that the key to success is developing your own self-awareness, and then developing your own path to success.
yourself. I’m a firm believer that looking inside yourself and developing your wisdom and your own intuition is the ultimate path to success. The more you focus on others, the less time, energy, effort, and resources you have to put into accomplishing your goals.
One law of success is firm: adapters always win. I’m not telling you to let the wind blow you wherever, and you have to adapt to every breeze. No, I’m saying the opposite. You must be smart about adaptation. Evolvers, innovators, and adapters win in nature, and they win in the economy.
When I look back at my bankruptcy and a few other major events that drastically stretched my “adversity muscles,” I think how much my problem-solving skills were developed. That’s what’s important. Whatever issues I face now, I am confident each one can be solved. Through my own personal evolution, I have learned to adapt and thrive, not just survive.
Creating success from scratch is hard. Success from scratch brings pressure. Diamonds, as I’m sure you know, are produced from massive amounts of pressure. Likewise, your greatest creativity, thoughts, and evolution of your consciousness can happen in times of significant pressure. These times hit you so hard and the pain is so deep you can’t even stand it. It’s not always easy, but if you embrace the pressure, you may break through to an unknown but wonderful place of revelation. I’ve felt pressure many times during my life.
You may be wondering, Well, technically I’m not at rock bottom, I’m steadily in a comfort consciousness that isn’t leading toward growth or anything great. How can I create an environment that is similar to extreme pressure circumstances so I can think diamond thoughts?
Remember that preventing pain is a human’s prime motivator, so focusing heavily on the pain of a stagnant life will get you going quickly. This is raw human nature. I hook into raw human nature because I believe those aspects of our beings are timeless. You’re reading this book because you don’t want to be in the same place five years from now, even a year from now; so if you can obsessively think about the pain of your situation, you’ll
quickly make small decisions without debating back and forth in your mind. Just look at the choices before you and say, “I’m going with that one,” and settle the matter with extreme confidence. Over time, you will rewire your decision-making mindset.
Chinese or Mexican, or should I grill burgers at home? Seriously, and I mean this with sincerity, say to yourself definitively, I’m having burgers, and cross the other options out of your head. You will become more decisive. Start with low-stake scenarios so when high-stake situations arise, you are quick and decisive. People around you will be attracted to your confidence, which brings your mission further, faster.
If you’re doing what the masses are doing, you’re never going to climb to success. You have to go where the masses are not and do what they are not doing. When the masses are opposing you and telling you what you’re doing is wrong, crazy, incorrect, etc., most of the time it’s confirmation and validation that you’re on to something big.
The foundation of my success is relationships. I didn’t consciously decide: “I need to strategically meet all these people on my list, and I’m going to create success from them.” No. The best relationships are organic and are naturally created when you have success on your mind. Remember, be the person who is truly sincere and nurtures relationships. Send a fast text or a brief email something like, “Hi, just thinking about you. How’ve you been lately? How are things going?” That’s a huge deal, especially in the fast-paced world we live in. The thought that went into typing those words that took you ten seconds is a seed for a volume of opportunity. The recipient thinks, Wow, Nick was thinking about me. That’s really nice. This quick gesture on your part will stick in his or her brain because it interrupts the normal everyday pattern. It was interruptive. The brain remembers interruptions. That’s how we’re wired. A month later when you call, that text or email will still be fresh on the
Accidentally, I figured out the magic ratio in the brain of how much to practice and how much to break after practice. The brain needs to rest and connect the new pathways that are created when learning something new. Let the pathways have time to connect. It’s like a muscle. When a muscle tears when lifting weights, it needs to rest to let it repair and grow. I believe the highways and learning passages in the brain are no different. Again, at that age, in my late teens, I had no idea that was the science behind it, but looking back, it’s clear.
The success path skills I’ve learned are no different. The quality of time is very important; it trumps the quantity of time. Commit to full immersion mode when you are practicing. Involve your whole mental capacity. I believe the best learning comes from immersion. Your brain has crazy amounts of power, and if you give 100 percent of it when you’re learning, you’ll be shocked at how fast results appear. When you are fully immersed in whatever you’re doing, even if it’s for a short period of time,
When I make the wrong move, there is freedom knowing that it’s going to be okay, which drastically minimizes stress and eliminates fear. I just reassess, evolve, and move forward. That’s how you win. That’s how you make real progress.
