Monthly Archives: July 2009

Powering Flowers can lead to Startling Realizations

Once there was a lady that owned a flower shop. She had opened the flower shop several years ago, and after the inevitable rough start up times that many small business face, she started to eke out a profit. Within a year she had realized one of her life long dreams. Ever since she was a little girl, she had dreamed of owning a small flower shop. Buying the flowers from the distributors, arranging them, selling them to people knowing that they would in turn give them to others to increase pleasure and happiness. This was probably her greatest reward, knowing that she was supplying people with something that they used to make others feel good.

After a few years, she started to notice that her sales, and her customer base were fairly consistent. After the first couple of years where moved out of the red and started to make a profit, her profits slowly increased every year, until recently. In the past three or four years, her profits had been almost exactly the same. She started seeing the same customers come into her shop, and she noticed she was selling the same arrangements to the same people during the same times of year.

Even valentines day she noticed the same people come in, that she usually only saw once per year, and by a dozen roses or some other traditional arrangement. Her original satisfaction that she had enjoyed when she started to make money was starting to grow into a complacency that she hadn’t expected. It wasn’t long before she saw her dream turn into another routine that she did on a daily basis. Gone were the times when she was able to generate good feelings as she headed into she shop every morning. More and more often, she would wake up sometimes with a feeling of just another day at work.

She started to notice this attitude among her customers as well. She wasn’t sure if it was she that was affecting them, or they affecting her. It was like everybody was trapped in a routine that they couldn’t’ escape from. Pretty soon the flowers themselves stopped looking so pretty, and began to take on a mundane everyday part of the background feeling to them.

She didn’t’ really notice this, as things like this usually sneak up on you slowly, and before you know it, something that was exciting is suddenly normal and you feel like you’ve always been doing this. You don’t really want to stop, because you’ve been doing it for so long, and it seems that the only that is really keeping you going is inertial. It’s like you are in some kind of a daze, doing the same things over and over again without any real feeling to them.

Then something terrible happened. Her neighbor’s daughter was hit by a car. She was rushed to the hospital and into surgery for three hours. After a long horrible wait, the doctors said she would be fine. It was close though. Her parents were obviously relieved. The flower shop lady decided to visit this little girl in the hospital, as she always exchanged a few words with her on the way to work.

What she saw in the hospital shocked her beyond belief. She had never been in a hospital. She was lucky enough to never have been sick, and although she was happily married, she didn’t have any children. What she saw was the abundance of flowers in the hospital. And she saw looks of happiness on people’s face that she had never seen before in her flower shop. When she visited the little girls room, she couldn’t help but to burst into tears at what happened. The little girls room was filled with flowers bought for the little girl by all of the neighbors. All from the lady’s flower shop. She didn’t notice this at first, but when she walked in, the little girl, who was still recovering from a painful three-hour surgery, beamed at her.

“Look at all your flowers! Did you know you had so many pretty flowers?”

And she did know, and she did notice. And she never forgot.

Mine Your Way To Success

Once there were two miners. They came to California during the gold rush back during the eighteen hundreds. They were both from the same small town in Kansas, although they had never met before they met up in California. At the time, the small town in Kansas was experiencing a lot of economic difficulties. The railroad, which was supposed to be building a main stop in town, which would be great for business, decided against it. There was a small mountain range just outside of town, and when the surveyors for the railroad company had come to take a look, they discovered a large iron deposit in the Earth.

This, of course, caused the townspeople, at first, to become even happier, as they imagined that the discovery of this resource would bring a lot of additional money and business to the town. But the problem was that the deposit of minerals were on different parcels of land, and they were difficult to get to. The legal ramifications were relatively complex, so in order to build the railroad, the railroad company simply opted for another town with fewer problems, and left the townspeople and the various iron miners to sort out there differences.

Just when all this was going on, people started hearing stories of the gold that you could find in California. There were all kinds of stories of people striking it rich every day, and all you had to do was to show up and find gold and all your problems would be solved. There were other stories of people finding diamonds, and oil running in streams in some mountains, and all the businesses that needed to support the gold finding industry.

