In his book, “The Four Agreements,” Don Miguel Ruiz says…“There are thousands of agreements you have made with yourself, with other people, with your dream life, with God, with society, with your parents, with your spouse, with your children. But the most important agreements are the ones you made with yourself. In these agreements you tell yourself who you are, what you feel, what you believe, and how to behave. The result is what you call your personality. In these agreements you say, “This is what I am. This is what I believe. I can do certain things, and some things I cannot do. This is reality, that is fantasy; this is possible, that is possible.”One single agreement is not such a problem, but we have many agreements that make us suffer, that make us fail in life. If you want to live a life of joy and fulfillment, you have to find the courage to break those agreements that are fear-based and claim your personal power. The agreements that come from fear require us to expend a lot of energy, but the agreements that come from love help us to conserve energy and even gain extra energy.Each of us is born with a certain amount of personal power that we rebuild every day after we rest. Unfortunately, we spend all our personal power first to create all these agreements and then to keep these agreements. Our personal power is dissipated by all the agreements we have created, and the result is that we feel powerless. We have just enough power to survive each day, because most of it is used to keep the agreements that trap us in the dream of the planet. How can we change the entire dream of our life when we have no power to change even the smallest agreement?If we can see it is our agreements which rule over our life, and we don’t like the dream of our life, we need to change our agreements. When we are finally ready to change our agreements, there are four very powerful agreements that will help us break those agreements that come from fear and deplete our energy.Each time you break an agreement, all the power you used to create it returns to you. If you adopt these four new agreements, they will create enough personal power for you to change the entire system of your old agreements.You need a very strong will in order to adopt the Four Agreements — but if you can begin to live your life with these agreements, the transformation in your life will be amazing. You will see the drama of hell disappear right before your very eyes. Instead of living in a dream of hell, you will be creating a new dream — your personal dream of heaven.The Four Agreements:1 – Be Impeccable With Your Word – this is the most important agreement and also the most difficult to one to honor. It is so important that with just this first agreement you will be able to transcend to the level of existence I call heaven on earth.This agreement sounds very simple, but is very, very powerful. Your word is the power that you have to create. Your word is the gift that comes directly from God. Through the word you express your creative power. It is through the word that you manifest everything. Regardless of what language you speak, your intent manifests through the word. What you dream, what you feel, and what you really are, will all be manifested through the word.The word is not just a sound or a written symbol. The word is a force; it is the power you have to express and communicate, to think, and thereby to create the events in your life. The word is the most powerful tool you have as a human. But like a sword with two edges, your word can create the most beautiful dream, or your word can destroy everything around you. One edge is the misuse of the word, which creates a living hell. The other edge is the impeccability of the word, which will only create beauty, love, and heaven on earth. Depending on how it is used, the word can set you free, or it can enslave you even more than you know.2 – Don’t Take Anything Personally – Whatever happens around you, don’t take it personally. If I see you on the street and say, “Hey, you are so stupid,” without knowing you, it’s not about you; it’s about me. If you take it personally, then perhaps you believe you are stupid. Maybe you think to yourself, “How does he know? Is he clairvoyant, or can everybody see how stupid I am?”You take it personally because you agree with whatever was said. As soon as you agree, the poison goes through you, and you are trapped in the dream of hell. What causes you to be trapped is what we call personal importance. Personal importance, or taking things personally, is the maximum expression of selfishness because we make the assumption that everything is about “me.” During the period of our education, or our domestication, we learn to take everything personally. We think we are responsible for everything. Me, me, me, always me!Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves. All people live in their own dream, in their own mind; they are in a completely different world from the one we live in. When we take something personally, we make the assumption that they know what is in our world, and we try to impose our world on their world.Even when a situation seems so personal, even if others insult you directly, it has nothing to do with you. What they say, what they do, and the opinions they give are according to the agreements they have in their own minds. Their point of view comes from all the programming they received during domestication.When you take things personally, then you feel offended, and your reaction is to defend your beliefs and create conflicts. You make something big out of something so little, because you have the need to be right and make everybody else wrong. You also try hard to be right by giving them your own opinions. In the same way, whatever you feel and do is just a projection of your own personal dream, a reflection of your own agreements. What you say, what you do, and the opinions