You must be able to accept total devastation— which could be right around the corner. You must know that you’ll live through it if it happens. I can say with clarity, it’s never as bad as you think. If you can accept that it could happen, you have freedom and power to win that much more. When you don’t go after everything you’re capable of, you’re never going to fully win or feel fulfilled.
When playing a sport, I’ve heard it said, “Play with heart and leave everything you have on the field.” It’s the same with a successful life. If you’re scared about what the opposing player might do, automatically you won’t be in your full “A” game. There’s nothing more fulfilling than playing a sport to win and putting everything into it. It’s the same with success. I’m not saying total devastation is something you should yearn for— but it is something you need to prepare yourself for— mentally and emotionally. If you lose the “game” (business failure, bankruptcy, loss of job, etc.), you can fall back on realizing the liberating freedom of power of knowing the game was just a road bump on life’s path. It was a micro dot on your macro timeline.
from those who don’t. Fact: to advance in life you have to make a move. It doesn’t have to be the correct move. A move, no matter what it is, is the foundation of progress; even if 99 percent of the move is wrong, you are still progressing. If there’s a shred of anything right, simply extract it and correct the 99 percent with the next rough draft move. Don’t look for a finished product in the beginning. Start with a rough draft move. People who win and succeed continually make rough draft moves, leaving everyone else in the dust who are still theorizing. Rough draft moves involve pre-action and post-action analysis. Pre-action analysis is analyzing a theory, which is nothing more than a bundle of neurons in your brain coming up with an idea. There is no validity at that point because it hasn’t been projected into reality. Rough draft moves take whatever is in your head and makes it reality.
MAKE ROUGH DRAFT MOVES!
I’m with you. You don’t need twenty years to make your dream a reality. If you take strategic rough draft moves on a regular basis, you have the world in your hands.
TAKE ACTION Everyone has great ideas. But many of the greatest ideas, songs, poetry, music, books, are buried six feet underground. Period. Ideas are worthless unless take action on your ideas— make your ideas real. Many great ideas are buried because people obsessed during pre-action analysis and never did anything more, so they took their ideas to their grave. They didn’t make that first rough draft move that could’ve opened doors to cure cancer, solve poverty, or bring about world peace. We’ll never know.
Successful people take the time to make responsible and reasonable calculations before making a rough draft move. In a painting example, you choose the right brush to draw your rough draft move. A writer would first choose to write a novel or a text book. Don’t act completely crazy or irresponsible to the point where your moves make zero sense.
Rough draft moves is a simple concept: you make a rough draft move, you screw up, you sidestep, you adapt and evolve. You make another rough draft move, eliminating the missteps; it may still be rough, but a bit more polished. So you sidestep and adapt again until it works perfectly— or until you scrap it altogether. Rough draft moves is a rinse-and-repeat process.
Grab people’s attention by being an anomaly. Reveal your unique value proposition. The brain stops and notices anomalies because they stand out from the crowd. You won’t stand out if you’re doing and saying the same things everyone else is. You have to present something different, something new and exciting— you. There are many people trying to promote themselves these days. The crowd is enormous. Remember our first conversation in this book about the new herd. Consequently, you have to say and do something different. You don’t have to stand on top of the Empire State Building and scream. You don’t have to do anything extreme or dangerous. You just have to be your unique self. Your unique DNA and unique life experiences are your ace in the hole. No worries.
What is spherical work? This is where you shine— it’s the passion that launched your dream to start your business. It’s what you’re great at and allows you to continue growing your vision. Spherical work involves your creative ideas and your visionary thinking. While you’re busy working your craft in the spherical realm, because you have delegated, all the moving parts in the linear realm are
working at the same time. This is how you scale up. It won’t work any other way. Let’s use the example of my real estate business, managing construction projects, and things like that. I’m good at finding deals. I’m good at building rapport with sellers and buyers and making deals happen. I’m a deal maker and a people person. I’m very good at salesmanship and persuasion. What I’m not good at is painting, refinishing hardwood floors, installing cabinets, accounting, those kinds of things. Do I understand them fully? Of course, but it’s linear work that others can perform better.
Comparing your path with someone else’s will interrupt the flow of your organic evolution, which is very unhealthy. You won’t create the true results you want if you go in directions that are against your being. Life is short and every person has a unique opportunity and a unique ability to put a dent in the world, small or big.
Remember, your journey will not be identical to anyone else’s; but guess what, that’s the beauty of the whole success scenario. Because it won’t look like anyone else’s, it’ll be your own unique stamp on the world, it will be a reflection of who you are. Your ultimate happiness and fulfillment in life will be in knowing that you built your success from scratch— in your own way and on your own terms. Celebrate!
