Quote of the Day: Good advice...

is priceless. Not what you want to hear, but what you need to hear. Not imaginary, but practical. Not based on fear, but on possibility. Not designed to make you feel better, designed to make you better.

Seek it out and embrace the true friends that care enough to risk sharing it.

I'm not sure what takes more guts—giving it or getting it.

Take it from marketing guru Seth Godin.

To go against the crowd just “to make you better” by “sharing” the “practical” “possibility” of risks from the current environment—shouldn’t this qualify me as your “true friend”?

Quote of the Day: Measuring nothing (with great accuracy)

The weight of a television set has nothing at all to do with the clarity of its picture. Even if you measure to a tenth of a gram, this precise data is useless.

Some people measure stereo equipment using fancy charts and graphs, even though the charts and graphs say little or nothing about how it actually sounds.

A person's Klout score or the number of Twitter followers she has probably doesn't have a lot to do with how much influence she actually has, even if you measure it quite carefully.

You can't tell if a book is any good by the number of words it contains, even though it's quite easy and direct to measure this.

We keep coming up with new things to measure (like processor speed, heat output, column inches) but it's pretty rare that those measurements are actually a proxy for the impact or quality we care about. It takes a lot of guts to stop measuring things that are measurable, and even more guts to create things that don't measure well by conventional means.

This splendid quote is from marketing guru Seth Godin at his website.

Even from the marketing perspective, it is the relevance and the quality of measurement (statistics) that matters. Importantly, measurements have inherent limitations.

Quote of the Day: Fearlessness is not the same as the absence of fear

The fearless person is well aware of the fear she faces. The fear, though, becomes a compass, not a barrier. It becomes a way to know what to do next, not an evil demon to be extinguished. 

When we deny our fear, we make it stronger. 

When we reassure the voice in our head by rationally reminding it of everything that will go right, we actually reinforce it.

Pushing back on fear doesn't make us brave and it doesn't make us fearless. Acknowledging fear and moving on is a very different approach, one that permits it to exist without strengthening it. 

Life without fear doesn't last very long--you'll be run over by a bus (or a boss) before you know it. The fearless person, on the other hand, sees the world as it is (fear included) and then makes smart (and brave) decisions.

A pragmatic advice from marketing guru Seth Godin at his blog.

Why Entrepreneurship is an Art

Marketing guru Seth Godin says it best

Studying entrepreneurship without doing it...

...is like studying the appreciation of music without listening to it.

The cost of setting up a lemonade stand (or whatever metaphorical equivalent you dream up) is almost 100% internal. Until you confront the fear and discomfort of being in the world and saying, "here, I made this," it's impossible to understand anything at all about what it means to be a entrepreneur. Or an artist.

That’s why you don’t learn entrepreneurship in classrooms.

Corporations Are People

Emotions can make even the best lose their sense of reasoning

My favorite marketing guru, Seth Godin, writing in disgust from an unfortunate experience by a customer with an insurance company, rants,

if someone in your neighborhood used this approach, treating others this way, if a human with a face and a house and a reputation did it, they'd have to move away in shame. If a local businessperson did this, no one in town would ever do business there again.

Corporations (even though it's possible that individuals working there might mean well) play a different game all too often. They bet on short memories and the healing power of marketing dollars, commercials and discounts. Employees are pushed to focus on bureaucratic policies and quarterly numbers, not a realization that individuals, not corporations, are responsible for what they do…

Corporations don't have to act like this. It's people who can make them stop. Corporations aren't people, people are people.

I sympathize with the tragic case presented by Mr. Godin. But personal tragedies should not be mixed up with ethical principles.

It’s is true that there will always be unscrupulous corporations. But CROOKED or IMMORAL behaviors or actions are NOT exclusive to corporations, they apply to PEOPLE—individuals or even communities (e.g. hate groups)—and most especially this applies to GOVERMENTs who wields coercive power over the community.

Corporations are no other than juridical or legal entity comprising sets of individuals.

Yet one unfortunate experience does not justify a sweeping condemnation of the rest. This represents a fallacy of composition.

Otherwise markets become zero-sum games which tilts the balance according to Mr. Godin’s accusations to producers or service providers at the expense of consumers. This is patently false.

In a market economy, corporations essentially do NOT force ‘people’ to buy their products or services. Mr. Godin admits to this, “If a local businessperson did this, no one in town would ever do business there again.”

But why should this be different elsewhere?

Only governments forces people to avail of their services. On many occasions these may come along with political arrangements with privileged private or semi-private owned corporations (e.g. public private partnerships, monopolies, subsidies and etc).

Corporations under such politically directed setting then would focus “on bureaucratic policies” or meeting political goals rather than servicing the consumers. The incentives guiding profit based private enterprises and public institutions are different.

In a market environment if corporations do not fulfill on their promises, then consumers can vote with their wallets and or file legal suits or countersuits against them.

Markets basically do not reward greed or “the power of marketing dollars” as the consumers are kings—unless inhibited by politics

Apparently, social media pressure (yes the free markets) seems to have forced the alleged corporate non-people antagonist to a settlement with the aggrieved. So the supposed villain has some people aspects too.

The idea of corporations as not representing the individual or the people looks like a Janus faced populist self-contradicting argument riding on people’s emotions in order to get “likes”.

Yet assuming Mr. Godin’s censure is true, this implies that since he possibly owns corporations (e.g. Seth Godin Productions Inc and Squidoo) then his denouncement could also mean that he must be similarly liable for “Corporations aren't people, people are people”

Ever heard of the proverbial pot calling the kettle black?

Quote of the Day: Shun the Non-Believers

When you do important work, work that changes things and work that matters, it's inconceivable that the change you're trying to make will be met with complete approval.

Trying to please everyone will water down your efforts, frustrate your forward motion and ultimately fail.

The balancing act is to work to please precisely the right people, and just enough of them, to get your best work out the door.

Shun the non-believers.

This is from my favorite marketing guru Seth Godin.

This powerful marketing message seems highly relevant to the struggle for liberty and to the advocacy of the unpopular economic truths.

The Virtue of Failure

Here is a helpful career tip from my favorite marketing guru Seth Godin

Too many MBAs are sent into the world with bravado and enthusiasm and confidence.

The problem is that they also lack guts.

Guts is the willingness to lose. To be proven wrong, or to fail.

No one taught them guts in school. So much money at stake, so much focus on the numbers and on moving up the ladder, it never occurs to anyone to talk about the value of failure, of smart risk, of taking a leap when there are no guarantees.

Well tolerance of failure is a trait dovetailed for market economies.

In socialist countries anyone’s willingness to lose would have been substituted for dependence on the state.

That’s why productivity and innovation is hampered. People have not been motivated to take risks. Losses are perceived as stigma. Regimented conformity displaces competitive thinking.

Also as emphasized by Mr. Godin, gut is a character that is hardly learned from school.

Quote of the Day: Life is More than Math…

"It's not prime enough"

"That number is too even... can you make the next one even odder?"

The thing about math is that it's right or wrong, on or off, yes or no. Seven is a prime number, there's no improving it.

The thing about life/business/culture and the things we make and do is that they are not math.

From my favorite marketing guru Seth Godin. Indeed, life is about human actions.

Quote of the Day: Real Knowledge versus Pretentious Knowledge

People who know what they're talking about...

Almost always talk like they know what they're talking about. That's why it pays to invest more time than you might imagine on the vocabulary, history and concepts of your industry.

Insider language, terms of art, the ability to use technical concepts... it matters.

On the other hand, sounding like you're smart doesn't mean you are.

Necessary but not sufficient.

My favorite marketing guru Seth Godin says it best.

Admitting to ignorance is a fundamental way to acquire knowledge. On the other hand, the presumption of possessing superlative knowledge exposes one's ignorance. Filtering one from the other matters.

Why I Don’t Bother to Give Talks

I didn't realize, until reading Seth Godin’s latest advice which he transcribes so well, the reason why I refuse or turn down invitations to talk in public.

Before you give a speech, then, you must do one of two things if your goal is to persuade:

Learn to read the same way you speak (unlikely)

or, learn to speak without reading. Learn your message well enough that you can communicate it without reading it. We want your humanity.

If you can't do that, don't bother giving a speech. Just send everyone a memo and save time and stress for all concerned.

That’s why I just write or blog.

Quote of the Day: Making a Difference

One option is to struggle to be heard whenever you're in the room...

Another is to be the sort of person who is missed when you're not.

The first involves making noise. The second involves making a difference.

From my favorite marketing guru Seth Godin

Seth Godin Explains On the Margin

Products and services succeed one person at a time, as the word slowly spreads. Customers defect one person at a time, as hearts are broken and people are disappointed. Doors open, sure, but not all at once. One at a time.

One at a time is a little anticlimactic and difficult to get in a froth over, but one at a time is how we win and how we lose.

Another effusive quote from my favorite marketing guru Seth Godin.

I may add that the the ideological war for liberty will be won or lost one at a time.

Quote of the Day: Stupidity Not an Excuse for Laziness

Stupidity is not an excuse for laziness, so argues my favorite marketing guru Seth Godin (bold emphasis mine)

(Is it that you can't do it or perhaps you don't want to do the work?)

