“There is no easy formula for determining right and wrong livelihood, but it is essential to keep the question alive. To return the sense of dignity and honor to manhood, we have to stop pretending that we can make a living at something that is trivial or destructive and still have sense of legitimate self-worth. A society in which vocation and job are separated for most people gradually creates an economy that is often devoid of spirit, one that frequently fills our pocketbooks at the cost of emptying our souls.”– Sam Keen
The Real Boss
“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.” – Sam Walton
Filed under Quotes
What Kind of Thing Must We Do?
In this interview, Tim Ferriss has the following to say:
“Converting your own passions into a job is the fastest method for eliminating any passion you once had.”
I think the above is true when you define a job as something that Michael Gerber talks about: one that you have to keep doing it, doing it, doing it day in and day out, with all the other associated chores that go with it. You don’t have a job, the job has you. And it has you trapped and bored.
So, what do you do?
Po Bronson might help us a bit. He says “…avoiding crap shouldn’t be the objective in finding the right work. The right question is, How can I find something that moves my heart, so that the inevitable crap storm is bearable?”
And, how do you make it bearable?
Umair Haque may have the answer. In his post on How to Build a Next-Gen Business Now, he lays out five steps to build such a business. The final step is:
“This final step - rediscovering meaning in the work we do – isn’t just the most difficult to come to grips with. It’s also the most critical – because though the other steps are necessary, they’re not sufficient. Without a deeply felt – and a powerfully lived – sense of meaning, every business will devolve to what the investment banks became: machines engineered with relentless precision to destroy long-run value, often implosively so.”
So, that’s that then. It’s the meaning one derives from one’s work that’s the source of fulfillment. A job that’s satisfying and fulfilling is the thing we need to strive for.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has written a book about the topic. Guy Kawasaki too says the same thing in his famous book, “The Art of the Start“:
“There really is only one question you should ask yourself before starting any new venture:
Do I want to make meaning?
Meaning is not about money, power, or prestige. It’s not even about creating a fun place to work. Among the meanings of “meaning” are to
- Make the world a better place.
- Increase the quality of life.
- Right a terrible wrong.
- Prevent the end of something good.”
So, let’s all go into the world and make some meaning.
Filed under Uncategorized
John Grisham’s a Happy Man
Here’s a wonderful article about John Grisham and his work. He got his first book published about 20 years ago, when he was about 34. And now, after all those years and after having several more popular books and movies based on his stories, he is a fantastic success. Read the article to know that he too faced financial trouble when young, that he too struggled earlier to complete books and to have them accepted for publication. Midway through the interview, he says that he “prefers to appreciate his success rather than boast about it“.
It’s a lot better to pay attention now to the life one needs to construct, and to work towards that vision. At the end of it all, it could mean the difference between one priding over a vast body of influential work and presiding over the debris of his or her dreams.
Filed under Favorite People, Your other self
Let’s Peddle Our Ideas
Watch this hugely informative and stimulating video of a talk that Seth Godin gives about the architectures that he’s used to get his books out to people in this digital age of ours.
Seth is a huge fan of the Internet. He welcomes it, embraces the disruptive changes that it brings about, studies it and figures out ways to use it to spread ideas and connect people.
The Internet is one medium that has the attention of the world like no other. And, what an incredibly malleable medium. You don’t need anybody’s permission to put things out there; you do not need a lot of money to do it, or a lot of time or a bunch of complicated tools. All you need are smart, creative ways to get your ideas across using media that the Internet is great a carrier of – text, audio, video, photographs, pictures and presentations. Using these, you are free to architect a strategy to get yourself heard by the niche that’s your target. All that it demands is some time spent thinking through the stuff you want to say, and a few hours of effort developing and publishing pertinent content. Now, how big an opportunity is that? How wonderfully democratic is that? And, how powerful is that?
When I look at the skyline of any great city, I am in awe at the power of the Internet: this is a medium through which almost every single person in those buildings could be potentially reached, at your and their leisure. No sweat from either side.
If you put across your message in a compelling enough manner, you begin to gather attention towards your material, which could then develop into permission to deliver more or better content. People can become your clique through which meaningful and creative interactions could happen.
It is an incredible, life-changing idea. If you have something to say, and if you can say it well and if that benefits people out there, you can form tribes (Seth’s term) that deliver mutual benefit using the content delivery and financial infrastructure that already exists for use by us all for free.
Filed under Your other self
A City of Character
I spent a magnificent day with “Images of World War II: Photographs from the Daily Mail“. Anyone in love with big, black-and-white documentary photographs would enjoy this one, containing for the most part pictures made in London during those times.
It’s surreal when it registers that you could walk around the same areas in the great city – the parliament buildings, the Buckingham Palace, the tube stations, Downing Street, Trafalgar Square, St. Paul’s Cathedral among the many more – that held such drama 60 years ago. The monuments develop such character when seen through these books that freeze history, having witnessed several epochs of change in the past 60 years. I felt privileged to experience the grandeur of them all, seemingly unshakable in these times of rapid development, in the same manner as scores of our kind have done through the past decades.