you have are according to the agreements you have made — and these opinions have nothing to do with me.Others are going to have their own opinion according to their belief system, so nothing they think about me is really about me, but it is about them.You may even tell me, “what you are saying is hurting me.” But it is not what I am saying that is hurting you; it is that you have wounds that I touch by what I have said. You are hurting yourself. There is no way I can take this personally. Not because I don’t believe in you or don’t trust you, but because I know that you see the world with different eyes, with your eyes. You create an entire picture or movie in your mind, and in that picture you are the director, you are the producer, you are the main actor or actress. Everyone else is a secondary actor or actress. It is your movie.The way you see that movie is according to the agreements you have made with life. Your point of view is something personal to you. It is no one’s truth but yours. Then, if you get mad at me, I know you are dealing with yourself. I am the excuse for you to get mad. And you get mad because you are afraid, because you are dealing with fear. If you are not afraid, there is no way you will get mad at me. If you are not afraid, there is no way you will hate me. If you are not afraid, there is no way you will be jealous or sad.If you live without fear, if you love, there is no place for any of those emotions. If you don’t feel any of those emotions, it is logical that you will feel good. When you feel good, everything around you is good. When everything around you is great, everything makes you happy. You are loving everything around you, because you are loving yourself. Because you like the way you are. Because you are content with you. Because you are happy with your life. You are happy with the movie that you are producing, happy with your agreements with your life. You are at peace, and you are happy.If someone is not treating you with love and respect, it is a gift if they walk away from you. If that person doesn’t walk away, you will surely endure many years of suffering with him or her. Walking away may hurt for awhile, but your heart will eventually heal. Then you can choose what you really want. You will find that you don’t need to trust others as much as you need to trust yourself to make the right choices.3 – Don’t Make Assumptions – We have the tendency to make assumptions about everything. The problem with making assumptions is that we believe they are the truth. We could swear they are real. We make assumptions about what others are doing or thinking — we take it personally — then we blame them and react by sending emotional poison with our word. That is why whenever we make assumptions, we’re asking for problems. We make an assumption, we misunderstand, we take it personally, and we end up creating a whole big drama for nothing. It is always better to ask questions than to make an assumption, because assumptions set us up for suffering.We make the assumption that everyone sees life the way we do. We assume that others think the way we think, feel the way we feel, judge the way we judge, and abuse the way we abuse. This is the biggest assumption that humans make. And this is why we have a fear of being ourselves around others. Because we think everyone else will judge us, victimize us, abuse us, and blame us as we do ourselves. So even before others have a chance to reject us, we have already rejected ourselves. That is the way the human mind works. We also make assumptions about ourselves, and this creates a lot of inner conflict.4 – Always Do Your Best – Under any circumstances, always do your best, no more and no less. But keep in mind that your best is never going to be the same from one moment to the next. Everything is alive and changing all the time, so your best will sometimes be high quality, and other times it will not be as good. When you wake up refreshed and energized in the morning, your best will be better than when you are tired at night. Your best will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick, or sober as opposed to drunk. Your best will depend on whether you are feeling wonderful and happy, or upset, angry, or jealous.In your everyday moods your best can change from one moment to another, from one hour to the next, from one day to another. Your best will also change over time. As you build the habit of the four new agreements, your best will become better than it used to be.Doing your best, you are going to live your life intensely. You are going to be productive, you are going to be good to yourself, because you will be giving yourself to your family, to your community, to everything. But it is the action that is going to make you feel intensely happy. When you always do your best, you take action. Doing your best is taking the action because you love it, not because you’re expecting a reward. Most people do exactly the opposite. They only take action when they expect a reward, and they don’t enjoy the action. And that’s the reason why they don’t do their best.If you do your best always, over and over again, you will become a master of transformation. If you do your best in the search for personal freedom, in the search for self-love, you will discover that’s its just a matter of time before you find what you are looking for.”
Not much strategy here. Just looking to dump my car lease. Ad-wise I think we’re just looking for some WOM and maybe geo-targeted adwords, if needed.
I’m also throwing in a month’s payment to sweeten the pot so that should help. You should know there are 28 months left on this lease @ 12k mileage per year. Here are the details:
http://www.swapalease.com/lease/details/2009ToyotaHighlander.aspx?salid=593286
Not much strategy here. Just looking to dump my car lease. Ad-wise I think we’re just looking for some WOM and maybe geo-targeted adwords, if needed.
I’m also throwing in a month’s payment to sweeten the pot so that should help. You should know there are 28 months left on this lease @ 12k mileage per year. Here are the details:
http://www.swapalease.com/lease/details/2009ToyotaHighlander.aspx?salid=593286
Not a big fan of football, but always find the ads interesting. Frankly a bit surprised to see Google as one of the advertisers here. A couple of reactions here on multiple levels for me:
1) the fact that Google has built it’s brand without traditional advertising and is now making its first foray into the most traditional of traditional. The fact that this is a feel good ad would lead me to believe that that they might have concerns around Google’s brand health vis a vis its’ “don’t be evil motto.”
2) shows the tremendous power of search as (Jeff Herzog used to say) a) a reverse direct marketing tool, and b) more interestingly to me, to harvest data on searchers to pinpoint where in the funnel they are and where they might be going next
3) to #2, and my previous post, how we can begin to harvest this stuff as marketers in aggregate, and begin to make more sense of it. Makes personas and market segmentation seem a little brute force when you can get down to this level of granularity and level of true observation/ insight. Literally a direct view into the searchers’ brain in real time. So as strategic advertisers, it’s not so much about attitudes, as it is about correlations between search content and search behavior, and other data, to make predictive, and therefore useful insights about consumers so we can better meet their needs, and of course, sell more stuff..
So I’ve been off for a few weeks - wife is filing for a divorce.
I just got back from a first visit to my lawyer who spent 1 hour telling me how screwed I was financially. It cost me $600 to tell me this, ironically.
All I know from the end of all this is this:
Marriage is a bad deal for men.
Truly the quickest way to commit financial hari kari is to get married, let your lazy wife get dependent on you, then have a kid. Then they leave you and take a huge chunk of your income. It’s like strapping dynamite to your financial testicles and giving the detonator to your arch enemy. Have a nice day.
Poker is a game of incomplete information. Most people think that this and its random nature make it at its core a game of luck. But in actuality poker is a game not just of luck, but of psychology and statistics, because if you know the odds of hitting your next card, and you understand the body language and psychology of your opponent, then over the course of time, you should win more pots than you lose.
I think that advertising is more akin to poker than we might care to admit. We play for the many pots which represent all the wallets of our customers, against our competition, and we make big and creative bets to win them. We believe that if we craft the right message, deliver it at the right place, and at the right time, our prospects and customers will buy from us. To be clear, I am referring here not only about traditional advertising, but newer more direct, conversational and social CRM forms as well.
In practice we go to work every day and as sophisticated as we believe ourselves to be, at a fundamental level we are engaged in playing basically just another game of incomplete information, albeit within a much larger and much more luck based construct. There is far more complexity in the mass human psyche than what can happen within a relatively simple game of poker, I should think.
Take just one person randomly out of your target audience. Despite all the research that’s been done on this target, truth be told, do we really have a clue what is happening with this one person on a real fundamental level in terms of behavior, motivations, drivers, life history, or any other of the multitude of random things that might be running through their brain at different moments in different situations? The persona we built about their “active lifestyle” just doesn’t cut it IRL, and although a bit more sophisticated, nor do some of the fancy predictive models we’ve built, either. There is still just too much unknown for him or her, much less anyone else. So we take our best guess based on some assumptions.
Now imagine for a moment that magically all the cards at the table are turned over, and we were suddenly granted a perfect, Godlike perspective into who this person is, what this person does all day, what they think, and what they want. Then according to our original maxim we would be able to craft and deliver up a perfect message for this person, served on a platter to them at the perfect place, at just the perfect time, every time. And them we must win their business from our competition every time, which is basically why we are playing in the first place, and thus we would be the greatest advertisers in the history of the world, and be famous, and of course rich.
The whole prospect of win-fame-fortune in my life thus leads me to propose a new unifying fundamental theory of advertising to help guide me the way there, which based heavily on Sklansky’s fundamental theory of poker, and rooted in the idea of advertising = luck, and information = victory:
The Getner fundamental theory of advertising: Every time we take action differently than if we had complete information about our target we lose, and every time we respond the same as if we had complete information about our target we win. Conversely, every time our competition takes action differently towards our target audience than if they had complete information about our target we win, and every time our competition takes action the same as if they had complete information about our target we lose.
What this means is that advertising is at its core must become a target uncertainty reduction exercise, information gathering competition on an individual and collective level which must of course then be properly executed off of. Everything we do that doesn’t recognize these tenets of the fundamental theorem is essentially just wasted effort.
Fortunately we live in an age where advertising is poised to take the next great leap in effectiveness and power due to the rise of data mining and advanced analytics, enabled by the seismic media consumption shifts that we are currently participating in the midst of.
I think this fundamental advertising theorem has tremendous implications for what we need to do as advertisers and can act as a true north for all of our efforts especially as we head into the new decade.
The fundamental task for anyone who wants to win for their clients or their business will lie in an increasingly mathematical, data oriented, technology based approach because this I think has been proven over the past few years to be the best way to understand our target audience. As technology and data acquisition continues to advance more and more rapidly, those with the ability to be flexible, gather more, and make more sense of the data will win. That is why I know companies with creative data acquisition and utilization at their core like Google will continue to dominate in the future (buy more stock!). And why I am also very bullish on data based retail e-stores like Amazon, and geo-mobile and location based, behavioral tracking services in the next few years as well.
So channels that do not have creative data acquisition at their core will continue to remain relatively cost inefficient and increasingly archaic by comparison with the ones that do, in particular, digital and direct dialogue, for they will continue to improve results at the same ratio as practical implementation of new technology and data processing and mining and insight gathering occurs. I believe the information insight gap between the haves and the have nots that occurs will continue to grow in the coming years, and the power and results will be concentrated to the hands of a few. Essentially whether we know it or not yet, we are all engaged in the great data land grab in the coming decade as we all file into the position that we either land in or determine for ourselves. There is still time to catch up if we’re behind but it will require some nimbleness, a fundamental philosophical reorientation towards the fundamental theory, and the proper resources and structural investment put against them
The hyperacceleration of technology and media consumption shifts is ushering in a new age right before our eyes where the ratio of unknown to known information will be reduced even more drastically at a more rapid rate for many. And whatever privacy implications that might have, the agencies of the future that are able to creatively acquire, harness, and drive insight from the data better than the competition, by virtue of my fundamental theory, will have to win. And those that don’t, or do it poorly, will be increasingly relegated to bluffing, winning occasional big pots, but over time, must then necessarily become quite poorer, losing players by comparison.
entertaining 5 minute chat about data viz with some helpful tips. thanks to kipbot.
Ok so one of my 2010 resolutions that I fully intend to keep is to do a better job getting out there among my peeps and sharing some random thoughts, for whatever value that might provide. I think the primary issues anyone who wants to do this on any sort of scale might need to address:
1) Continued social media fragmentation - ie. where to share
2) How to do this without it turning into a major time sink
3) How to achieve 1 and 2 without any worlds colliding precipitiously (to explain in just a moment)
My solution to 1&2 were to basically use Posterous as the catch-all property, ie. the outbound hub for all posts, and setting up a presence on the various sites that they themselves support for auto-posting. The hub and spoke model definitely makes sharing a breeze, so you only have to worry about the content.
For the worlds colliding thing, I basically put together the attached few slides over a bout of insomnia tonight, so please excuse some of the ugly slides. It is nearly 3 am. :)
The concept of colliding worlds was inspired as you may remember by George Costanza railing against the notion of his dating and his friend personas colliding, and I think there might be some truth in it inasmuch as whether we like it or not, we do manage the face that we portray to our family, friends, and work quite differently. Further while I hear and do not disagree at all with the case for authenticity, the reality is most of us do divide our life into spheres, and so then I think there becomes a need to assign audiences & a purpose to the various social platforms that we might want to share our thoughts with.
Anyway, what do you think of all this…does this make sense? Does yours look similar? Or do you think that worlds colliding is in fact the point in the new media landscape (ie, keeping it real)? What does your personal social media strategy/ ecosystem look like?
If you see this lady turning clockwise you are using your right brain.
If you see her turning anti-clockwise, you are using your left brain.
Some people can see her turning both ways, but most people see her only one way.
See if you can make her go one way and then the other by shifting the brain’s current.
If you can switch between seeing her turn either way at will without shifting your gaze, your IQ is above 160 … which is almost at genius level!
This was devised at Yale University for a 5 year study on the human brain and its functions.
Only 14% of the US population can see her move both ways.
Posted via web from Greg Getner Heavy Industries Worldwide, Inc. | Comment »