The correct exchange I want for you is to achieve success to the point where you can use money to buy time and freedom. That’s the exchange that most people look at and wonder how the “lucky few” were able to achieve it. This book is all about teaching you how to be part of that few.
When you realize that your actions up to this point have been created by everyone and everything else but you, you can finally approach the world in a way that allows you to be a kid in a candy store. The only thing stopping you from the success you desire is the mindset that you’ve developed from years of conditioning.
On the flipside, if you’ve developed the opportunistic lens, you see nothing but upside. Even when things are negative, you see an upside. You see that there are opportunities under your nose everywhere you turn because of your viewpoint
One of the best success strategies in the world— choose to be around positive people.
As you climb, you’ll realize there are always new thresholds to cross, and you have to continue the “rewiring” process. Some people cool off as soon as they break one or two thresholds; that is unfortunate. As you gain momentum, the climb won’t feel as tough because breaking through thresholds is part of your new behavior as a whole, and it has a cumulative effect.
success. I firmly believe that the key to success is developing your own self-awareness, and then developing your own path to success.
yourself. I’m a firm believer that looking inside yourself and developing your wisdom and your own intuition is the ultimate path to success. The more you focus on others, the less time, energy, effort, and resources you have to put into accomplishing your goals.
One law of success is firm: adapters always win. I’m not telling you to let the wind blow you wherever, and you have to adapt to every breeze. No, I’m saying the opposite. You must be smart about adaptation. Evolvers, innovators, and adapters win in nature, and they win in the economy.
When I look back at my bankruptcy and a few other major events that drastically stretched my “adversity muscles,” I think how much my problem-solving skills were developed. That’s what’s important. Whatever issues I face now, I am confident each one can be solved. Through my own personal evolution, I have learned to adapt and thrive, not just survive.
Creating success from scratch is hard. Success from scratch brings pressure. Diamonds, as I’m sure you know, are produced from massive amounts of pressure. Likewise, your greatest creativity, thoughts, and evolution of your consciousness can happen in times of significant pressure. These times hit you so hard and the pain is so deep you can’t even stand it. It’s not always easy, but if you embrace the pressure, you may break through to an unknown but wonderful place of revelation. I’ve felt pressure many times during my life.
You may be wondering, Well, technically I’m not at rock bottom, I’m steadily in a comfort consciousness that isn’t leading toward growth or anything great. How can I create an environment that is similar to extreme pressure circumstances so I can think diamond thoughts?
Remember that preventing pain is a human’s prime motivator, so focusing heavily on the pain of a stagnant life will get you going quickly. This is raw human nature. I hook into raw human nature because I believe those aspects of our beings are timeless. You’re reading this book because you don’t want to be in the same place five years from now, even a year from now; so if you can obsessively think about the pain of your situation, you’ll
quickly make small decisions without debating back and forth in your mind. Just look at the choices before you and say, “I’m going with that one,” and settle the matter with extreme confidence. Over time, you will rewire your decision-making mindset.
Chinese or Mexican, or should I grill burgers at home? Seriously, and I mean this with sincerity, say to yourself definitively, I’m having burgers, and cross the other options out of your head. You will become more decisive. Start with low-stake scenarios so when high-stake situations arise, you are quick and decisive. People around you will be attracted to your confidence, which brings your mission further, faster.
If you’re doing what the masses are doing, you’re never going to climb to success. You have to go where the masses are not and do what they are not doing. When the masses are opposing you and telling you what you’re doing is wrong, crazy, incorrect, etc., most of the time it’s confirmation and validation that you’re on to something big.
The foundation of my success is relationships. I didn’t consciously decide: “I need to strategically meet all these people on my list, and I’m going to create success from them.” No. The best relationships are organic and are naturally created when you have success on your mind. Remember, be the person who is truly sincere and nurtures relationships. Send a fast text or a brief email something like, “Hi, just thinking about you. How’ve you been lately? How are things going?” That’s a huge deal, especially in the fast-paced world we live in. The thought that went into typing those words that took you ten seconds is a seed for a volume of opportunity. The recipient thinks, Wow, Nick was thinking about me. That’s really nice. This quick gesture on your part will stick in his or her brain because it interrupts the normal everyday pattern. It was interruptive. The brain remembers interruptions. That’s how we’re wired. A month later when you call, that text or email will still be fresh on the
Accidentally, I figured out the magic ratio in the brain of how much to practice and how much to break after practice. The brain needs to rest and connect the new pathways that are created when learning something new. Let the pathways have time to connect. It’s like a muscle. When a muscle tears when lifting weights, it needs to rest to let it repair and grow. I believe the highways and learning passages in the brain are no different. Again, at that age, in my late teens, I had no idea that was the science behind it, but looking back, it’s clear.