To behold the steady march of mankind across time around such pivotal points is fascinating.
Filed under Favorite Moments
What You Should Work On
An excerpt:
What jobs are secure from the onslaught of automation? Ben Goertzel says, “those that involve transferring knowledge from one area to another, or thinking broadly, creatively and integratively, because these [tasks] require powerful general intelligence, not just narrowly specialized intelligence.“
All the technology that’s being talked about right now are great enablers – they let you do something in a far more economical and time-sensitive way. But, they do not manufacture experiences for you. They don’t they engage in a conversation with you, nor do they empathize with you. They just enable you to do deterministic things better and faster. They stay within a boundary that involves itself in the mechanics of things. But, the translation of it into a certain quality of experience is still done by humans, depending upon the way they use it. Making music, movies or having stimulating telephonic conversations are all facilitated by technology, but technology does not translate things into an experience that people can cherish. This step still involves heavy human input.
As Dan Pink says, the skills that would still be sourced from humans would have the following three characteristics:
- Are you doing something that someone overseas can’t do cheaper?
- Are you doing something that a computer can’t do faster?
- Does what you do satisfy some of the spiritual, emotional, or esthetic needs of our society?
Doesn’t that give you something to think about? How are you preparing to thrive when such an era does descend?
Filed under Your other self
Spend – But on Others
This post on Vagablogging says that spending money on things might not buy you long term happiness, spending money on buying experiences gets you further but spending money on other people goes a long way to keep you happy.
Consider this excerpt, which has always rung true for me. And, I have lived by it – having spent a lot of my money on people. And, I derive lasting happiness from those memories.
Experiences are inherently more social [than buying things] – when we vacation or eat out or go to the movies it’s usually with other people, and we’re liable also to relive the experience when we see those people again. And past experiences can work as a sort of social adhesive even with people who didn’t participate with us, providing stories and conversational fodder in a way that a new watch or speedboat rarely can.
Filed under Your other self
The Meaning of It All
I interpret the purpose of life to be the continuous unfoldment of its powers, its growth into higher forms, that is to say, forms more complex and subtly contrived, capable of more intense and enduring kinds of that satisfaction which is nature’s warrant of life. – in The Book of Life by Upton Sinclair
That’s the best, the most practical and the most empowering of statements on the meaning of life that I have ever read!
Filed under Your other self
What Kind of Marketing?
Here are some books about marketing that I have come across in recent times:
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout
Getting Real by 37signals
I have also been reading books by Seth Godin.
And, as always, some of the advice that these books give are contradictory. Ries and Trout talk about the importance of being the first in the market place. They warn us against getting obsessed about being the best, especially at the cost of being the first. The authors put out a lot of examples that supposedly back their claims. They tell us to concentrate on getting the messages of new products out rather than on building brands. They also say that if a company cannot be the first in a certain marketplace, it much change the way the game is played and invent a new market so it could be the first in there. The examples given date from the pre-Internet era.
But Seth Godin says that trying to invent a new market would lead to a lot of cash-bleed – to try to convince people to spend on products or services they are not accustomed to would take a lot of money, time and effort. He says that companies need to exploit markets already created through the conditioning that people have been subjected to by companies that have walked the path before, and develop products that better existing ones, causing shifts in consumer loyalty. Seth’s ideas are in tune with the Internet era.
So, which strategy should a company adopt?
Ries and Trout also state a company needs to drill ideas into as many people as possible to cause the marketplace thus created to identify best with that company.
But Seth says that in the Internet era, such “interruption” marketing would not be useful. He says that one needs to build a “Tribe” around one’s ideas – that is, to get a few people excited about an idea who in-turn would talk to people they know (people usually network with like-minded people), making the idea spread organically. The impact of brands builds with the size of the Tribe. He tells us to target only those who would be interested in the products or services offered, hoping they would do the marketing for the company through the power of social networking. These days, people are more connected to others than ever.
So, which strategy should a company adopt?
I sometimes like the strategy that Picture Window Pro adopts. No big ads, no loud promises, no sleek website. Only great, fast photo-editing software written by one of the world’s best programmers that’s available at a reasonable price. Lots of substance. Very little style. I love to stumble upon steals like these. They got a character that the mass marketed products just do not have. I got to know about the software while searching the web for information on color-correction that I could use while processing wedding photographs last November. I landed in Norman Koren’s site, read his glowing accounts about PWP, downloaded the software and fell in love with it. I have been using it ever since.
PWP had three things going for it that made be buy it after the evaluation period had expired: strong recommendations by well-known photographers, a well-known name behind PWP and the affordable price tag. The first two gave me the required credibility to test and use the software, and the last made it too good to miss. That’s Seth’s idea in action.
I did not even know that PWP was out with a new version of the software until I landed at their page one day. Talk about being different from those in-your-face marketeers.
So, which strategy should a company adopt?
Filed under Questions