Tag Archives: Stories

How To Attract Customers To Any Shop

The other day I was walking down the street, minding my own business, like I usually do. Of course, I don’t always mind my own business, there’s times when you just can’t help but to involve yourself in the affairs of others. This almost always goes well, and people don’t generally object to me imposing on their situation, because it’s usually with a helpful comment of appreciation.

But in this particular case, I was just focusing on the thoughts that were in the forefront of my mind, which were rather jumbled, which made this a little more difficult than normal. Sometimes I have such clarity of thought and purpose that I go after and achieve my daily objection with incredible focus. This was not one of those days.

So there I was, staggering down the street, and suddenly I bumped into a rather festively dressed circus clown. He was doing an advertisement for some grand opening of a shop of some sort. When I happened across him, he was on his break, as he was sitting on a bench, smoking a cigarette. I sat down, suddenly changing my plans to not involve myself in the business of others.

This was an opportunity I didn’t want to miss. I had never spoken to a circus clown before, especially one that was on his break taking drag after drag on an unfiltered cigarette.

I asked if he was always a clown, and he replied that most of the time, he was. He didn’t do kids parties, because those were too dangerous. He did mostly advertising, marketing gimmicks, and the occasional rodeo when they needed somebody to fill in. The particular job that he’d been assigned on that particular day was to simply stand outside a shop (which turned out to be a furniture store) and wave to customers to draw them inside the store.

Now there’s a couple of conversations I’d like to at least listen in on. One is the person who goes out, maybe to pick up his laundry, or drop off their kids at day care, or whatever. The last thing they want to do is buy some furniture. But lo and behold, there is this funny clown standing there on the sidewalk, and they can’t help but to go inside and see what’s what. And before they know it, they’ve purchased an entire dining room set.

The conversation I’d like to hear is when their friends come over, and ask them how or why they decided to buy a new set of furniture. I’d like to hear them explain that a voiceless cigarette-smoking clown convinced them.

The other conversation I’d like to hear is the furniture shop owners deciding how they were planning on promoting their grand opening, or sale, or whatever. And how exactly they decided on hiring a clown. Did they have three or four choices, and they clown was there best one? Personally, I’d choose a couple of bikini models, but that’s just me.

There was a story in the news a while back about a sandwich shop that had a bikini model, not even a real one, the kind that model clothes in department store windows, out front during lunch time. It was a fantastic success, and drew a large lunch crowed. Until somebody complained to the city council. It seems that having a bikini mannequin is against some city ordinance or something, so they had to put a t-shirt on her.

So maybe they wanted to put a couple of bikini models out front, but they got out-voted by the pro-clown faction of their marketing division, perhaps due to fears of repercussions from the community. Who knows?

When I asked Mr. Clown (I never did get his name) how long he’d been doing his, he said he was in his third year as a clown. He found out about it from an ad on craigslist. He didn’t tell me how much he got paid, but he did say that the benefits were pretty good. He got paid extra if he could juggle several balls at once.

So after a few minutes of pleasant conversation, I went on my way, sure I’d see the clown again somewhere.

Express Yourself and Increase Self Confidence and Self Esteem

The other day I had the opportunity to visit an author in a local bookstore. He wasn’t that famous of an author, which was good for me, and the rest of the people that went to see him, but probably not particularly good for him. Nevertheless, he was really outgoing and friendly, and took the time to sign everybody’s books, and answer any and all questions that people had, in a lot of detail.

I asked him what made him decide to write a book on his chosen subject. It’s is not really a particularly popular subject, I would classify it as a kind of self-help or self-development. He seemed really enthusiastic about answering, and lot of other people became interested as well.

He said it all started with a teacher he had in Junior High School. This teacher was kind of different from the rest, sort of like a rebel. He didn’t last very long, because he was always getting into disagreements with the administration on the proper teaching methods. It seems that is the case more often than not. You’ll get a really good teacher, like this one, and he’ll really have an impact on you, but because these methods are not “proper” or “accepted,” the administration doesn’t really like them very much, so they fire him.

I remember a teacher like that I had in elementary school. He was really interested in each student, and made sure that each individual student was taken care of, as far as being able to not only understand the stuff we were supposed to be learning, but be able to understand everyday stuff as well. One of things he had us do was a lot of oral reports, or show and tell, or mini-plays. Anything to get us talking in front of class. I guess he figured that being able to express yourself in front of a group was a skill they didn’t teach much in public schools.

But unfortunately, despite how much the kids liked him and how much our self-esteem was raised through experience, he didn’t stick to the “proper” curriculum, and was let go only after one year.

That was what this author’s teacher taught him as well. He said that everybody has something important that they need to share with other people, no matter how unimportant you think it is. And when you find that, and figure out a way to share that with others in a congruent way, not only will you benefit many other people, but also you can really increase your self-confidence to the point where you can discover all other kinds of cool stuff.

And this guy kept answering questions and talking to people well after the bookstore closed. The manager of the bookstore was nice enough to let us hang around. And he even gave everybody his own personal email in case we had other questions that came up.

I think I was really lucky to meet this person. When you find somebody like this, you can really feel good knowing that this is an example of all the good things that can happen when you open up yourself to others.

Metaphors Filled with Uncertainty

The other day I was talking to a friend of mine about normal everyday stuff. Stuff people usually talk about to kill time while waiting for the bus or waiting for their turn at the dentist office. Of course, you want the bus to hurry up and come, but you usually want the dentist to do something else. The conversation kind of meandered into other things that we don’t normally talk about, I don’t know if you’ve ever been involved in something like this. But as you sit there, and read this, you might begin to notice certain sensations in your body. Maybe pleasant sensations, maybe familiar sensations. Maybe some sensations that you hadn’t noticed up until now, like that feeling you have now in the lower portion of your left leg.

It’s like the other day, when I was browsing in a bookstore. It was a large bookstore, one that has over a hundred thousand titles. I happened to be in the self-development section. I wasn’t sure how I got there. I had started off in the music section and then moved on to the investing section, and then I’m not sure what happened after that. The next thing I realizes was that I was standing there reading a book about hypnosis. Now I’m not going to tell you that hypnosis is a fascinating subject, you’ve probably already come to that conclusion on your own. And they weren’t even aware of who was doing that, anyway. But one of the interesting things about hypnosis that you can use for your immediate benefit is the many ways in which it helps you to increase learnings about fascination.

Fascination is another subject that doesn’t get much attention. Sure, people feel fascinated by many things, but the actual subject of fascination doesn’t really get a lot of attention itself. Like the structure of fascination. What makes things more fascinating that other things? And some things can hold fascination really well for a long period of time, while other things are more of a flash in the pan for other ideas.

But my friend started to talk about sailing. He had recently bought a sailboat, and was planning on sailing around the world. Not really around the world, he wasn’t confident enough to venture across the Atlantic or the Pacific oceans, he was only planning on sailing down the east coast, through the Panama Canal, and then back up the west coast. I don’t know how he was planning on getting his boat back to the east coast, I guess that is a different story altogether.

But as we sat there, talking about things like those other ideas, we began to notice that some of the people around us were speaking a funny language. Almost as if we were automatically transported to a foreign country. I’m not sure if that has ever happened to you, but when you suddenly find yourself surrounded by people that are speaking a foreign language, it can be difficult to keep your thoughts in a single file line, waiting to take a number and sit patiently.

Of course, this might very well all be a jumbled mess of misplaced metaphors, but I suppose I’ll think about that later.

Star Trek and Jesus, Have you Seen the Prequel?

I just recently saw the new Star Trek movie. As a huge fan of the original series, I was incredibly impressed. I loved all the small quick references to original episodes. Because of where I saw it, I couldn’t help but wonder how much of the plot was understood by those who don’t know what it’s like to be a trekkie. One interesting thought I had while I was watching is how many successful stories and moves will sometimes come up with the idea of a “prequel.”

Of course there are as many exceptions as there are examples, but couldn’t help thinking of the idea of making a “prequel” after the original series becomes popular. The prequel series for Star Wars didn’t come about until nearly thirty years after the original series were released. A few years ago, the James Bond was re-written as a prequel. Just recently I saw a movie poster for “Underworld, The Beginning.” Because movies here are released sometimes several months behind the rest of the world, I don’t know of the original release date of this movie. Another recent popular movie/story that had a prequel released was Hannibal Rising.

I guess it’s part of human nature to want to know the origin of things. Maybe because when a story is first conceived, it is wholly conceived according to the classical intro/climax/resolution model. And because many times, after the conflict resolution, there isn’t much room for more story to please eager fans who want more, so a prequel is the only direction a writer can go. I’m sure you can think of a few stories or movies where the sequels were just not as thrilling or entertaining as the original. (Jaws comes to mind.) Perhaps writing a prequel allows for much more leeway in story creation, as in Star Trek. Or maybe humans are just naturally curious about where things come from. The more we learn about something, the more we want to find out the beginning.

When you write a prequel for a story, you aren’t bound by matching the new story to the original story. Because it is a prequel, it only has to end where the previous one began. And the more you tell a story, the further back you can go, and the more creative you can be with how the story began.

One very popular story (arguable the most popular story ever told) that comes to mind that fits this model perfectly is the story of Jesus of Nazareth. It’s generally agreed that the first gospel that was written was the Gospel of Mark, around 40 or 50 AD. Twenty years after the crucifixion. Since the crucifixion happened around 20 or 30 AD (the calendar we used to guess the date wasn’t invented until around 400 AD, so there is plenty of room for error,) most of the “story’ that was circulating around was by what they call “oral tradition.” People telling and retelling stories. The interesting thing about the gospel of Mark is that it doesn’t contain the birth of Jesus. At that point in the stories life, people were really only concerned with His teachings and crucifixion/resurrection. Only when the next two gospels appeared twenty years later (Luke and Mathew), did they contain a narrative regarding the nativity. It’s like the more the story about Jesus spread, the more people wanted to know where He came from. And as they spread, they naturally grew and evolved backwards in time, to include this information.

One of course has to wonder about the accuracy of any of these stories, as it consisted of orally passed on renditions of Gospel. I once watched a fascinating rendition of the Gospel of Luke performed by an actor who portrayed what he imagined was an accurate rendition of how this would have occurred two thousand years ago. He gave a compellingly fascinating monologue for about an hour as he described the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus. It was completely amazing, and would be fascinating to see how this particular story spread an evolved over time as talented orators two thousand years ago retold, embellished, added to and improvised on the story that we now call the Gospel. I think you have to agree that one thing that is always on a storytellers mind is how to keep the audiences attention throughout the monologue.

Of course the final Gospel, or at least the final Gospel that was included in the Latin Vulgate around three or four hundred AD, was written around 90 AD and borders on the metaphysical, but that’s another story.

I don’t know if this makes any sense to you, or whether or not you see a connection between the evolution of stories and the nature of human curiosity. Maybe something to keep in mind next time you watch or read a prequel.

The Magic of the Turtle Brain Freeze

Once upon there were these two turtles. They had been friends since they started walking to school together. Most people don’t know that turtles only are allowed to take the bus until they get to the second grade. Then they have to walk. I think it has something to do with their shells and some sort of international bus transportation code regarding moving shells across the ocean floor. Not that they were necessarily sea turtles, because turtle bureaucracy is not very advanced, so when they create one law, it applies to turtles everywhere.

So these two turtles were walking home from school, where they liked to stop and play a few rounds of video games at their favorite ice cream shop. Another thing people don’t know about turtles is that they love ice cream. If you don’t believe me, you can go out and find a turtle, if you don’t already have one, and feed it some ice cream. But you must be careful though, you don’t want to give it a head freeze from eating ice cream too fast. One of the disadvantages of being a turtle is that they can’t reach up and grab their heads when they get a brain freeze from eating ice cream too fast. And although grabbing your head doesn’t actually do anything to decrease the length and severity of a brain freeze, it does give you the illusion of control, as if massaging your temples will cool down your brain temperatures back into the normal range. You’d be surprised at the amount of things that people do that don’t have any real effect, but we do them anyways because we think it gives us some sort of psychological advantage.

The other day I was talking to my friend about this. We were watching this couple walk by, and they were obviously exercising. We could tell they were exercising by the way they were walking. Instead of just letting their arms swing normally, like you do when you walk, they had them held up at a ninety degree angle and were pumping them as they were walking. Our discussion kind of spiraled in two different directions.

The first direction was when my friend said they were doing that, and not really getting any benefit out of it. Maybe had they been wearing weighted armbands or something. I haven’t read any studies where they compared how many calories you burned while purposely swinging your arms versus letting them swing naturally, so I wasn’t convinced either that there was any real benefit to walking like that.

Then my friend suggested that they weren’t exercising strictly for the calorie burn. Many people have discovered that exercising gives a solid boost to your self-esteem. And perhaps the boost in self-esteem is not really related to the actual amount of calories that you burned, but the perceived effort. I thought that made some sense, until my friend suggested a third reason for their apparent simple actions.

He suggested that they were actually trying to achieve an improved image in the eyes of the society at large. He said he had seen them before, and one of the reasons he remembered them was because of the way they were swinging their arms so much. So perhaps they were looking for some kind of recognition of sorts. Perhaps they wanted to be known locally as the couple that exercises together. That in itself might suggest yet another reason for the arm swinging. Perhaps if they created an image of themselves as the couple that exercised together, it would strengthen their marriage (if that indeed is what they shared).

Perhaps they were swinging their arms for altogether different reasons. Maybe they saw somebody on TV doing it, and thought it looked cool. Perhaps they are some kind of a mix of all the things together, and more that they have yet to discover. It’s really amazing when you really dig deep into the meaning that you see in the world.

You see this, and you think it means something, but the more you decide to wonder about this, the more you can realize there are so many different meanings to choose from, you can choose this to mean anything you like. And nobody will be the wiser. (Except for you, of course.)

So the turtles finished playing their video game. They had their parent’s permission of course, as long as they didn’t spend more than a dollar each on the game, and that the dollar had to come out of their allowance. They had learned earlier that they had to save their resources to spend how they liked, because everybody knows that when you are out of resources, you need to find a way to get more. Of course, sometimes finding more resources is more fun than actually spending them. Which is exactly what those two turtles did.