So these two guys, without knowing each other, each decided to sell everything they had that was worth anything, and head out to California. They hitched rides on trains, wagons, walked for several miles, and after several months of traveling, they finally made it to the hills of San Francisco.

They both began in earnest looking for treasure, but they each had a different strategy. The first guy had been studying all about gold, and talking to people along the way. He had a clear idea of exactly what he wanted to find. Because he knew exactly what he wanted to find, he could easily choose the right equipment. And he listened very carefully to stories of people that had found exactly what they were looking for. He made sure to study their methods, study where exactly in the hills they went, what kind of landscape surrounded their findings, the exact kind of river and every detail he could get his hands on. He kept a notebook of all this detailed information.

Naturally, when he got to the hills of San Francisco, he began in earnest. He panned for gold in the exact same method of those who had already became rich. He stayed in one spot only long enough to determine, based on the amount of gold dust that he found, whether it was likely he would find a large amount. He kept this up, until after a short while, he had found enough gold to easily retire wealthy and happy. From his perspective, he thought it had been fairly easy. He looked around at all the people running around not sure what they were doing and wondered why they hadn’t become rich already. Then he bumped into the fellow from his small town.

After they recognized each other, they exchanged greetings. When he asked him how he had been doing, the other guy was upset.

“This whole place is a scam. I’ve looked for everything, diamonds, silver, rubies, and all those stories I heard are all made up. I think they are made up by the people that want to sell you the material to find this nonsense with.”

“What did you say you were looking for?” The first guy asked.

“Well, first I was looking for diamonds, because I heard about some guy who came here three years ago and found one big one. Then I heard another story about a family that had discovered rubies in the root of a sycamore tree, so I started digging up sycamore trees. Then I heard that the real money is in finding oil, but I haven’t found any of that yet.”

“Hmm,” said the first guy, stroking his chin. He wondered if he should tell him that in order to find what you are looking for, you first have to know what you are looking for. Then after you know what you are looking for, the best way to find it was to do what other people had done that had already found it. And the next thing to do is to simply decide to keep looking, until you found it. Because other people had found it, you could be sure that if you did the same thing they did, of course changing it to suit your own personality, you would find the same thing.

But he decided against it, as he suspected the old timer would figure this out on his own.

Clear Intentions Leaves no Room for Mistakes

I was waiting at the train station the other day. It was a Saturday afternoon, and there were a many people. Mostly out shopping, a few kids that had to go to school on Saturday, as that is fairly common here. I started talking to this woman sitting next to me. She had an interesting book that was about baseball. It turns out her son is in university and plays baseball for the university baseball team, and she because she never really knew anything about the game, she decide to buy a book to figure it out. It turns out that her son had always been interested in baseball before, but he never felt comfortable expressing an interesting, because when he was a kid his parents had always placed so much importance on studying, getting good grades, and getting into a good university. Only when he went away to university did he find the persona l freedom to explore his desires. And he found out he was really good.

The funny thing was that his mom told me that had he said something about baseball earlier, like in junior high school, she would have loved to help him explore that option. So there she was, reading this book about baseball. The particular chapter she was reading was all about signals and signs and secret messages inside other pieces of random communication. In baseball strategy is very important, but sometimes communicating changes in strategy to players on the field is difficult. So they devised a complex set of signals and hidden messages. And because both teams are doing this, it can become very complicated to send signals that the other team can’t understand. Otherwise they would intercept their strategy and know what they are planning to do. They go to great lengths to conceal the intention behind their communication.

While I was talking to her this guy started walking behind us, mumbling something incoherently. He was holding some map of some sort, which looked to be a local train map. A few people looked like they wanted to help him, but he wasn’t really making any sense, so people just kind backed off. He stopped a few times, looked at his map, and then looked at the large map they have of all the different lines and their stops and intersections and times. They have it written in three different languages, so that all travelers can understand the sign.

When I asked the woman if she had ever talked to her son about why he didn’t express his interest in baseball earlier, it turned out that he had, she just didn’t understand, or maybe he didn’t communicate it very clearly. He would always watch baseball on TV, and when his parents asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, a couple of times he said a baseball player. His parents, of course, didn’t know that he was serious, as he never showed any interest in signing up for the local team. Of course, when he went to find out about it, they required a form signed by his parents, and the very day he brought the form home for his parents to sign, his father had decided that was the time to give him a lecture about choosing a career path, as he was soon entering high school. His father, of course, didn’t know anything about his desire to play baseball, and the son didn’t know that it would have been allright had he of asked.

When he finally told his parents how much he was enjoying playing on the University Team, they were both very happy. I asked the lady what she thought was interesting about reading about baseball signs, and she said she never realized that before the games they spend a considerable amount of time going over the signals so there is no miscommunication. Not communicating properly can lose a game. And when the lady went over and asked the man where he was going, it turned out he was going where most everybody else was. The reason nobody could understand him was because he was from a prefecture that is out in the countryside where they speak a different dialect. When the lady figured out what dialect he was speaking, everybody could understand what he wanted. It turns out he was a visiting professor that was going to give a lecture on communication.

How Other People’s Criteria Can Get You Everything You Want

I was sitting in a bookshop the other day, like I like to do, as those of you that read this blog on a daily basis have noticed. And I saw some guy walking around the shop giving out his business cards. He was very bold. He would just walk up to somebody, introduce himself, and give a quick introduction, and then before his mark knew it, they were holding one of his business cards. I wasn’t near enough to listen to what he was saying to people, because I was sitting in the coffee shop section of the bookshop.

I was reading this interesting book on metaphor. The book was talking about how all word are really metaphors for things that, with our limited capacities of understanding, can only approximate through our language. The best we can do as communicators is share our metaphors with each other, and hope that our underlying understanding of what it is that we are talking about overlaps enough so that we can communicate our ideas and feelings to each other. Sometimes though, when people communicate, there are several different meanings on several different levels, and you can never be quite sure what it is that this person is saying, even if you can lip read and have a clear view of their mouth.

But as this guy kept handing out his business cards, and judging by the expressions on the faces of the people that were on the receiving end, I got the sinking suspicion he was trying to sells something. I don’t think he was giving out free information like how to keep your car in tip top shape or how to make sure that when you bake your thanksgiving turkey it comes out with a moist juicy inside, and a crunchy delicious outside. I got the sinking suspicion he was a network marketer of some sort.

And judging by his approach, he seemed to be going for the shotgun marketing technique, or what is sometimes called the spaghetti marketing technique. This, as you are well aware, is when you throw your pitch to as many people as possible, and inevitably you will get a few that buy into your ideas. If you do this enough, you will likely be successful, so long as you follow the old ABC rule of sales: Always Be Closing.

“That works, but it takes a lot of energy. And the thing is, for every sale you get; you are going to have a few people that are angry that you approached them. Which is fine, you have a thick skin. But some people starting out, that’s not the best way to go.”

I heard a voice from behind me say. I looked, and I guess it was obvious that I was watching this guy.

“Oh?” I said.
“What do you recommend?”

“Well, the best way is to have a business card with a website on it. Then just give out the business card to as many people as possible, but without asking for a sale. Just tell them to visit the website if they are interested in the general kind of products you are offering. The on the website you have information about your product, and an email form to fill out if you are interested in more information. The people that fill in the information are called warm leads. These are much easier to convert to sales than cold leads, like that poor fellow is trying to do.”

“Hmm, sound interesting.” I said.

“What do you do when they say they want more information?”

“It’s all about criteria. All you need to do, is to find out what’s important to them. Once they tell you what’s important to them, all you have to do is show them how they will satisfy that need in buying your product.”

“Interesting. You are in sales, I take it?” I asked him.

“Oh, no,” he said.
“I’m an architect. I just like studying human behavior as a hobby.”

“So where did you learn this?” I asked him.

“I took a seminar from a guy a few years back, and he said that selling things to people, ideas, products, new behaviors is all really part of the same structure. People are a walking set of unmet needs. And these needs go very deep. He said that when you can elicit just one or two of these needs, and show them how it can be satisfied by one of your products or ideas, or new behaviors, they will not only eagerly accept it, but they will thank you afterwards.”

Hmm, interesting, I thought, turning back to my book on metaphors. In case you’re interested, the book is “Metaphors We Live By,” by George Lakoff. It’s fascinating, and I highly recommend it.

Speak Your Skills and the World Will Listen

Once upon a time there was a bricklayer. He had been doing this job for about ten years, and he was very good at it. He was well known amongst his peers as having a very dedicated work ethic, and an incredible amount of skill. There was a waiting list or at least three years long for those that wanted to apprentice under him, as he was well regarded as having the best skills in the area.

He mostly did non-residential buildings, like museums and churches and some city centers. Occasionally he did some small residential projects, fountains, and a few private temples here and there for the religiously inclined. He was very successful, and very happy.

He was also very young. He had only been in the business for ten years, starting fresh from high school. His father had died when he was very young, and as soon as the law would allow, he took full time work. He quickly realized that he had found his calling, as the work was both rewarding and challenging. And he had always made decent money. Yet to start a family on his own, he still gave the bulk of his salary to his mother, who had raised him alone since he was six years old.

Something was happening, though. Although his list of apprentices kept growing, the jobs he was finding were becoming fewer and fewer. Many companies were starting to buy pre-fabricated walls and other structures, as it was much cheaper. The work slowly began to dry up, until he had a list of apprentices wanting to learn under him, but no work to do. Finally he had to suspend his apprenticeship program, as he had to take on simple mundane jobs that even his would be apprentices were qualified to do. Many times he found himself working right alongside of them.

He started to get worried to the point of letting his fears overcome the pleasure he had always received from doing the work. He began staying up late at night, unable to sleep, imagining a future where his skills were no longer needed. His life, which had been so promising, filled with delight and a positive future now was clouded by thoughts of a life filled with performing unskilled labor for low wages, never knowing where his next paycheck was going to come from. It became almost too much to bear.

Then one night he had a dream. In the dream his father came to him. He had always kept a picture of his father on the nightstand next to his bed, always imagining his father looking on hi with pride. In the dream his father said to him:

Son, you have a skill that few possess. When people hire you, they hire you for the beauty that you impart on their buildings, their places of worship. Before, you relied on your work to speak for itself. But now, you must speak for your work. You must proclaim your skills. You must make it easy for others to choose your work over the easier path. You must convince them of your value, and the value your work will bring them. I have faith in you.

He woke up, barely remembering the dream, but he had a new motivation. He set up a meeting with three of the projects that had canceled only a few weeks before. He asked for a meeting with whoever was in charge of deciding on traditionally laid bricks or prefabricated bricks. When he met with them, he spoke with passion and belief and conviction. All three of them agreed to hire him. Soon word spread of his work. Word spread of the conviction with which he spoke of his work. Soon he needed to hire a personal secretary to handle all the calls from around the country of people that wanted to hire him. And now he had two lists of apprentices. One to learn bricklaying, and one to learn how to tell others about their skills, and the value that they would bring to others.

Divide Your Differences to Combine Your Resources

Once upon a time there were two communities of rabbits. They had lived near each other for a few generations, and they had a truce that had not been broken for several years. A truce because they had a long history of fighting behind. They lived on two separate sides of a small river. The river was large enough that it supplied both of them with water that they needed to live, but not big enough to keep them for crossing when the level was low.

On the east side of the river, there was an abundance of blueberries. Both rabbits loved blueberries. One the west side of the river was a huge crop of naturally growing lettuce. Rabbits love lettuce. Before the truce, each side would war agains the other side to try and take all they could before crossing back safely into their own territory. Every time this happened, there were many deaths. Finally they agreed that they would only send a team of six rabbits across, at the same time, but only when the river was low enough to cross, and only for a total of four hours. And most importantly, only at the same time.

Every time the river receded, two teams would gather one each side. One team, containing the six rabbits that would go and collect the food, and another, much larger team that would observe the “visiting” group to ensure they didn’t take more than they were allowed. After the allotted four hours, they would meet and ensure that each team had taken an equal share. They both agreed that this was the best method, but deep down they would love nothing more to destroy the other side’s community completely, and take all the resources for themselves.

Then one day, as they were gathered along the shores of the lowered river, preparing for their respective incursions, there was a huge, and long earthquake. The ground shook for what seemed like hours, and the distant mountains trembled, causing huge boulders to tumble down the mountainside. When the earthquake was over, they were shocked to see the river had completely change course. Not only had it completely changed course, it was nowhere to be seen. Both teams of rabbits immediately squared off, unsure of what to do. They were both terrified and excited at the same time. Each side saw this as a clear opportunity to demolish the other side once and for all, and take all the resources for themselves.

Finally, cooler heads prevailed, as they realized they had a much more pressing and potentially devastating problem. There was no water. Without any water they would surely die. They decided to form a survey team, a team that would go out in search of water. The two teams went back to their respective councils to choose team members. They smartest from each tribe were selected, and they met at the site of the old river. They agreed to share whatever they found, the threat of their mutual extinction overshadowing any hatred that they used to have.

The team set off. They searched for days, until they made a startling discovery. The river had split in two, about four miles upstream. The river had forked, running down the valley, encompassing an area containing both rabbit tribes.
At first the two tribes were perplexed. How would they manage? They survey team continued to search all the area between two rivers, which now contained both rabbit tribes, instead of separating them. They determined that not only was there an abundance of lettuce and blueberries, but there were various patches scattered all through their new mutual home. The two councils decided to merge into one, much larger council, and the rabbits quickly found that by combining their efforts, they could easily build a better community. After a time, they began to celebrate the day of the earthquake, as a time that split not only the river, but also their differences, and joined the two tribes into a powerful and abundant community.

Stay Focused On Your Target

I had a friend of mine that worked for a trading company. It was a medium sized trading company, and their mission statement was to be the biggest trading company in the world. They had set that goal several years ago, and had been steadily growing to that end. However, with the recent economic troubles, their market share had been slipping, and they were in danger of not achieving their target. My friend that worked there worked in the new accounts department. His job was to find foreign markets for the products that they were importing from other countries. They had certain requirements for each distributor, and sometimes it took a while to find out the information that was required.

They had the company goal written on a large poster. They spent a lot of money on a graphic artist to come up with a symbol of their future goal. It was a combination of a graphical representation of the market share they were after, combined with the symbol for the company as chosen by their founder a over a hundred years ago. It was a very impressive emblem that everyone was required to have in their office. My friend had his hanging over his desk, so that he would see it when he first came in every morning.

He also kept a large white board in front of his desk, as sometimes they would have meetings. When they would have issues that came up during the meeting he would leave them on the white board, so he could look at them while he worked, sitting behind his desk.

I remember once when was a kid. I went away to summer camp while I was in boy scouts. The way it was set up was that you chose about five or six merit badges that you wanted to get, and then you spent the time working on them while you were at camp. It was important to choose what you wanted before camp, because they learned from experience that if you didn’t choose beforehand, you would just kind of mess around and not really achieve anything. They said that even choosing one thing with confidence was better than choosing a bunch of merit badges that you think you might enjoy getting, only to realize you didn’t really want to get them enough to go through the actions required to actually get them.

One of the ones I chose was archery. It was pretty cool. We had to learn all about the names of all the equipment, all the safety requirements, and you had to score a certain number of points on a regulation archery course. Before doing this we were required to practice a lot of mental visualization. The most important one was to focus on the target above all else. The instructor told us that in order to hit our target, we had to imagine the arrow going straight into the bull’s eye. You had to take several deep breaths before shooting, and then see the arrow hitting the target in your minds eye. Then you had to exhale slowly, pull back the bowstring, and slowly release.

One thing I never thought about was how to adjust for you misses. In order to get enough points to get the merit badge, you didn’t have to hit a bulls eye every time. You could even miss the target completely. So long as you were able to watch where the arrow went, and then adjust your aim accordingly. The instructor told us that it was important to accept every result that we got, and get upset if we missed our target. To simply watch where the arrow went, and adjust our aim accordingly. He said that if we did this, then getting a merit badge in a couple of days would be automatic.

One day my friend had an idea. He switched the placement of the white board, and of the emblem that his company had designed for the goal. He placed the emblem in front of his desk, where he was always looking at it. And after the meetings, he would leave the main issues on the whiteboard as before, but he would roll the white board so it sat behind his desk, where he could turn around and look at it when he needed to remember what problems to move away from. He found that by keeping his problems behind him, and keeping his target in front of him, he found it much easier and much quicker to achieve the company goals.

The Tulip Save

Once upon a time there was a family. They were a normal, modern family with normal, modern family problems. They had two kids, and the father worked as an account executive in a large advertising firm. Because of the recent economic problems, the father’s company was experiencing problems, and so his company wasn’t paying out big bonuses like they normally did. When the father joined the company several years a go, he opted for payment plan B. Which at the time was great. Only now it wasn’t so great, because a large part of his salary was based on bonuses.

So of course the family was struggling. The wife had a small flower stand that she worked several days a week. It wasn’t a full-blown shop; it was just big enough to store a few dozen different flowers to catch the attention of people as they drove by to and from work. You know how when you are just going along and minding your own business, and then you see something that captures your interest, and you think to yourself you have to take a look at this? It was like that. It was more of a hobby than anything else. She just made enough to pay her rent and the expenses. She never really had any expectations of making a living selling flowers. Which was fine with her, because she enjoyed raising her children and making sure they did well in school and stayed out of trouble.

She was also fairly lucky in that her grandfather had owned a large farm. Her grandfather had passed away several years ago, and they had inherited the land. Because the family wasn’t very interested in continuing the farm, they let the land go. It was only a couple acres just on the outside of town. Fortunately, the land produced many wildflowers that she sold in her shop. Her shop was known around town as a shop that sold wildflowers and other things like that. The kind of people that shopped there were a unique brand of people. They usually bought flowers for other than main flower buying reasons. Usually just to give to somebody for some spontaneous reason, and not a rose for Valentines Day or any other socially required gift.

But then one summer, the flowers on her farm started changing. They were only wildflowers, and they grew naturally, so she really had no idea what was happening. She had a friend who knew about these things and they investigated for her, and determined that there was a particular strain of a plant disease that had infected her flowers. Her source of her hobby was at risk.

She went home, and was surprised how depressed this had made her. She had always thought of selling flowers as nothing more than a hobby, so she never really gave it much thought to how it affected her personally. But when her hobby was threatened, she noticed how much pleasure she received when she sold somebody a flower, who in turn was going to give it to somebody else. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do.

When she arrived home, she was in for another shock. Her husbands company had decided to discontinue their bonus plan altogether. And despite efforts to reorganize the pay structure so it wouldn’t be so bad, the family was going to take substantial financial hit. The kids had just entered high school, and they were not completely unsure of their futures. They all sat up late at night after dinner, discussing how they could handle the impending financial crisis. Nobody could come up with an idea that didn’t involve them selling their nice house and moving into a cheaper one, and having to choose a less expensive college for the kids.

The next day at work, something incredibly fortuitous happened. A stranger came up to the flower shop, and brought some flowers that the woman had never seen before. They were beautiful, with a swirl of colors she never thought was possible outside of a painter’s studio. The man was just curious, as he had picked them on a drive in from outside of town. When he saw the shop, he’d decided to ask her about them, merely out of curiosity. She was amazed when he told her where he’d picked them.

When she arrived at her grandfather’s farm, with her friend, they saw hundreds of flowers just like the stranger had brought in. The “disease” had somehow changed the flowers into the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. She gathered a couple dozen, and brought them back to her shop. They sold out within an hour, and the news of the unique flowers quickly spread. They repeated this, until fully half the wildflowers from her grandfathers farm had been sold. Her friend determined an easy way to repeatedly grow the same flowers, with the same colors. Pretty soon people were driving hours from all over to buy these strangely colored flowers. She made more money selling flowers than she’d ever thought possible.

Experts from a nearby University came to test the soil of her grandfathers farm, and said it was a unique blend of minerals they’d never thought about before, that might potentially have limitless medical applications. They government leased her grandfathers property from her, in a hundred year lease, for an enormous price. Her husband was able to quit his job, and help her in the flower shop. Because of the income from the government lease, they never had to worry about money again.

Something that they had that they thought was only a source for a passing hobby turned into a magnificent source of income for a lifetime, for reasons they never would have expected.

Does Snake Oil Really Work or The Power of Visualization

There used to be this guy. He was a normal guy, with a normal job. He had some normal friends, some he liked more than others. He would meet his friends from time to time, and do some various activities with them. Some of these, of course, he liked more than others. Sometimes, after a long workweek, he didn’t have the energy to go out on the weekend, so he would stay home and watch TV, or read the latest novel, or play video games on his computer. Once in a while he would go see a movie, but he always felt a bit strange going to the movies by himself.

He figured he had a pretty good life. But sometimes, when he wasn’t occupying his thoughts with the latest craze, or some time filling activity with his friends, he wondered what he was doing with his life. Once he went to a coffee shop to hang out and read the latest thriller novel, but he forgot to bring it, and so he just sat and thought about things for a while. The cute girl he was hoping to flirt at the coffee shop wasn’t working, so he just kind of stared out the window and let his mind wander wherever minds like to go in those situations.

He started to trace back through his personal history, to determine when he’d made the choices that led him to where he was. Not right there in the coffee shop, but in his life, his job, his friends, his apartment, the area of town he lived in. He wasn’t too surprised that his life was a string of events that were more or less accepted by him, rather than chosen by him. The last time he made a really strong choice was when he decided on which university to go to. Even then his choices were influenced by many other factors. His friends, his parents, what his guidance counselor had told him in high school. He chose his major based on his interests, but again, it was based largely on what kind of job he would be able to get with the major that he chose.

When he accepted the job offer, it wasn’t like there were fifty companies competing for his skills. He had applied to several, got interviews at a few, and took the first decent offer that he received. It was a good company, but he didn’t’ really have as much choice in the matter as he’d let himself believe.

He finished his coffee, and started wandering around the mall he found himself in. It was a Saturday afternoon, and he didn’t have any plans, so he kind of wandered aimlessly, like he’d been doing pretty much his whole life. He wandered into a bookshop. Not a big bookshop like a major chain, but a small, niche market bookshop. He browsed around and picked up a book on manifesting. He had always thought that this subject was a bunch of nonsense, that was nothing more than modern day snake oil. What he found inside this book was fascinating, to say the least.

The book described how mankind was a complex biological social organism that had developed over the course of millions of years. And that human social behavior was goal driven, but for many, those goals are determined by those outside of the individual. People have the ability to choose their own goals, or let others choose their goals for them. Of course, it is much easier, and less risky to allow others to choose the goals for them, so nature has this goal setting mechanism built into the human mind by default. But it can be overcome. The book went on to explain that by creating a very compelling idea of what you want to create, and focusing on that idea again and again, your actions will start to naturally and unconsciously pull you towards those pictures that you want to create.

This guy decided to buy the book and try this out. He spent several weeks coming up with one or two things that he would like to have. His own home, a relationship with a sweet, kind and beautiful woman, a salary double what he was making now. He created several pictures in his mind of each of this, and focused on them whenever he had a chance. Pretty soon, he found himself doing things that he didn’t do before, but seemed to be drawing towards the future that he was imagining, rather than the future that he had allowed others to imagine for him by default.

He started doing things a little bit differently at work, which got him noticed by upper management. Soon he was promoted, and making more money. He started going out by himself, instead of hanging out with his friends. And when he went places, he went to museums, charity events, and other social gatherings rather than the same bars he had been going do. Pretty soon he was dating a few candidates for a serious long-term relationship. And with his increased salary, he was saving enough to put down on a nice house in a neighborhood. Pretty soon his life was completely changed, for the better, and almost as if by magic. The perplexing thing, to him at least, was that he didn’t remember deciding to actually do anything different. All he remembered was making up those pictures of the things he wanted, and focusing on them several times a day. Everything else was pretty automatic. Another thing that came to his attention was how incredibly happy and motivating his life had become. Amazing how these things work.

Push and Pull Your Way To Success

I knew a guy once that I hadn’t seen in a long time before I ran into him recently. It was one of those relationships that fall kind of halfway on the border between a friendship and an acquaintance. Like when you first meet somebody, and you kind of hit it off, but for some reason, you don’t usually hang out on purpose, you just kind of bump into this person whenever you are involved in whatever mutual activity through which you met in the first place. And when you go a while without seeing this person, you can remember them enough to put them in the category of some pretty cool guy that you used to know, but they haven’t been elevated into real friend status where you make it a point to keep up with each other and find out how each other is doing at least a couple times of year. Because the feeling in these relationships is generally mutual, when you bump into each other, it’s usually with mutual happiness, and there isn’t any guilt or implied anger at each other for not keeping in touch.

Like I used to live in this small town that had this really cool Mexican restaurant. They were right on the beach, and their business was about fifty/fifty take out and eat in. They weren’t that expensive, but the tacos they make are probably in the top three most delicious I’ve ever eaten, including the ones I’ve eaten in Mexico.
But every time I went away, I would quickly forget about that little restaurant, and even Mexican food completely if I happened to be traveling in a foreign country.
Only when I come back in town do I remember how delicious these tacos are and how happy I am that I can remember that that little restaurant is always sitting there waiting for me.

When I saw my old acquaintance again, it took me a while to recognize him. He seemed different, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was different about him. After a few minutes of catching up, I tried to work in a polite question about what had changed. I didn’t want to blurt out that he looked different. I made that mistake before with an old friend who had some kind of hair replacement surgery. This was many years ago, when hair replacement surgery wasn’t as sophisticated as it is today, so it was an awkward situation.

It turns out the guy had an incredible amount of success recently. He changed careers, found a really fantastic woman that he fell in love with and married, and he has one kid, and another one the way. He actually didn’t lose any weight, and there was nothing else physically different about him. He just had this glow like he had finally found out the secret to life. Like when you walk into a supermarket and they tell you that because you are the one-millionth visitor you can have anything you want from the supermarket for free. Or you are walking up to a big department store, and your hands are full, and you are trying to figure out how you are going to open the doors in front, but just as you approach them, they open completely automatically, making it a lot easier than you expected.

I asked him what his secret was, and he said it was because of a goal-setting seminar that he went to. He said he was convinced to go to this seminar because of the advertisement that claimed that life would look completely different after the seminar than before, and you will forever be changed. The instructor at the seminar was very skilled in these matters. Because he was such a nice guy, he told me what the secret was. The secret is to choose three or four specific goals you want to achieve. And everything you come across in your life, you can use as either a positive motivation to pull you to your goals, or a negative motivation to push you away from where you are towards your goals. If you see a really successful person, you can imagine that you are them, and use those feelings to pull you towards that good feeling. If you are in an unhappy situation, you can fully embrace it and use the bad feelings to push you away from where you are and move you towards where you want to go. When you begin to see everything in your life as either something that is pushing you away from bad things and towards good things, or just pulling you towards good things. Then the whole world and everything in it takes on a whole new meaning. All of a sudden the whole world is conspiring to help you, no matter how messed up you used to think your situation was before you came to this realization. And I thought he was pretty nice to share this wonderful insight with me, and I hope that you can do the same.