Category: dignity

Marketing must match its product, both the content and the method. Sometimes, “not marketing” at all is the best kind of marketing. We never know. Never believe someone who claims to tell you the right way of marketing a product. If a business must reinvent itself every five years—and introduce new products every year—and come out with multiple advertisements for each product—that puts marketing on the more extreme list of things that need constant reinvention.

Some skills and theories never change, such as color theory and typing speed. But, non-changers are few. Think beyond the billboard itself. Is a visual ad even necessary? What about strategic logo placement or contributing to a needy open source software project? To some extent, the best products market themselves.

Of course, when you have a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail. That explains the marketers who want everything to be done via one specific action plan of, say, social media. Those marketers happen to be familiar with that particular marketing avenue: social media. Stay shy of such people, they want to sell you something.

In order to know if something works, it must be tested. Whether in product development or software development, flaws are found by trial, error, and stress. Tradition carries beauty and wisdom, but even traditions can be tested and come out wanting. It is the test, not the tradition, that proves a thing valuable.

Writing endless blog posts just because everyone else is writing endless blog posts doesn’t mean consumers will have more time to read every piece of blogosophere spam—though many copywriters would have us think so. Copywriting is useful, but not over-useful. Stay focused on your mission—on your pivotal purpose.

Marketing “lets people know”. We market ourselves all the time. It’s called “fashion”. Economic recessions zero impact on cosmetic sales. That doesn’t prove makeup is a “need”, but that individual marketing is a marketable “need”. The same physiological programming that drives people to spend emergency money on hairspray also drives those same people to post pictures and “statuses” on the “bragosphere”. We know that because recessions test markets. Test everything and everything will make more sense.

Don’t badger people about their need to change. It’s best if you just live your life wisely. That will inspire others in some way, thus offering the best chance that others will choose to change.

You don’t want people to change to whatever things you dictate for them, to become the image you make them into. You will be much happier with friends who gladly live out their own empowered lives. Having real, genuine relationships requires that you accept people as they are.

Give tips, such as brushing teeth (a bigger problem outside the West, but just for example). But, tips are not any attempt to fundamentally change someone’s bad habits or hygiene. People always grow and change.

Change comes by inspiration. We change into whomever we need to in order to pursue what captivates us. So, rather than “changing” others, change yourself; become captivating just by existing, without explanation. Be an inspiration by example. Improve your own habits. Get better at whatever you want other people to do. When we perceive that we want something to change in someone else, that’s Life’s way of showing us what to change about ourselves. Once you truly, fully, all-out, no-stops change yourself into top-grade material, you won’t even care to consider changing others. You’ll find “changing others” was just a distraction from the most important person to give a talk to: the one in the mirror.

The tongue gets everyone into a lot of trouble no matter how old we get. The best way to rein it in is to focus: Manage your own life. Then you will be comfortable with one-word answers, whether you give the answer or whether someone gives the answer to you. You won’t spill your beans when someone asks an inflammatory question or hurtles accusation. You won’t need to lie or feel guilty. You’ll easily speak only what helps, rebuking no more than necessary, never complaining, focusing on the helpful difference you can make.

If you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything. Change yourself first. Talk about what you’ve done and the changes you’ve made yourself. Everything else is superfluous. Change is contagious and it starts with changing oneself.

In life, we learn and grow, choose and become. One single human life contains an equilibrium to itself, made up of whatever morals we held, skills we learned, self-control we gained, strength we grew, knowledge we discovered, truth we accepted, friends we earned, enemies we notarized, fruits we yielded, gratitude we gave, and beauty we beheld.

Skill, hard work, learning, and stewardship are some pieces of a much larger ecosystem. All of the components of a healthy life can never be exhausted or listed since living life includes searching out what it means to live. Knowledge becomes outdated or added to. Stuff we gain from good stewardship decays and blows away in the wind. But, things like character and virtue matter eternally. From hard work and stewardship, we cannot help but gain good character and godly virtue because good character and godly virtue both require and lead to hard work and fruitful stewardship. But, the actual work and stewardship themselves are mere means to the greater ends of enjoyment and godliness that last into the next life.

Don’t sacrifice or overemphasize any one aspect of a well-rounded life over another. Like stones in an archway, every component is important. The ongoing quest is to identify all of the parts of your life that matter to your journey of today and remember them all throughout the day.

Remembering everything to remember is a near-impossible task. As ever-growing humans, our lives are prone to disproportion. Never think that you have arrived at perfect balance of the juggling act of life’s many values because the moment you become perfect, your purpose in life is expired and it’s time to pass on. God makes sure that we each die when we become as perfect as we will ever be—either by becoming nearly perfect or by refusing to.

We can never measure the impact or value of our own lives. You might help a million souls see the light or you might mentor only one child who does. Which is greater—the world-changer or his mentor—is for Eternity to decide. Gauge your life’s value, not by what you see in this lifetime, but by values transcending into Eternity.

