Stumbled upon Brian Clark’s recent article which nails some insightful points about social media marketing.

The most important conversation is not between seller and buyer, but between prospective and existing buyers.

I suppose many sellers would pay dearly to know what existing buyers say to the prospects. The catch is, they don’t have to wait until it happens by itself — it probably won’t, if there are no social objects the conversation can be built around.

And then comes the second step of social media marketing:

While social media marketing with content and conversation will bring you business, you’ll get more business the better you expressly point out the benefits of buying. More importantly, you should expressly ask people to do business with you.

Not an easy task, because, on one side, people are sensible to the sales efforts, and on the other side, people usually have no idea of buying anything unless told so. That’s why writing skills Brian talks about are so important. And that’s where lies a new divide of social media era.

Four things are needed to implement a project: people, money, time, and thinking. The first three are in most cases utterly lacking. So, being good at thinking is crucial.

An example of what I mean is David Allen’s natural planning model. Asking “Why?” is so simple, and yet so often it is asked when it is too late.

Being smart isn’t an inborn quality. Thinking is a skill that needs training, and however beautiful are the anticipated results, training requires some effort. And yet, 30 years after Edward de Bono’s CoRT, a thinking course still isn’t included in most school’s curricula. Perhaps that’s why so many projects fail, even those with plenty of money, time and workforce.

As your desire is, so is your will.
As your will is, so is your deed.
As your deed is, so is your destiny.

(Upanishad, via Deepak Chopra’s Seven Spiritual Laws of Success).

In fact, it’s an entire program of personal development with four successive levels, starting from discerning desires and then proceeding to will (I think it’s about habits / perception patterns / attention management) to deeds (action management) to destiny. Very close to Ignatius Loyola’s idea of discernment of spirits as the first step of spiritual development.

Back to Chopra’s book — it’s a wise and refreshing one. Deep books often have misleading names, it looks rather like publisher’s advice. It’s also interesting how easily Chopra integrates some Christian concepts, like the expression “state of grace” he uses there. Looking forward to reading “The Third Jesus”.

People who follows popular social models — like a-list blogger, web2.0 startup founder, stock investor, visionary millionaire etc. — have less chance of success than those who serves them.

There is plenty of examples, from WordPress that serves bloggers to investors that serve visionaries. It’s not that there aren’t any successful bloggers or visionaries out there, I just think the successful ones don’t dream to become a successful one in the first place — instead, they like helping people and making life better.

Ego-looped dreams have no power because they simply don’t go any farther than ego and so don’t have access to the power of the universe.

Akousma (plural akousmata) is a Greek word Pythagoreans used for their maxims, it is translated as ‘things heard’ (the same root as in acoustic). It is also possible that akousmata were used as a sort of tokens/passwords. So I thought it would be a good name for microcontent I am introducing here — short phrases I heard somewhere or said myself — for example, in my twitter.

It’s always hard to explain an akousma or it takes a lot of words, but you can quickly grasp it, if there are your “passwords” inside. I mean some words which are keys to bigger patterns, just like a name of a resort we once visited easily arises an entire sea of memories.

Сatena is an entertaining word game that helps develop creative thinking. Catena trains a free, associative style of thinking, and assists in observing both dominant patterns and vertical thinking. In also has many other uses.

I initially thought that I invented that game in 1990 when I served in Soviet Army, but it rather looks like I adapted it from some unknown source and gradually developed its rules. I took the name from philosophy — the term «Catena Mundi» was used by Descartes for describing a mystical chain that connects everything.

Here are some catenas:

• market, mist:
  market — forecast — mist,
  market — morning — mist
• mather, atom:
  mother — nature — physics — atom,
  mother — warmth — energy — atom
• Prague, stool:
  Prague — bar — stool
• euro, eternity:
  euro — coin — circle — eternity
• ticket, thought:
  ticket — road — crossword — thought

Give it a try — your feedback would be greatly appreciated!

Currently reading Buckminster Fuller’s “Critical Path”. However controversial, it’s still an overwhelmingly bright and integral vision.

“70 percent of all jobs in America and probably an equivalently high percentage of the jobs in other Western private-enterprise countries are preoccupied with work that is not producing any wealth or life support – inspectors of inspectors, reunderwriters of insuranse reinsurers, Obnoxico promoters, spies and counterspies, military personnel, gunmakers, etc.”

This was written in 1980, and I suspect this is still shamefully true 27 years later, with a bunch of new professions like auditors of seo optimizers, metaverse travel guides, tamagotchi cemetery keepers etc. etc. The difference, however, is that now there is much more individual projects and freelance work one might only dream about in 1980, with web2.0 social sites as just one example.

Then, there are jobs related to life support but done in a non-sustainable way, like the oil industry which is also mentioned in Fuller’s book, with a reference to an oil geologist who counted that it costs nature well over a million dollars to produce each gallon of petroleum.

Then,

“We find all the no-life-support-wealth-producing people going to their jobs in their cars or buses, spending trillions of dollar’s worth of petroleum daily to get to their no-wealth-producing jobs. It doesn’t take a computer to tell you that it will safe both Universe and humanity trillions of dollars a day to pay them handsomely to stay at home.”

Fuller supposes that it would be more effective from the planetary point of view to give people income adequate for high standard of living instead of forcing them “earning a living”.

“What do I see that needs to be done that nobody else is attending to?”, this is the question people would ask themselves more often in this case, Fuller says.

Of course, one of conditions for this is a special kind of education with focus on individual’s unique talents and their application for the needs of humanity. Here again, Fuller’s view is against the currently dominant system:

“The physical and social costs will be far less for individual, at-home-initiated, research-and-development-interned self-teaching than having individual students going to schools, being bused, and so on.”

Perhaps now, with e-learning, we are much closer to this vision than ever before. And, of course, if parents, too, weren’t so busy “earning a living”, they would better help their children with their individual learning.

“I can conclude at the outset of 1980 that the world public has become disenchanted with both the political and financial leadership, which it no longer trusts to solve the problems of historical crisis. Furthermore, all the individuals of humanity are looking for the answer to what the little individual can do that can’t be done by great nations and great enterprises.”

But will people really ask themselves this question, “What needs to be done that nobody else is attending to?” if they wouldn’t have to earn a living anymore? Deepa Chopra in The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success wrote about the same question he offered his children:

“I never, ever want you to worry about making a living. If you’re unable to make a living when you grow up, I’ll provide for you, so don’t worry about that. I don’t want you to focus on doing well in school. I don’t want you to focus on getting the best grades or going to the best colleges. What I really want you to focus on is asking yourself how you can serve humanity, and asking yourself what your unique talents are.”

They made it, Chopra says, and are financially independent.

Back to Fuller, he names himself a design science revolutionary, not a political revolutionary. Design science is exactly what gets lots of attention nowadays, when people starts shifting to green, sustainable life, with WorldChanging or Massive Change as some points of reference, to name a few. So, changes are really coming, and who knows — perhaps some Fuller’s prophecies are just about to materialize?

Undoubtedly, one of the main problems of the Information Age is information. How we can select, digest, interpret, learn and transfer it the most effectively? For example, it’s crucial in any form of learning, but especially in online learning, to be sure a student has really understood a topic and got the meaning the authors have intended to convey. It’s equally important when we come to personal development: how to find a sure ground in the overwhelming chaos of theories, movements, views and possibilities constantly present around us?

One of the hints comes from Merab Mamardashvili, a Georgian/Russian philosopher who introduced the idea of “Perception Cone” — an evolving field of findividual experience.

It’s clear that our perception doesn’t hold all the information we are able to perceive — in fact, we ignore the most of it. Our perception, our ability to feel, experience, be alive, are, Mamardashvili says, inside some cone which doesn’t coincide with the set of external objects around us. For example, you can listen to radio without actually hearing anything, but instantly hear a song that moves you. In the same way, if you try reading a book that isn’t interesting to you, its contents is just inaccessible to you. It looks like the way we communicate with the world is via a sort of “speaking things”, impressions or dream particles which arise in us interest, emotions and motivation. We can learn and work productively only within our inner cone, as all unrelated information will be screened anyway. That cone grows basing on growing personal experience (not on cramming).

Then, the first task of learning is to transfer knowledge and skills from an external state of impersonal “information” to the inner perception cone of anindividual , making them accessible for further exploration. Accordingly, the first task of self development is to realize your cone, to track the path of your personal evolution, your relationships and ideas history. That means that the half of the time we spend to learning new things should, in fact, be spent to getting the meaning from the experience we’ve already got.

The most important secret of life isn’t hidden somewhere in the head of a Grandaster who has to reveal them to us. The most important secret is that we already know everything the most important to us.

There are many useful alternative reading techniques that may help you to find new ideas and develop your creativity.

1. Before you even open a book, try to compose its table of contents. (A preferable technique of Bernard Shaw). Besides developing your imagination, it’ll help you to recall and organize your knowledge on the subject and, therefore, to prepare yourself for better learning.
2. Stop at book’s middle and try to outline the rest of it.
3. Try reading only right pages of a book, thinking out what happens on left ones. The book’s plot will enrich :)
4. If in the course of reading there is described some problem, stop and try to find the solution before continue reading. (A preferable technique of John Kennedy).
5. Best solutions often come from unrelated areas. Try to ask yourself as often as possible if there are any analogies or other hints for realization of your priority tasks and solving problems. The more unrelated a book is to your task, the better the results.
6. Be a visionary. After finishing reading a book, go ahead and think out it’s sequel. Or, propose alternative versions of plot starting from some point.
7. Do a content analysis. What trends does the book speak about? What new business possibilities may be found there? What ideas you can adapt to your business?

And finally, an Einstein’s advice. “Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.”