The success path skills I’ve learned are no different. The quality of time is very important; it trumps the quantity of time. Commit to full immersion mode when you are practicing. Involve your whole mental capacity. I believe the best learning comes from immersion. Your brain has crazy amounts of power, and if you give 100 percent of it when you’re learning, you’ll be shocked at how fast results appear. When you are fully immersed in whatever you’re doing, even if it’s for a short period of time,
When I make the wrong move, there is freedom knowing that it’s going to be okay, which drastically minimizes stress and eliminates fear. I just reassess, evolve, and move forward. That’s how you win. That’s how you make real progress.
You must be able to accept total devastation— which could be right around the corner. You must know that you’ll live through it if it happens. I can say with clarity, it’s never as bad as you think. If you can accept that it could happen, you have freedom and power to win that much more. When you don’t go after everything you’re capable of, you’re never going to fully win or feel fulfilled.
When playing a sport, I’ve heard it said, “Play with heart and leave everything you have on the field.” It’s the same with a successful life. If you’re scared about what the opposing player might do, automatically you won’t be in your full “A” game. There’s nothing more fulfilling than playing a sport to win and putting everything into it. It’s the same with success. I’m not saying total devastation is something you should yearn for— but it is something you need to prepare yourself for— mentally and emotionally. If you lose the “game” (business failure, bankruptcy, loss of job, etc.), you can fall back on realizing the liberating freedom of power of knowing the game was just a road bump on life’s path. It was a micro dot on your macro timeline.
from those who don’t. Fact: to advance in life you have to make a move. It doesn’t have to be the correct move. A move, no matter what it is, is the foundation of progress; even if 99 percent of the move is wrong, you are still progressing. If there’s a shred of anything right, simply extract it and correct the 99 percent with the next rough draft move. Don’t look for a finished product in the beginning. Start with a rough draft move. People who win and succeed continually make rough draft moves, leaving everyone else in the dust who are still theorizing. Rough draft moves involve pre-action and post-action analysis. Pre-action analysis is analyzing a theory, which is nothing more than a bundle of neurons in your brain coming up with an idea. There is no validity at that point because it hasn’t been projected into reality. Rough draft moves take whatever is in your head and makes it reality.
MAKE ROUGH DRAFT MOVES!
I’m with you. You don’t need twenty years to make your dream a reality. If you take strategic rough draft moves on a regular basis, you have the world in your hands.
TAKE ACTION Everyone has great ideas. But many of the greatest ideas, songs, poetry, music, books, are buried six feet underground. Period. Ideas are worthless unless take action on your ideas— make your ideas real. Many great ideas are buried because people obsessed during pre-action analysis and never did anything more, so they took their ideas to their grave. They didn’t make that first rough draft move that could’ve opened doors to cure cancer, solve poverty, or bring about world peace. We’ll never know.
Successful people take the time to make responsible and reasonable calculations before making a rough draft move. In a painting example, you choose the right brush to draw your rough draft move. A writer would first choose to write a novel or a text book. Don’t act completely crazy or irresponsible to the point where your moves make zero sense.
Rough draft moves is a simple concept: you make a rough draft move, you screw up, you sidestep, you adapt and evolve. You make another rough draft move, eliminating the missteps; it may still be rough, but a bit more polished. So you sidestep and adapt again until it works perfectly— or until you scrap it altogether. Rough draft moves is a rinse-and-repeat process.
Grab people’s attention by being an anomaly. Reveal your unique value proposition. The brain stops and notices anomalies because they stand out from the crowd. You won’t stand out if you’re doing and saying the same things everyone else is. You have to present something different, something new and exciting— you. There are many people trying to promote themselves these days. The crowd is enormous. Remember our first conversation in this book about the new herd. Consequently, you have to say and do something different. You don’t have to stand on top of the Empire State Building and scream. You don’t have to do anything extreme or dangerous. You just have to be your unique self. Your unique DNA and unique life experiences are your ace in the hole. No worries.