The troubles and struggles along the pathway to any victory ought be expected. Unfortunately many of the world’s mentors skip this lesson with their pupils. Athletic coaches talk about it, but institutional establishments paint a very different and false picture—that diligent homework makes friends and a shoe-in financial statement. But, that’s just propagandist brainwashing for institutions to make obedient minions, rewarding them with frictionless perks.

Real victory is bloody, sweaty, and teary. Consider the trailblazers and pioneers of the Wild West. Anything new, fresh, and growing will cut into the wild and untame. Anyone who does new, fresh, and growing work will adapt one’s tastes to find comfort and familiarity in the fray.

Institutions and establishments, by contrast, sterilize their environments before entering. If the masses allow—and sometimes they do—institutions will raze the jungle, mill the logs into poles, and plunge them back into the ground like a field of giant toothpicks where trees once stood, labeling it a “better” forest to explore. But, nature is organic and spontaneous.

Each tree, each grass and moss and bird and critter thrive uniquely—differently yet in kind. Life sprawls with ordered chaos having a purpose necessary to biological progress. That life is strong and powerful, able to overcome… whatever—even a forest fire, even nuclear fallout. Consider the environment around Chernobyl.

The bumpy, irregular path of real life makes us tired. Enemies return flack when the good guys make progress. Wisdom tells us this is normal. But, institutions see the unique irregularities of life as a nuisance and it makes them depressed. Thus, institutions and their teachers pass on their depression to their pupils—to their minions. To hear any institutional culture speak of life is disheartening. It has neither spunk nor spark, completely deflated and complacent.

“It’s so hard,” they say. “I don’t know how I’ll make it, but I’ll keep going a little longer. This life isn’t easy, full of trouble.” For the so-called “godly” institutions, they inject “institutional hope”—”God will come help me some day and rescue me from this depressing existence.” Such is lifeless Institutionalism.

Know this truth and thrive: Winners are not weary as victims, but as victors.

Troubles come from a variety of sources. Some troubles come from our own stupidity, others come from outside forces we cannot control. When you see someone else caught in too much trouble, don’t add to it.

Help everyone; it doesn’t matter where their trouble came from. Helping people out of trouble that they made for themselves is not an irresponsible thing to do. In fact, it shows people that there is a better and higher way of life on Earth. They already regret their difficulty, they’re likely too embarrassed to say so. When you see someone evidently in distress, nothing says that you know they caused their own problem like proving that you know just how to help them out of it.

When someone tries to apologize, but their effort might seem to be only half of a full apology, just accept their apology as it is. “Um, maybe I was not quite right about half of the things I might have said yesterday when…” Just interrupt the person and say, “Apology accepted. I completely forgive you. Let’s move on.” That will deal with the issue much more effectively than putting them on the witness stand, demanding a full confession in open court. It will address any lack of sincerity, avoid unnecessary shame, and grow your friendship at the same time.

Do not make people fully confess their wrong before you personally forgive them.

Western children understand seeking forgiveness. Good parents demand a full apology from their children to train them to be honest. But, as adults, we must mature beyond our acquired appetite for fully fledged confessions from others.

Love conceals a sin. This does not mean that you have become an accomplice by not shaming and publicly scorning everyone for every transgression. By granting merciful shadows to hide in, you allow people to search their hearts and resolve to be better people without making it impossible to show their faces in public.

If you can help people in distress from their own folly, then you can help anyone in distress. So, what caused other’s problems isn’t your own problem to solve. Just offer a friendly boost wherever you see a boost is needed.

Everyone needs to lead, mainly lead ourselves.

You don’t need people telling you how to be you and you certainly don’t need people telling you how to be them. When people give you flack for doing things the way you do them in your life, the answer is to get them out of your life decisions and somehow help them to focus on leading their own lives.

No one knows how to be you better than you, God notwithstanding. While achieving the never-before-achieved, every achiever has friends who moonlight as naysayers saying, “You can’t do that,” and, “it’s not done that way.” Actually, they mean, “It’s not failed that way.” Achieving what’s never been done requires doing what’s never been done and doing those never-before-done things in a way that’s never been done that way.

People who’ve never done it haven’t figured that part out yet. So far, they have only “done”, not “done never-before-done”. They began with questions, learned to do things they way other people had already been doing things for a long time, sprinkled a couple pinches of “new ideas” atop the frosting, and decided how every master chef should invent a new cake recipe. The world does, indeed, have many people who need to learn what’s already been learned—including you to some extent.

But, doing what’s already been done didn’t bring us where we are. At some point, we need those one-in-a-million weird-o types, the trailblazers, the pioneers, the people who boldly go… anywhere they feel like. Trailblazers always take flack from friends who think that leveling new paths indicates a mental illness—and that they are the ones to treat it.

Think of yourself as a time traveler. Going back in time—to the situation where you are now—to the situation where people have never seen what you have already seen in your mind’s eye. Don’t try to argue with history and certainly don’t start any time paradoxes. Just shut yer trap, work, talk only with people who contribute to the controversial effort, and tell your other “volunteer therapist” friends trying to fix you, “I’d rather have you show me what never-before-imagined work only you could get done.”