When I was in college, I took a ton of advanced math courses, three or four of them, until one day I hit the wall. Too many dimensions, transformations and toroids for me to keep in my head. I was too stupid to do really hard math so I stopped.

Was it that I was too stupid, or did I merely decide that with my priorities, it wasn't worth the work?

Isn't it amazing that we'd rather call ourselves stupid than lazy? At least laziness is easy to fix.

People say that they are not gifted/talented/smart enough to play the trumpet/learn to code/write a book. That's crazy. Sure, it may be that they don't possess world-class talent, the sort of stuff that is one in a million. But too stupid to do something that millions and millions of people can do?

I'm not buying it. Call it as it is and live with it (or not). I'm just not willing to believe we're as stupid as we pretend to be.

Instead of stupidity, my encounters with such genre of an excuse often times are packaged as self-imposed handicaps or even as fear of failures, e.g. I am not a college graduate, I am not an economics graduate, I am just a small investor, I am not good looking, work is too overwhelming and etc.

But as Mr. Godin rightly points out most of these are in essence as signs of laziness or sloth which can be rectified.

After all, mental attitude is about our desire and our corresponding actions which can be directed either to strive for success or to condescend to failure.

The sad part is that for many, failure is seen as endemic trait even without lifting a single effort to go for success.

Quote of the Day: Legacy

It's one thing to miss someone, to feel a void when they're gone. It's another to do something with their legacy, to honor them through your actions.

That’s from marketing guru Seth Godin’s eulogy for Steve Jobs. Read the rest here

Quote of the Day: Living Out of a Myth

Excerpt from the always eloquent marketing savant Seth Godin

Myths allow us to project ourselves into their stories, to imagine interactions that never took place, to take what's important to us and live it out through the myth.

The quote comes in the context of a “myth” or vicarious brand based marketing strategy.

But I think this valuable quote applies to many aspects of social activities.

In my field, they are represented by the rigid mechanical chartists and micro fundamentalists in the financial markets, hydraulic econometric-statistics-quant based economics or in the political sphere—ideologies based on utopianism.

These people tend to live out or rationalize their morals or beliefs or their fantasies as reality.

The tragic bombing and shooting massacre which left 68 people dead in Norway by deranged Anders Breivik seems an example.

Quoting Stratfor’s Scott Stewart, (bold emphasis mine)

Breivik also is somewhat unique in that he did not attempt to escape after his attacks or become a martyr by his own hand or that of the authorities. Instead, as outlined in his manifesto, he sought to be tried so that he could turn his trial into a grandstand for promoting his ideology beyond what he did with his manifesto and video. He was willing to risk a long prison sentence in order to communicate his principles to the public. This means that the authorities have to be concerned not only about other existing Justiciar Knights but also anyone who may be influenced by Breivik’s message and follow his example.

Living out of a myth can be fatalistic.

Quote of the Day: Problem Solving as an Enabling Force of Innovation

When we fight constraints and eliminate them, we often gain access to new insights, new productivity and new solutions. It also makes it easier to compete against people who don't have those constraints.

There's a useful alternative: embrace the constraints you've been given. Use them as assets, as an opportunity to be the one who solved the problem. Once you can thrive in a world filled with constraints, it's ever easier to do well when those constraints are loosened. That's one reason why the best filmmakers learn their craft making movies with no budget at all.

That’s from marketing guru Seth Godin.

I would further add that this would work best in a competitive decentralized profit and loss driven environment.

Quote of the Day: Is Expertise Posture or Knowledge?

Another thought provoking article from my favorite marketing guru Seth Godin [bold emphasis mine]

What I discovered, though, was that domain knowledge, edge to edge knowledge of a field, was incredibly valuable. It helped me understand where the edges were, and it gave me the confidence to be selective, to develop a taxonomy, to see what was going on.

As the deluge of information grows and choices continue to widen (there's no way I could even attempt to cover science fiction from scratch today, for example), it's easy to forget the benefits of acquiring this sort of (mostly) complete understanding in a field. I'm not even sure it matters which field you pick.

Expertise is a posture as much as it is a volume of knowledge.

Reading every single trade journal, for example, or understanding the marketing, engineering and sales of your field--there are countless ways to go deep instead of merely paying lip service to the current flavor of the moment.

To me, the importance of domain knowledge (specialized) is especially relevant for those in the financial markets (or in stock markets).

Instead of acquiring the necessary ‘signals’ that could deliver the ‘edge to edge knowledge’, most get lost in the din or cacophony of ‘noises’, which Mr. Godin describes as the “current flavor of the moment”.