What is spherical work? This is where you shine— it’s the passion that launched your dream to start your business. It’s what you’re great at and allows you to continue growing your vision. Spherical work involves your creative ideas and your visionary thinking. While you’re busy working your craft in the spherical realm, because you have delegated, all the moving parts in the linear realm are
working at the same time. This is how you scale up. It won’t work any other way. Let’s use the example of my real estate business, managing construction projects, and things like that. I’m good at finding deals. I’m good at building rapport with sellers and buyers and making deals happen. I’m a deal maker and a people person. I’m very good at salesmanship and persuasion. What I’m not good at is painting, refinishing hardwood floors, installing cabinets, accounting, those kinds of things. Do I understand them fully? Of course, but it’s linear work that others can perform better.
Comparing your path with someone else’s will interrupt the flow of your organic evolution, which is very unhealthy. You won’t create the true results you want if you go in directions that are against your being. Life is short and every person has a unique opportunity and a unique ability to put a dent in the world, small or big.
Remember, your journey will not be identical to anyone else’s; but guess what, that’s the beauty of the whole success scenario. Because it won’t look like anyone else’s, it’ll be your own unique stamp on the world, it will be a reflection of who you are. Your ultimate happiness and fulfillment in life will be in knowing that you built your success from scratch— in your own way and on your own terms. Celebrate!
June 7, 2018
I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to live a extraordinary life. I have taken many great Nuggets from this book. This book provides knowledge from real life experiences. I you have read this book now it's time to implement this in your life, bring it into action.
Thank you to my Mentor, Coaches and Leaders for recommending this book to read, now this will be put into action
Thank you to my Mentor, Coaches and Leaders for recommending this book to read, now this will be put into action
August 16, 2023
Ruiz spends a whole book without actually writing anything of substance, and spends entire chapters repeating his same idea throughout dozens of consecutive paragraphs. Each chapter talks about the importance he finds in a motivational tag line, but mostly just repeats the tag line over and over, leaning on a handful of his personal experiences to exemplify the tag line (take a shot every time he reminds the reader that he went bankrupt once and that going bankrupt was a blessing in disguise). You can probably get just as much value out of this book by reading through the table of contents and reflecting on the chapter titles.
He has a chapter about “maximizing value of time” and how he likes to laser focus and blast through a task. In his business sense, quantity of wins is more successful that quality. Another chapter talks about his rough pass method - before sinking too much time into a pursuit, take a rough pass to see how it goes. This book felt like Ruiz’ rough pass at authorship - a business attempt to get a book on the shelves without having to put thought or time into writing one.
I don’t doubt that Ruiz’ ideas have helped him find success, but I doubt the usefulness of this book. Hope others can get more out of it than I did
He has a chapter about “maximizing value of time” and how he likes to laser focus and blast through a task. In his business sense, quantity of wins is more successful that quality. Another chapter talks about his rough pass method - before sinking too much time into a pursuit, take a rough pass to see how it goes. This book felt like Ruiz’ rough pass at authorship - a business attempt to get a book on the shelves without having to put thought or time into writing one.
I don’t doubt that Ruiz’ ideas have helped him find success, but I doubt the usefulness of this book. Hope others can get more out of it than I did
December 28, 2018
Success means different to different people. How do we evolve ourselves and position ourselves towards success irrespective of our background, temporary setbacks, past failures etc.. determines our inner strength. The author has done an incredible job in talking straight to us to get rid of our negative emotions and stay on top of the things to make things happen for us. Recommended to all those folks who would like to acquire the mindset of a successful person and apply those principles to realize their goals.
March 26, 2018
Success thinking, activities and vision abound in this book. No matter your starting point, you can apply these principles to achieve massive SUCCESS. Included are countless mental strategies for success in a survival of the fittest environment. Karen Briscoe, author "5 Minute Success" books and podcast.
September 4, 2018
Great book.
December 20, 2018
Despite the numerous grammar and language errors in the book, the content is invaluable. Nick Ruiz is truly qualified to talk about how to be successful in life.
September 9, 2019
Best book out there
February 22, 2019
An easy to read book that has some great insights and ideas from the author.
October 1, 2018
Great book and this is the second one I've read from Nick!
He adds value by helping the reader to uncover those mental blocks and then make plans on how to smash those goals.
Short, sharp and well worth the read!
He adds value by helping the reader to uncover those mental blocks and then make plans on how to smash those goals.
Short, sharp and well worth the read!
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews