brain washing

New show concept -

A group of friendly bears, named the Christian Bears, travel around spreading the gospel to people with large cross medallions embroidered on their chests.

But there is a twist!

There is a bear out there who doesn't want to be a Christian Bear, but that can be fixed. The Christian Bears struggle with him, it is a hard fight because the other bear is small but uses the giant machine of the entertainment industry to fight the Christian Bears.

It all works out in the end though, because the Christian Bears overpower the smaller bear and force him into the religion which is what is really best for him anyway.

This is offensive to even me.

Only Fear

I've had some time away. First the construction ended, then the dancing. Now all that is left is the fear.

All of my hopes and dreams were in those things, and although I could have done more, tried harder and spun my wheels faster, nothing would have saved either business in the long run. Nothing should have saved them either. In four years of devouring business reading I never came across an author or speaker who said a perfect execution of a broken business model equals long painful failure.

I also did not read about the recovery process after the first shovel full of dirt hits the casket. I lost my identity, I lost the hope of recovering my money, the hope of building a future, the hope of resurrecting my image of myself.

Maybe these were all good things, maybe I won't have the courage to post this after I'm done, but right now it still hurts and I want it to be over. Right now I'm angry and sad. I thought I was just starting a business; that is what I was most wrong about.

I have heard it said that failure builds character.
That is a lie.

I have no more character now, in fact I'm sure I have less. I want to lay down for a few years and do nothing, I want to run away to another state, I want to change my phone number and delete my facebook account. Character may be best built directly after failure in the giant chasm that is left in your being, but it is not built in the failure. Character is built when character is built.

So what happens tomorrow? I'm not sure, but I'll be here. Let's discuss how to build character. How to let things die. How to generate motivation from dust. How to guide anger and resentment. How to care most about what is happening right now. But most of all, let us talk about how to take that giant, gaping, painful hole inside of us and fill it with character.

Sales etc.

We don't like some salesmen, some pushy I just happen to have the perfect, some well only for you, salesman. We do like buying though. Buying somebodies passion, buying somebodies excitement about a product that simply is not exciting.

I was once at a state fair and was stuck at a booth for five minutes watching a guy sell a broom! He loved it, he wasn't faking it, and he was putting on a great show (which is why you go to the fair right?).

I also recently read an article by an internet marketer who "proved" he was a good marketer by how many marketing products he had sold that month. sigh.

Don't do a presentation on presentations, and don't sell selling. Do something, even if it is just sweeping with a broom, if you are passionate we can tell and we want to hear about it (and buy it).

Form and Context

Form and context are best explained in this video (30 min) or by massively understating that:
Form = The perfectly rippled sand in the desert
Context = The wind blowing, the sun, etc.

In nature context can dictate the form, add all of the context together and you get the form of a tree growing around a fence and leaning towards the sun.

When we design from scratch we decide form from our understanding of context, which is why there are so many poorly designed things (ie. the Apple app. store or a two party political system). These are derived from a poor understanding of context.

Humans are a mixture of both. Context decides if we have scars or are malnourished (and thus small) or if we are abused as children. Form designed from scratch is what job we choose to work at, what neighborhood we live in (as adults), who we marry, what religion (however, often chosen by context needs to be chosen by form) how many kids we have (as of the last 40 years), etc.

When was the last time you sat down and figured out what is form in your life that you are letting be designed by context (your diet?). And when was the last time you struggled designing something your context has total control over (your past?).

Theory of Everything

I've heard it said that Einstein was always most interested in discovering the theory of everything, one theory that tied all the different sciences together. This is intriguing in theology because I've always thought that something that is a belief should be backed by another belief. Just keep following the belief trail about different assumptions and it may lead you to a rather shaking foundation etc.

Business tends to run this way as well, you see giant companies acting foolish and receiving a fools reward vs. other companies that seemed to have figured out their business theory of everything, basing all of their products off of it. Southwest - no frills, cheap air travel. Starbucks - high end, coffee related daily rewards. Nike - be you but better.

It's all around, one day is the world spinning once on its axis, one year is the world spinning around the sun as an axis. An eight pound baby is born and yet contains all of the essential organs and body functions that a two hundred pound forty year old adult does.

This is why truly smart people are interested by everything, because everything is one thing and one thing represents everything. Einstein new this about music, Richard Branson knows this about each and every person, he has filled up seven hundred pocket notebooks with other peoples thoughts from everyday conversations he has had throughout his life. Robert Gelinas knows this about jazz and Christianity.

When you figure something out, relate it immediately to everything else in your life and see if you are not enlightened by yourself. And if you are having trouble with something, retreat to an area of expertise and search for the answers there.

Completely...

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Completely aware, and acting on it.