The latter can be characterized by the pervasive use or application of cognitive biases and logical fallacies, except that they are masqueraded in numerical or technical methodologies which are completely dependent on past or historical activities or on some presupposed constants which operates on aggregated formulas.

Popular or consensus wisdom usually represents what Black Swan theorist and author Nassim Taleb calls as the negative knowledge (wrong and doesn't work).

For many, thus, expertise signify more as social signaling (posturing or seeking social acceptance) and or “telling people what they want to hear” but predicated on certain technically based paradigms which produces an aura of supposed superiority rather than representative of the true domain knowledge.

We should learn how to separate the proverbial “wheat from the chaff”

Quote of the Day: Change is Ageless

Another magnificent words of wisdom from marketing guru Seth Godin (bold emphasis mine)

At some point, most brands, organizations, countries and yes, people, start talking about themselves like they're old.

"We can't stretch in that direction," or "Not bad for a 60 year old!" or "I'm just not going to be able to learn this new technology." Even countries make decisions like this, often by default. Governments decide it's just too late to change.

The incredible truth is this: it never happens at the same time for everyone. It's not biologically ordained. It's a choice. It's possible to put out a hit record at 40, run a marathon at 60 and have your 80 year old non-profit change its business model. It's not as easy as it used to be, but that's why it's worth doing.

Change indeed is a choice.

Has the Magic of Technology Ebbed?

Marketing guru Seth Godin thinks so. He writes, (bold emphasis mine)

Arthur C. Clarke told us, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Head back to the 1800s with a Taser or a Prius or an iPad and the townsfolk will no doubt either burn you at the stake or worship you.

So many doors have been opened by technology in the last twenty years that the word “sufficiently” is being stretched. If it happens on a screen (Google automatically guessing what I want next, a social network knowing who my friends are before I tell them) we just assume it’s technology at work. Hard to even imagine magic here.

I remember eagerly opening my copy of Wired every month (fifteen years ago). On every page there was something new and sparkly and yes, magical.

No doubt that there will be magic again one day... magic of biotech, say, or quantum string theory, whatever that is. But one reason for our ennui as technology hounds is that we’re missing the feeling that was delivered to us daily for a decade or more. It’s not that there’s no new technology to come (there is, certainly). It’s that many of us can already imagine it.

The current generation, whom have been key beneficiaries of the transformative technological innovations, may seem to be less appreciative of the contributions of technology to our current welfare. That’s because technology has been giving us constantly more for less.

Thus, the diminishing returns on expectations from the impact of technological progress: the perceived loss of magical touch.

But I think it goes more than that.

Perhaps most people may be a lot less familiar with the antecedent of today’s state of technology. Or, people may have forgotten the roots of today’s progress: our ancestors compounded efforts or actions.

As the great Ludwig von Mises once wrote, (bold highlights mine)

Nobody denies that technological progress is a gradual process, a chain of successive steps performed by long lines of men each of whom adds something to the accomplishments of his predecessors. The history of every technological contrivance, when completely told, leads back to the most primitive inventions made by cave dwellers in the earliest ages of mankind. To choose any later starting point is an arbitrary restriction of the whole tale. One may begin a history of wireless telegraphy with Maxwell and Hertz, but one may as well go back to the first experiments with electricity or to any previous technological feats that had necessarily to precede the construction of a radio network. All this does not in the least affect the truth that each step forward was made by an individual and not by some mythical impersonal agency.

When people forget about history; the contribution of a multitude of individuals in today’s progress through the years, then they became less appreciative of the blessings that has been happening.

Many people today seem to think that the progress from technology is just a given. It is not.

For as long as people are allowed to trade, trade will then function as the main driver of technological progress.

Writers like me will try to keep that magic alive.

Common Sense Education

Another treasure from marketing guru Seth Godin; this time he talks about the basic things we need to learn about: (bold highlights mine)

-How to focus intently on a problem until it's solved.

-The benefit of postponing short-term satisfaction in exchange for long-term success.

-How to read critically.

-The power of being able to lead groups of peers without receiving clear delegated authority.

-An understanding of the extraordinary power of the scientific method, in just about any situation or endeavor.

-How to persuasively present ideas in multiple forms, especially in writing and before a group.

-Project management. Self-management and the management of ideas, projects and people.

-Personal finance. Understanding the truth about money and debt and leverage.

-An insatiable desire (and the ability) to learn more. Forever.

-Most of all, the self-reliance that comes from understanding that relentless hard work can be applied to solve problems worth solving.

In short, common sense education.

We don’t need extended years for these.