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Dead already

It's in style to talk about all of the sheeple out there living in suburbia who are dead already, the sleep walkers.

Lincoln said, "Most men die at 20, they just aren't buried for another forty years". The underlying theme in the film Zombie Land (gory and wonderful). George Ivanovitch Gurdjief stated it as "A considerable percentage of the people we meet in the streets of a great town are people who are empty inside, that is, they are actually already dead."

But this is where it has stayed, hundreds of years we have been warned about sleep walking, becoming the zombie, dying on the inside. Stop the warnings, bring on the solution, and while we're at it let's take this theory to the next level.

The Solution

Wake up and stop being a loser who does what their shown/told.

The Next Level

Death on the outside. How about living a life on the outside that is repugnant to those who are dead on the inside?

You know those people, those people in little matching boxes driving little matching boxes trying to save 100k to send their kids to little matching boxes so finally at 70 they can finish the royal flush by sliding quietly into rows in... little matching boxes.

Live a life that looks like death to those people. Live a life where a company doesn't market to you because you are not a demographic.

Happyness

Tim Ferris once said that the opposite of happiness is not sadness, it's boredom. This statement alone can change your thinking, but let me take it a step further. What is the opposite of sadness?

Stability.

You have a friend that has just found out their mom was in a car accident, would you invite them to a day at the amusement park to lift their spirits with a few roller coaster rides? Of course this seems silly, you would tell them to find out if their mom was ok, get some information, if she was close by to go visit. All of these things are like little pillars around this person creating stability.

You can run pretty far with this. If you are financially traumatized, don't try and get rich, just get your feet under you until things settle. If you are going through health issues, don't train for a marathon, just start eating healthy and getting fresh air every day. Relationship problems, sit and have a quiet meal with your partner, don't try and recreate your honeymoon.

Lastly, if you are unhappy, get out and do something. You will not find happiness in a slightly newer car, a slightly bigger house, one more outfit, a vacation in Europe instead of Florida. All of these things represent leveling up your comfort and stability. Instead, push yourself. Maybe you do need to train for that marathon.

Pulling the Trigger

Decision making is hard. Climbing the whole mountain is impossible.

Decision making becomes much harder when we only make monumental decisions that we have to marry for the rest of our lives. As some call it, pulling the trigger.

The issue is that most of the time we should be making tiny decisions that we can undo just as fast as we did them. We make a hundred tiny decisions and they all add up to create a mass and momentum that are what we were truly trying to achieve all along. We never pull the trigger.

Pulling the trigger fires the gun, you can never unfire a gun. Pulling the trigger can kill something. Pulling the trigger is terrifying, so why do we continuously put ourselves in the position to have to?

Want to get in shape, lace up some shoes you already own and go for a walk, don't pull the trigger on a $500 gym membership. Want to change careers, go volunteer for a day doing something you might be passionate about, don't pull the trigger on your job.

So go out there today and don't make a big decision, just dip your toe, it's a lot easier than jumping in.

Running to the noise

In a world completely thrashed with noise I find it interesting that we so often run towards more noise. When we go shopping we head to the mall. When we go on vacation we head to Vegas. When we want to eat out we find crowded, popular restaurants downtown. When we wish for entertainment we run towards television which spikes twenty minutes of commercials into our face for every hour of couch time.

If you watch 1 hour of television a day (stop lying, 5 maybe) then you watch 560 minutes of commercials a month. If you bought Netflix for $9 a month and streamed those shows you would save over nine hours. Next time you get on a plane and they ask, "would you like to upgrade to our flight that takes one hour less for $1", smile, shake your head no, and then stare at the back of that seat for an hour watching your life filch away.

Stop running towards the noise. Start searching, spending, working to get towards the quiet.

100% of this post was stolen from my fantastic wife Kelsey, come on Kelsey, lets escape the noise and get out of here soon.

Frankenbusiness

Today we are going to play a little game where we hook up the neck bolts of our company to a lighting rod and bring the ugly thing to life. The game consists of two questions and it if you follow me to the end, or cheat and jump to the end right now... welcome back cheaters, this post will relate to everyone. I played this game with Dance Core:

1)What would your business look like if it where a real person?

2) What do you want your business to look like as a real person?

Interesting question here and it could be answered a couple of different ways. Maybe you imagine taking your business to a holiday party and look at it through the eyes of the guests. Is your business sexy? Did your business get drunk and make out with a stranger? (mine sadly did but we are getting over that, at least there aren't many pictures) Does your business talk softly telling stories or loudly yell jokes? Is your business a man or a woman? Does your business brag, are they well kept or could they use a haircut and deodorant? Is your business confident about itself or does it cower behind you?

We may not have control over our business all the time but much of that we can decide. More accurately in tune with parenting we can lead correctly and hope for the best instead of just sitting back while your business lives in your basement smoking pot.

So how does this apply to everybody? Well, replace the word business with career, house, hobby. You would not go to a party with a guy wearing a piano tie, so why are you letting your resume out dressed up like that?

Seth Godin and Steroids

If you click on the title or here you can read Seth Godin's post from this morning. The interesting thing for me is to take his idea a step further and say that trying harder is a race to the bottom. Take the baseball pitchers. Throw the ball really fast and you succeed. So everyone starts working really hard at throwing a ball faster. Then they start changing training techniques. Then they start changing their diets. Then they start taking steroids.

Roger Clemens (steroids) was 6'4" and 240 lbs, at 47! He hit the wall of work harder, and then realized there was still another step. Where Seth leaves off is sometimes working harder is actually not the end, but the end is even worse.

There is another pitcher in baseball aptly nicknamed "The Freak" who is 5'11" and 170 lbs. Seventy pounds less then Roger. Five inches shorter than Roger. I promise you, that if Tim Lincecum had tried to beat Roger by working harder, changing nutrition and shooting steroids, he still would not have won. And yet he did, best pitcher two years in a row. Sometimes you need to stop working harder not because there is nowhere else you can go, but because there is no where else you should go.

Before you lose a leg and have a wheel leg like the maid from the jetsons

I once read a book called "Good Calories Bad Calories" back in 2008, great read, a thousand pages of technical insight on the long road of how we got to where we are when it comes to our view on calories if my memory serves me. Here's a note I jotted down after reading it.

Enter Ben 2008 -

Just putting in junk hours is like eating carbs, it makes you think that more will help and in reality you are just getting fat and closer to death. But meat, meat satisfies and solves, meat is tightly held in one package that includes everything, meat is neither sweet or bitter or sour, but rather, it is meat.

Something had to die for you to eat meat, does that register?

What dies when you put in meat hours?

1200 cal of junk carb's make you lose little weight and feel like your starving, 1200 cal of meat makes you full and healthy (check out the Inuit's). A cool thousand bucks can buy you a big tv and leave you feeling starved: Forty hours in a week can make you believe that you need to put in another forty just to break even. Or you can spend one hour a day tutoring a child so they can graduate high school: Spend a thousand bucks on giving a needy family a furnace. We spend all week at work snacking on hours, and then we take the money we earn there and spend it on more empty calories. Now we wonder why we have emotional and financial diabetes?

Re-enter Ben 2010 - I think relating this thought to time = money is important because both sides of the equation can vary so greatly. Not all time/money is created equally, dump the empty calories/time/money from your life and start consuming smaller amounts of quality. Did you know that our bodies can get most of the nutrients we need from meat even though they are in tiny quantities compared to fruits and vegetables. This is because carb's force our body to work overtime (and create to much insulin) and we don't absorb the tiny but sufficient nutrients such as vitamin D.

Money CAN buy happiness

There was a great article here about money and happiness. An aggressively interesting part is when they discussed the concept of what we are buying.

"Part of the problem is that happiness isn’t necessarily what’s motivating us when we reach for our wallets."

This is interesting because most of us work eight to twelve hours a day for money and then think long and hard about how we are going to spend our money. We then bemoan that money can't buy us happiness when in fact that is not what we were trying to buy in the first place. What if somebody close to you spent a year saving money, took twenty thousand dollars in cash and went and bought a beautiful car with it. Three months later they come to you and complain that the car was not giving them the the benefit of retirement security that they had hoped for. It is not that money can't buy you retirement security, that's just not what you bought.

So read the article and then go out today and buy yourself some happiness or stop complaining that your money is broken.

Time = Wealth

If we believe the concept that time equals wealth then we must take a step back because it means five life altering things -

1. Each morning we all have the same amount of wealth
2. At any given moment we all have the same chance of losing all of our wealth forever
3. It is a type of wealth that can only be utilized when spent, today's wealth will mold the moment you go to bed tonight
4. We consider wealth to be security, so how do we handle the notion that we have wealth (yay your alive) with the fact that there is zero security (lookout for that truck).
   
5. Lastly a question: Does the act of hurrying, multitasking, utilizing, going as fast as possible actually decrease the value of any given moments in a day?
   

The village idiot

There used to be a village idiot, somebody who did not fit in, which is mostly because everyone else fit in. The shoemaker fit in because when he was ten he started working for the old shoemaker and learned how to not be an idiot. The school teacher fit in because she went to school and then left for more school and then brought that school back.

Then along came entrepreneurship, this hard to spell endeavor, that said that you can succeed with an idea and passion. And oh by the way, it helps if you don't fit in, it helps to stand out and be a purple cow and a lone wolf and a leader (but early on nobody will follow you because you're a trail blazer). The problem is that now you're the idiot.

I became the idiot because I started a small business without the realization of a couple things, here are just five, out of order and importance:

1. It takes decades to start a cool business and decades past that to mature a cool business.
2. You don't get rich just because you start a business.
3. You have to do things you don't like and that make you uncomfortable.
4. I really do not have very much knowledge/intelligence/insight/etc.
5. Ideas do not win, implementation wins.

But do you know the real reason I became the idiot, because the people who are not the idiot are filling a role that already exists and doing it well. Furthermore, the idiot tends to think that everybody else is an idiot (or sheep, or sheeple, or cog, or drone). But those cogs, those drones, took years (remember the shoemaker starting at 10) to get good at becoming normal, how much harder (and more difficult) is it going to be to create a movement and lead that movement.

The world is moving so fast now that we forget how long it takes to become something, except the village idiot, with the right moves you can become that overnight.

Failure spiral

A documentary on the south pole, shot by renowned film maker Werner Herzog, follows a group of people taking the mandatory upon arrival survival course. They do a drill called bucket head, where they place (you guessed it) buckets on their head to simulate a white-out snow storm that kills your eyesight completely and muffles your hearing. They then have to leave the building to go find somebody lost a hundred feet away. As they leave the building, guide rope in hand to help them find their way back, they yell out numbers - "One out the door", "Two out the door" etc.

They start out well but then begin a circle back on themselves and get tangled in the rope. The instructor turns to the camera, as we watch in the background a bunch of bucket heads bumping into each other, and says "This is really important, we want to see if they will realized their mistake and return to the building to formulate a new plan or if this will turn into a failure spiral where one mistake leads to another mistake which leads to another and never ends".

1) I've been in a failure spiral for a couple years now, it's interesting when your in it because you spend so much time trying to figure out your next move when your really need to go back to the building. What gets really wild is that each decision you make seemingly makes it so much harder to make the decision to go back, we're this far now why restart?
2) I don't know how they picked guy #1 but he acted like guy number one, leading by pulling on the rope and yelling, and guy number three acted like guy number three, following, bucket on head, collecting a paycheck (only kidding all you paycheck junkies). The moment you are lost you have to realize that guy #1 (also known as Ben in many examples) got you here and all power is shifted to the last person in line, the one holding the rope that leads directly back to the building.
3) Realizing that there is a bucket on your head is paramount, the same rules don't apply as in regular life. Sometimes you have to restart, sometimes you have to slow down, sometimes the person at either end of the rope has to take control.

Crack Addicts

Quick thought on customers and crack addicts.

Customers tell us at the dance studio and the construction company regularly that they can not afford our services. I recently had a customer tell me they were leaving for a few reasons (we were far away etc) and at the end just threw on "and financial hardships of course..." They just emailed and dropped they were attending a studio much closer to their house, that studio is more that 200% what we charge.

This is where the crack addicts come in.

Crack addicts will tell you all about financial hardships, but they will never tell you they do not have enough money for crack. Gambling addicts will tell you they have financial hardships but they will never say they wish they had more money to gamble. The reason, possibly it is faux pas to say you wish you had more crack, or maybe it is that you find the money to buy what is most important to you, even at the detriment of the rest of your life.

If you are selling something boring, even if it's needed, you'd better simply get comfortable with people kvetching about financial hardships. The other option is to sell crack. Sell something that people put first.

Lastly as a individual note, I hope we can all stop lying and just say "Your dance studio is really far away and just kind of average for me and not worth the drive." Because otherwise we are going to convince ourselves we have money problems when we can actually afford to pay twice as much for right around the corner, twice as much for amazing, twice as much for meeting all my needs.

Big You

Spent some time recently thinking about "Big You". For me, Big You comes from a few different points with the basic concept that Big You is really who you are but we spend each and every day letting little you decide where we are going. Big You knows they should delay gratification but little you lets the stress of a car breaking down push you into a new car loan. Big You knows the importance of having balance in your physical life but little you does not want to put their shoes on and go out for a walk/run.

Whether it is the white pebble, whether it is the zen "big mind", or Paul talking about the flesh and the spirit this concept is brought together from a lot of different view points and readings. Maybe this thought process was brought on by news years resolutions, maybe it is just the disconnect between knowing and doing but this has really taken hold.

I am going to try to turn this thought into a manifesto of a little substance and then use that to steer me through this new year. Please be patient as I try to put this all together, for me to get one conscious thought pieced together takes quite a bit of time.

Let us be big people, let us do what we know to do, let us finally realize that the only one that can let us is us, and the only one that can stop us is us.